Peter Saville Book by Sarah Soejono

THE DESIGNER

The factory era

The unknown pleasure

The Rests

THE DESIGNER You may not know his name, but you know his work. Peter Saville was Factory Records in-house graphic artist, designing some of the most famous record sleeves of the last 20 years, including Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, Pulp’s This is Hardcore, Happy Monday’s Pills, Thrills, N’ Bellyaches,and the famous floppy disc “Blue Monday” 12” that cost so much to manufacture they lost money on every copy sold. (It remains the best-selling 12” single of all time.) He is one of the most well-known rock graphic designer of the post punk era and beyond. Peter Saville is an English art director and graphic designer. During the 1980s, he designed many record sleeves for Factory Records. Peter Saville was born in Manchester. He studied graphic design at Manchester Polytechnic (later Manchester Metropolitan University) from 1975 to 1978.

music. Just as the musicians in those bands wrote and produced their songs as catalogues of their thoughts and feelings, so Saville has conceived his images – for fashion and art projects as well as music – as visual narratives of his life. Saville’s many clients have included Roxy Music, Ultravox, Peter Gabriel, Pulp, Suede, Whitechapel Art Gallery, The Pompidou Centre, Yohji Yamamoto, Jil Sander, Christian Dior, Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney, Mandarina Duck, Givenchy, Selfridges, EMI and Adidas.

His work is noted for combining an unerring elegance with a remarkable ability to identify images that epitomise the moment. Saville’s reputation for contributing to the progressive design profile of the city of Manchester since the early 1980s has earned him an ongoing consultancy to programme Manchester’s artistic future from its city Saville entered the music scene after meeting Tony council and an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Wilson, the journalist and television presenter, whom he approached at a Patti Smith show in 1978. This resulted in now Manchester Metropolitan University. Wilson’s commissioning the first Factory Records poster Saville’s reclaimed status and contribution to graphic (FAC 1). Saville became a partner of Factory Records design were firmly established when London’s Design along with Wilson, Rob Gretton and Alan Erasmus. Museum exhibited his body of work. The exhibition, The Peter Saville Show, was open severaly in England. A book Influenced by fellow student Malcolm Garrett, who had by Rick Poynor, Designed by Peter Saville, accompanied begun designing for the Manchester punk group, the Buzzcocks, and by Herbert Spencer’s Pioneers of Modern the exhibition. The Peter Saville Show Soundtrack for the exhibition was performed and recorded by New Order, Typography, Saville was inspired by Jan Tschichold, and was available to early visitors to the exhibition. His chief propagandist for the New Typography. According latest big achievement is that in 2010, Saville designed to Saville: “Malcolm had a copy of Herbert Spencer’s the England football team home shirt. Pioneers of Modern Typography. The one chapter that he hadn’t reinterpreted in his own work was the cool, disciplined “New Typography” of Tschichold and its subtlety appealed to me. I found a parallel in it for the New Wave that was evolving out of Punk.” From 1979 through to 1986, Saville shaped the perception of Factory as much as Joy Division or New Order. His reputation as an extraordinary designer grew on the back of sometimes enigmatic, other times painstakingly luxurious, but always individual and innovative album sleeves. The images that Peter Saville created for Joy Division, New Order and, later, Suede and Pulp were so compelling that they struck the same emotional resonance with the people who bought those albums and singles as the

THE FACTORY ERA Art director in Factory Records When Tony Wilson, the founder of Factory Records, decided to release a record of music by some of the bands that played at The Factory, he asked Saville to design the sleeves and when he launched a record label – Factory Records – in 1979, Saville became its art director. As a co-founder of the label, he was given an unusual, if not unprecedented level of freedom to design whatever he wanted, just as the bands were with their music: free from the constraints of budgets and deadlines which were routinely imposed on designers elsewhere. Saville treated his artwork for Factory acts such as Joy Division and Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark (so-called because it was the self-indulgent name they could think of) as form of self-expression to articulate whatever happened to obsess him at the time. He was allowed to do the same at DinDisc, the label which signed hired him as art director after he moved to London in 1979. There he met and befriended the photographer Trevor Key, and Brett Wickens, a young Canadian who joined Saville’s studio as an assistant but later became his business partner. Together they helped Saville push his work forward by experimenting with new techniques of photography, production and typography.

The famous logo of Factory Records, designed by Peter Saville

Born in Manchester in 1955, Saville was brought up in the affluent suburb of Hale. He found their elegantly ordered aesthetic more appealing than the anarchic style of punk graphics. Tschichold was the inspiration for Saville’s first commercial project, the 1978 launch poster for The Factory, a club night run by a local TV journalist Tony Wilson whom he had met at a Patti Smith gig. Having long admired the ‘found’ motorway sign on the cover of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn, the first album he bought for himself, Saville based the Factory poster on a found object of his own – an industrial warning sign he had stolen from a door at college. Factory was more than just a record company. For my generation of Mancunians Factory’s unique design concept and range of conceptual ideas not only revolutionised the way music was packaged, but also established the essence of a new and vibrant cultural identity for Manchester in the late 70s. The Manchester thing, eventually became the Madchester cult. Most of the material shown here was designed by Peter Saville and demonstrates the general breadth of the Factory organisations design remit.

From Joy Division to New Order

Saville’s album design for Joy Division’s last album, Closer, released shortly after Ian Curtis (the singer of Joy Division) suicide in May 1980, was controversial in its depiction of Christ’s body entombed. However, the design pre-dated Curtis’ death, a fact which rock magazine New Musical Express was able to confirm, since it had been displaying proofs of the artwork on its walls for several months. Saville on ‘Closer’: “This cover for the band’s second album was like a work of antiquity, but inside is a vinyl album, so it’s a postmodern juxtaposition of a contemporary work housed in the antique. At first, I didn’t believe the photo was an actual tomb but it’s really in a cemetery in Genoa. When Tony Wilson (Factory co-founder) told me Ian Curtis had died I said, ‘Tony, we have a tomb on the cover.’ There

was great deliberation as to whether to continue with it. But the band, Ian included, had chosen the photograph. We did it in good faith and not in any post-tragedy way” Saville’s output from this period included reappropriation from art and design. Design critic Alice Twemlow wrote: “...in the 1980s... he would directly and irreverently “lift” an image from one genre—art history for example—and recontextualize it in another. A Fantin-Latour “Roses” painting in combination with a colour-coded alphabet became the seminal album cover for New Order’s Power, Corruption and Lies (1983), for example. Having drawn on early modernist symbolism in the late 1970s, Saville turned to classical art historical references by the early 1980s juxtaposing them with complex coding systems. For the cover of Power Corruption And

Lies, the 1983 New Order album, he combined a 19th century Fantin-Latour flower painting he had spotted as a postcard in the National Gallery shop with a coded colour alphabet. Having seen a floppy disk for the first time, he conceived the sleeve of Blue Monday, a single from that album, as a replica. The indulgent Factory had to pay more to print the replica floppy disk than it could sell the single for. By the mid-1980s, Saville’s reputation as a designer of music graphics was assured and he was sought-after by mainstream acts such as Wham! and Peter Gabriel, yet he felt constrained. At a time when style culture – once the preserve of obsessives, like himself – was being commercialised by High Street chains such as Next, he had tired of post-modernist appropriations and wanted to strip away excess from his work. Unsure of which

direction to take, Saville looked for reference points in what he regarded as the last great period of modernism – the late 1950s and 1960s. Inspired by The Void, a 1958 exhibition staged by the French artist Yves Klein, he and Trevor Key set about creating their own take on Klein’s concept of ‘nothingness’ using advanced photographic and printing techniques. This produced a beautiful series of sleek, silkscreen-style images for New Order’s 1989 album Technique.

THE WORKS

First row

Second row

TOTAL Joy Division & New Order (Factory, 2011)

True Faith New Order (Factory, 1987)

Ceremony New Order (Factory, 1981)

The Best Of Joy Division (Factory, 2008)

Movement New Order (Factory, 1981)

Substance Joy Division (Factory, 1988)

Blue Monday New Order (Factory, 1983)

International New Order (Factory, 2002)

Third row Technique New Order (Factory, 1989) Closer Joy Division (Factory,1980) Republic New Order (Factory, 1993) Low-life New Order (Factory, 1985)

THE UNKNOWN PLEASURE This is probably the most renowned artwork designed by Peter Saville, a music album cover titled Unknown Pleasures. The album cover has voted as the most iconic music album cover design. ‘Unknown Pleasures’ itself is English postpunk band Joy Division’s debut album, released in 1979 through Factory Records. Martin Hannett produced the record at Strawberry Studios, Stockport, England. The album sold poorly upon release, but due to the subsequent success of Joy Division with the 1980 single “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, Unknown Pleasures is now better known. Factory boss Tony Wilson had so much faith in the band that he contributed his £8,500 life savings toward the cost of producing the initial run of 10,000 copies of the album. The front cover image comes from an edition of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy, and was originally drawn with black lines on a white background. It presents successive pulses from the first pulsar discovered, PSR B1919+21—often referred to in the context of this album by its older name, CP 1919. The image was suggested by drummer Stephen Morris and the cover design is credited to Joy Division, Peter Saville and Chris Mathan. The back cover of the album contains no track listings, leaving a blank table where one would expect the listings to be. The original release came in a textured sleeve. The original LP release contained no track information on the labels, nor the traditional “side one” and “side two” designations. The ostensible “side one” was labeled Outside and displayed a reproduction of the image on the album cover, while the other side was labeled Inside and displayed the same image with the colours reversed (black-on-white). Track information and album credits appeared on the inner sleeve only.

A scan of the original technical illustration from the Cambridge Encyclopaedia Of Astronomy

Saville on Unknown Pleasures: “This was the first and only time that the band gave me something that they’d like for a cover. I went to see Rob Gretton, who managed them, and he gave me a folder of material, which contained the wave image from the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy. They gave me the title too but I didn’t hear the album. The wave pattern was so appropriate. It was from CP 1919, the first pulsar, so it’s likely that the graph emanated from Jodrell Bank, which is local to Manchester and Joy Division. And it’s both technical and sensual. It’s tight, like Stephen Morris’ drumming, but it’s also fluid: lots of people think it’s a heart beat. Having the title on the front just didn’t seem necessary. I asked Rob about it and, between us, we felt it wasn’t a cool thing to do. It was the post-punk moment and we were against overblown stardom. The band didn’t want to be pop stars.”

The expansion

New Balance has produced a tribute sneaker for this legendary group. The sneaker is done in white and grey featuring Joy Divisionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first album cover graphics on the tongue and insole.

Saville for Zune

An MP3 player brand, ZUNE, has made a collaboration with Peter Saville, create an MP3 player as an appreciation to the iconic image and to the band as well.

Waste Painting #9 (2009)

THE RESTS Work beyond Factory Records In 1979 Saville moved from Manchester to London and became art director of the Virgin offshoot, DinDisc. He subsequently created a body of work which furthered his refined take on Modernism, working for artists such as Roxy Music, Duran Duran, Wham!, Ultravox and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. Saville founded the design agency Peter Saville Associates (still designing primarily for musical artists and record labels) before he was invited to close his office in 1990 to join the partner-owned Pentagram. In 1993 Saville left London and moved to Los Angeles to join ad agency Frankfurt Balkind with Brett Wickens. Saville soon returned to London where he asked designer Howard Wakefield to restart the design studio. For 3 years they became known as The Apartment for the German advertising agency Meiré & Meiré from Saville’s modernist apartment in Mayfair that also doubled as the London studio. (The same apartment is depicted in the record sleeve of Pulp’s album This Is Hardcore). The Apartment produced works for clients such as Mandarina Duck and Smart Car. In 1999 Saville moved to offices in Clerkenwell later renaming the studio in 2002 as Saville Associates (in 2005 it was then renamed Saville Parris Wakefield).

Hardcore. Meanwhile advances in image manipulation software enabled him to digitally rework images, rather than having to work with sourced imagery. He applied these processes to commercial projects including Coming Up and to ad campaigns for the fashion designer John Galliano at Christian Dior as well as to personal projects, such as his ongoing series of Waste Paintings. On his ‘post-factory’ artworks, it seems Saville that playing with colour and shapes more. An improvement and development of his style captured clearly on his later artworks and design. Saville’s many clients have included Roxy Music, Ultravox, Peter Gabriel, Pulp, Suede, Whitechapel Art Gallery, The Pompidou Centre, Yohji Yamamoto, Jil Sander, Christian Dior, Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney, Mandarina Duck, Givenchy, Selfridges, EMI and Adidas.

For over twenty-five years he has produced essential innovations in the field of communications, significantly affecting the interplay between art and design. As a cofounder of Factory, the legendary independent record label, he created a series of iconic album covers for Saville grew in demand as a younger generation of people the bands Joy Division and New Order; even though, in advertising and fashion had grown up with his work for Saville has also worked extensively in the fashion and Factory Records. He reached a creative and a commerart sectors. He was at the forefront of developments in cial peak with design consultancy clients such as Selconceptual design, and exhibits his work in museums and fridges, EMI and Pringle. Other significant commissions art galleries internationally. came from the field of fashion. Saville’s fashion clients have included Jil Sander, Martine Sitbon, John Galliano, Saville is now playing a leading strategic role in the Yohji Yamamoto, Christian Dior and Stella McCartney. economic regeneration and cultural renaissance of his Saville often worked in collaboration with longtime friend, home city of Manchester as consultant creative director to fashion photographer Nick Knight. The two launched an Manchester City Council. art and fashion website SHOWstudio in November 2000. Belgian fashion designer Raf Simons was granted full access to the archives of Saville’s vintage Factory projects and made a personal selection of Saville-designed works to integrate them into Raf Simon’s “Closer” Autumn/Winter 2003-4 collection. Sought out by a younger generation for his signature, Saville’s work became increasingly self-referential. Not only was he photographed for Suede’s Film Star, but The Appartment was a set in the cover of Pulp’s This Is

Ever since his first work for the fledgeling Factory Records in the late 1970s, Peter Saville has been a pivotal figure in graphic design and style culture. In fashion and art projects as well as in music, his work combines an unerring elegance with a remarkable ability to identify images that epitomise the moment. When the fly posters for Suede’s new single Film Star were pasted on walls across London in 1997, the languid male sprawled elegantly on the back seat of a Lincoln limousine was instantly recognisable to any graphic design enthusiasts who happened to stroll past. It was Peter Saville, the graphic designer, who had not only art directed the cover of Film Star and the rest of Suede’s Coming Up album, but had posed for the photograph by Nick Knight. Such a visible manifestation of the designer’s signature was exactly what Brett Anderson, Suede’s lead singer had wanted when he had sought out Saville and asked him to design the artwork for Coming Up. Obsessed as a teenager by Saville’s work in the 1980s for Factory Records’ bands such as Joy Division and New Order, one of Anderson’s treats as an adult indie rock star whose record company was willing to indulge him was to commission Peter Saville to design for his own band. Another of Saville’s clients at the time, Jarvis Cocker, the lead singer of Pulp, had commissioned him for exactly the same reason. The images that Peter Saville created for Joy Division, New Order and, later, Suede and Pulp were so compelling that they struck the same emotional resonance with the people who bought those albums and singles as the music. Just as the musicians in those bands wrote and produced their songs as catalogues of their thoughts and feelings, so Saville has conceived his images – for fashion and art projects as well as music – as visual narratives of his life.

“POP CULTURE USED TO BE LIKE LSD – DIFFERENT, EYE-OPENING AND REASONABLY DANGEROUS. IT’S NOW LIKE CRACK – ISOLATING, WASTEFUL AND WITH NO REDEEMING QUALITIES WHATSOEVER.” Peter Saville

Compiled By Sarah Soejono