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The long-lost K West sign in all its magical luminescence: the restored emblem of the Ziggy Stardust album sleeve is on display at MPAG, London. Captured in its mystic rays (above), writer Alex Hopkins of the quarterly Lifestyle magazine beigeuk.com with the always-on Paul Burston of Time Out London. (Nokia snap © Shapersofthe80s)
❚ AFTER ZIGGY’S 40TH ANNIVERSARY HULLABALOO comes a unique selling exhibition of Bowie graphic art and memorabilia from his golden years 1969–1981. On display this week in London for the first time in 30 years is the original K. West sign that featured in Brian Ward’s covershot for Bowie’s springboard 1972 album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. The record sleeve itself has long been as iconic a London image as Abbey Road’s zebra crossing. At last, the illuminated sign from 23 Heddon Street has been rescued by a music industry veteran and restored, and is on show at the Movie Poster Art Gallery, run by 80s Mud Club regular, Tim Maddison. He revealed to Shapersofthe80s that it may be for sale “at the right price”.
The exhibition highlights celebrated images created for Bowie by talents such as Brian Duffy, Edward Bell, Masayoshi Sukita, Guy Peellaert, Steve Shapiro and Eric Stephen Jacobs. Original posters and large-format promotional displays on Bowie in the 70s are hard to come by, let alone buy, so this show is a treat. At the preview, a 3-ft wide original RCA in-store display for Diamond Dogs was snapped up at £1,250. A fab Scary Monsters in-store stand was still for sale today at £950.
Bowie graphics: five of the images for sale this week
➢ David Bowie: Sound and Vision at the The Movie Poster Art Gallery, London (Nov 17–Dec 1)
➢ View more classic Bowie images for sale this week
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❚ KNOWN AS THE MAN WHO changed the colour of Bowie’s left eye, painter George Underwood is showing his recently discovered 1975 oil painting of the Hunky Dory cover shoot [below] in London next month. He stumbled upon the 32 x 38-inch original while sorting through some old artworks and now it’s on sale for £16,000.
Bowie’s schoolfriend and former musician, Underwood as a painter adopted an imaginative style that refers to Bosch, Bruegel and mannerism. He is among an eclectic mix of ten contemporary artists selling direct through The Art for Art’s Sake Show at The Gallery in Cork Street next month. Rather more affordable Bowie mementoes are his limited edition giclée prints which include Width of a Circle (1969, £500), seen on the back cover of the UK David Bowie LP on Philips… Stardust Memories (1972, £350), a Ziggy era painting that was reproduced as a poster… The Man Who Fell to Earth (1975, £650), seen on the cover of the Pan Books film tie-in.
Rediscovered: George Underwood’s 1975 painting of the Hunky Dory cover
➢ The Art for Art’s Sake Show: the New Kids on the Block (Dec 3–8)
➢ At Underwood’s own online gallery, collectable enamel brooches of Ziggy Stardust cartoons
Posted in London, Media, Pop music, Youth culture
Tagged 1970s, David Bowie, exhibition, George Underwood, graphics, Hunky Dory, Memorabilia, photography, posters, sale, Ziggy Stardust
◼ STARMAN: HOW DAVID BOWIE LIT UP THE 1970s is the title of a two-session course coming up next month at London’s premiere adult-education institute, the City Lit. But you will have to get out of bed on two Sunday mornings to attend. The course costs £41 and its tutor, the music writer Toby Manning whose specialist subject is Pink Floyd, aims it at “music lovers generally” who will find out “how David Bowie’s songs, persona and style broke with 60s values and aesthetics and largely ‘invented’ the 70s”.
Toby promises lots of videos and says: “Watch how, through constant reinvention, Bowie’s relentless creativity set and reset the agenda for rock music throughout the 1970s and beyond.” Test your tutor’s mettle by viewing the stupendous Young Americans video from 1973 [above] and asking why Bowie is wearing those fabulous shoulders and what agenda did they set?
Afterwards, Toby promises, you should be able to “hold your own in any discussion about David Bowie”. So you’ll be ready to impress Mastermind’s 1.74 million viewers. Howzaboutthatthen!
➢ Details of the City Lit’s FE course in Bowie-ana and many more
Daily Telegraph: “David Bowie after collecting food from a cafe, bearing little resemblance to the fashion icon of the 1970s” (© Splash News)
➢ Update Oct 18, 2012 — “David Bowie: singer’s pale appearance reignites health fears” … Relentlessly downbeat report at The Telegraph online about “the polymorphic rocker’s” health beneath this genial paparazzi pic taken after picking up a takeaway lunch from the Italian Bottega Falai Café in New York.
Daily Mail: “A grinning David Bowie has a wide smile as he joins Coco Schwab for lunch at Sant Umbroeus in New York” (© Splash News)
➢ Update Oct 19 — Reclusive David Bowie heads for lunch in New York… and he’s smiling again … Today’s Daily Mail follows up with five more pix from Splash News showing a very relaxed Bowie heading off to lunch: “Judging by the wide grin on his face, Bowie was feeling great.”
Between the two national newspaper reports accompanying these snaps of Bowie as a “hoodie”, neither offers one new piece of information and all the pix are completely undated. Eagle-eyed fashionistas will notice in the first “takeaway lunch” shot without his zebra print scarf he sports different shoes from today’s pix taken en route to a restaurant. So either David has scoffed two lunches, or, let’s guess, they were taken on different days.
Posted in Culture, London, Pop music, Youth culture
Tagged 1970s, adult education, City Lit., David Bowie, education, FE courses, New York City, paparazzi, Toby Manning, Video
Britain’s infamous “winter of discontent” that brought down the Labour government in 1979: as public service workers went on strike, rubbish piled-up even in London’s Leicester Square
❚ AN “INVALUABLE WEBSITE” — this is the verdict on Shapersofthe80s by historian Dominic Sandbrook, author of the rich new cultural analysis, Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974–1979. It’s a doorstep of a book, yet highly readable, which reveals numerous upbeat aspects to the chaotic decade many write off as worthless.
Chapter 31 is especially inspirational! Sandbrook gives generous credit to key characters who Shapersofthe80s has long maintained deserve recognition as movers and shapers pivotal to the energy of the 80s. And, having quoted chunks from our own texts, the historian gives due acknowledgement in his extensive bibliography. Indeed, the scope of his research is more impressive than for much other contemporary history, as Sandbrook not only cites political and economic mandarins, but also sifts fine detail from popular culture and eye-witness reportage across the whole social spectrum.
Sandbrook writes: “Behind the lurid news stories, the late 1970s were the decisive point in our recent history. Across the country, a profound argument about the future of the nation was being played out, not just in families and schools but in everything from episodes of Doctor Who to singles by the Clash. These years marked the peak of trade union power and the apogee of an old working-class Britain – but they also saw the birth of home computers, the rise of the ready meal and the triumph of a Grantham grocer’s daughter who would change our history for ever”
Seasons in the Sun is the fourth title in Sandbrook’s survey of postwar Britain. His unstuffy combination of high and low life is behind the BBC2 series The Seventies currently viewable live and on iPlayer.
Sandbrook’s Seasons in the Sun forms the basis of the current BBC2 TV series The Seventies
❏ “The first three volumes of Dominic Sandbrook’s epic history of Britain between 1956 and 1979 were exceptionally good. The fourth, Seasons in the Sun, is magnificent … marked by its pace, style, wit, narrative and characterisation as by its exhaustive research.” — Roger Hutchinson, Scotsman
❏ “Sandbrook has created a specific style of narrative history, blending high politics, social change and popular culture … his books are always readable and assured, and Seasons in the Sun is no exception … Anyone who genuinely believes we have never been so badly governed should read this splendid book.” — Stephen Robinson, Sunday Times
August 1977: Jayaben Desai, treasurer of the strike committee at the Grunwick photo-processing plant, had been picketing for a year, supported by white, male trade unionists while postmen blocked the company’s mail. (Photograph by Graham Wood/Getty)
➢ Playwright David Edgar draws together the Sandbrook quartet in The Guardian, May 9, 2012: “ The 1970s was the moment when our century arrived… As Sandbrook insists, the women’s liberation movement was as much about Hull’s fishermen’s wives and female machinists at Ford Dagenham as feminist activists disrupting Miss World. In 1971, workers campaigning against the closure of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders borrowed the student tactic of the sit-in. As 1970s chronicler Andy Beckett argues, the gay groups who stood shoulder to shoulder with trade unionists outside Grunwick prefigured an alliance which “would become commonplace in the decade to come”. The identity politics that were to become such a satirised feature of the left of the 1970s arose not just out of campus and culture but class war… ” / continued at Guardian online
Posted in Culture, Economics, London, Media, Politics, Pop music, Social trends, TV, Youth culture
Tagged 1970s, 1980s, Allen Lane, Battle for Britain, BBC, Books, David Edgar, Dominic Sandbrook, Grunwick, history, Seasons in the Sun, winter of discontent
Ways of Seeing, 1972: John Berger takes a knife to Botticelli’s Venus and Mars
➢ CLICK ON THE PIC to run the video of Ways of Seeing, part one
❚ 40 YEARS AGO AN ART CRITIC TOOK A STANLEY KNIFE to a Botticelli masterpiece in the National Gallery, and cut the head of Venus out from the canvas. (No, not the real painting, but a reproduction, obviously.) And what he held in his hand was the typical picture postcard by which many of us know this beautiful and all-conquering goddess. The critic and iconoclast John Berger was making a point that it is through reproductions that most of us view the world’s great art. He argued that paintings had been stripped of their context to raise money through sales of reproductions.
“With the invention of the camera, everything changed,” he said, meaning the ways our perceptions shifted. “The days of pilgrimage are over. It is the image of the painting which travels now. The meaning no longer resides in its unique painted surface which it’s only possible to see in one place and at one time. Its meaning has become transmittable. It comes to you, like the news of an event.”
This is how Berger launched Ways of Seeing on Jan 8, 1972 — four pioneering TV films which themselves were extended into a Penguin Modern Classic (set entirely in a heavy Univers font for a reason the author explains), and itself in turn is considered a seminal university-level text for current studies of visual culture and art history.
Yesterday’s BBC radio strand Archive on 4 made exciting listening of judicious extracts. Titled The Politics of Art, it teased out Berger’s then revolutionary way of discussing paintings as commodities, under the themes of society and context, the nude, the power of money and advertising.
The historian Tim Marlow, currently director of exhibitions at White Cube, shows how Ways of Seeing was provocative and up-to-date in seeking out the opinions specifically of women and children. He believes the politics still matter. Berger challenged 600-year-old notions of ownership. “Previously art celebrated wealth and power: gods, princes and dynasties were worshipped… But the European oil painting served a different kind of wealth. It glorified not a static order of things, but the ability to buy, to furnish and to own.” In the late 20th century Berger subjects art to a Marxist critique that reminds us of the role of the makers. Being naked, he argues, is to be oneself. But a woman posing nude “is to be seen as an object”.
Berger’s phwoarr factor: charisma and intellect
Marlow asks how far the message of this series is pertinent again today. As a powerful corrective to glibness in much contemporary culture, The Politics of Art is well worth catching on the radio iPlayer, for Berger’s own bluff opinions, and those of several pundits, including the British novelist Marina Warner who is hooked on his phwoarr factor as well as his intellect: “Physically he was a powerful, beautiful man. And then his Mick Jagger-like charisma: he’s a thrilling performer. It’s a shame this kind of sexual magnetism is rarely seen now on TV — because it’s not permissible”!
There’s also a priceless sequence where the patrician connoisseur Lord Clark (of Civilisation, the earlier landmark TV survey of Western art) confesses to incomprehension before Picasso’s gigantic anti-war painting, Guernica, which invokes the aerial bombing of a Basque town during the Spanish civil war in 1937. Then Berger the passionate ideologue gives an assured deconstruction of the images of slaughter, its screaming civilians and symbols of freedom.
Now aged 85, Berger said recently of his TV series: “The programmes seem as urgent now as then. That’s because what’s happening in the world hasn’t changed very much — it’s only got more extreme. This political approach was prophetic about the world today.”
➢ John Berger video interview with Michael Silverblatt
in October 2002
Posted in Culture, London, Social trends, TV
Tagged 1970s, Books, John Berger, painting, Politics of Art, TV series, Ways of Seeing
✱ Deejay legend Robbie Vincent returned to JazzFM on Sundays 1-3pm in 2021… Catch Robbie’s JazzFM August Bank Holiday 2020 session thanks to AhhhhhSoul with four hours of “nothing but essential rhythms of soul, jazz and funk”.
◆ Who was who in Spandau’s break-out year of 1980? The Invisible Hand of Shapersofthe80s draws a selective timeline for The unprecedented rise and rise of Spandau Ballet –– Turn to our inside page
✱ If you thought there was no more to know about the birth of Blitz culture in 1980 then get your hands on a sensational book by an obsessive music fan called David Barrat. It is gripping, original and epic – a spooky tale of coincidence and parallel lives as mind-tingling as a Sherlock Holmes yarn. Titled both New Romantics Who Never Were and The Untold Story of Spandau Ballet! Sample this initial taster here at Shapers of the 80s
✱ Jawing at Soho Radio on the 80s clubland revolution (from 32 mins) and on art (@55 mins) is probably the most influential shaper of the 80s, former Wag-club director Chris Sullivan (pictured) with editor of this website David Johnson
➢ Search for all on Bowie here
at Shapers of the 80s
✱ “I’m not a rock star” Bowie often said – No, David, you were a messiah – Obituaries and key videos on the godlike one
✱ Prince Rogers Nelson RIP: ‘A funny cat’ and ‘sole authentic genius’ of the 1980s
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