homage...

So, I finally got my act together the other night and made some time for 24 Hour Party People. It was my Forrest Gump; a big-time nostalgia trip through my Anglophilic, particularly Mancunian, musical past (save Happy Mondays). While Billy Squier, David Lee Roth, and Steve Perry inexplicably touched the hearts and minds of my peers, they had nothing to say to me. But Ian Curtis – and Bernard Sumner, in Curtis’s wake – did.

But it wasn’t just the words or the music of Joy Division and New Order; it was the whole package. You see, what I felt upon opening a new Factory records release can only inadequately be described as a kind of Gestalt, visuotactile adrenalin surge. Carefully working through layers of plastic, cardboard, and adhesive, the sacred, Schliemannian ritual began with the removal of transparent tape from the clear, plastic sleeve (the sure badge of an import) that enveloped said cardboard. Separation of plastic and paper yielded only another, inner layer of plastic – this one semi-opaque – that was the static-charged conduit to the grooves themselves.

Label was checked for proper turntable rate, and that having been set, needle hit vinyl. Oh yes, back then, an album or dance single meant a record – a 12-inch, vinyl disc – and the cardboard encasement therefore provided a large canvas for cover art.

This canvas was what one looked at, admired, and interpreted while listening to the music. Of the three senses that Joy Division and New Order could conceivably penetrate, one was affected through words and music; the other two, through sight and touch. And the person responsible for shaping what we saw and felt, for defining and honing the Factory image, is a designer named Peter Saville.

Saville (his character, that is) has a small part in the on-screen account, but those who followed the Factory saga know that his real role was an essential one; image was tantamount to music according to the Wilsonian credo. Indeed, every Factory action, whether it be a New Order release, the Hacienda opening, or the Hannett settlement, was enumerated, and a Saville creation accompanied most of these.

But what was it about Saville’s work for Factory that is worth remembering? During a period of cover design that embraced the spacey (think Boston), the silly (think Devo), the hokey (think Supertramp), the otherworldly (think anything 4AD), Saville simply chose the thoughtful and the beautiful.

As an example of the former, consider the cover of New Order’s 1984 single, Confusion. The importance of the numeric index was writ large and in violet; eight-inch high Gill Sans figures told those in the know that this was release 93. But it was reiterated subtly; the color strip on the upper right edge spells “FAC93” in a code created by Saville (see the back of the previous year’s Power, Corruption & Lies for the decoder wheel). And the bitmapped title was, well, confusing indeed. The C could just as well be an O or an N; the O might be a B; the N approached H or W; and so on.

And as for the latter, the design of the aforementioned album was a risky departure: a still-life painting by Henri Fantin-Latour. Said Saville in a 1995 Eye interview, “In 1983, when I put flowers on the cover of Power, Corruption & Lies, we hadn’t seen flowers in pop culture since the 1960s. But fashion designer Scott Crolla was buying Sanderson fabric and Georgina Godley was running it up into dresses and there was this buzz about Flower Power coming back.”

There is a resurgence of interest in Saville; he is enjoying what Neil Tennant might call a second “imperial” phase: The movie, a forthcoming book by Emily King, and a recent article in The New York Times.

The floral metaphor of annuals and perennials has been extended to typefaces (see Michael Twyman’s quote in King’s dissertation), and so too may it apply more generally to graphic design. The work of Peter Saville reminds us, perennially, of the powerful role design plays in our lives.

Other links:
(1) Eye interview with Rick Poynor
(2) Dennis Remmer’s Factory Records Discography
(3) New York Times article by Horacio Silva

08-October 2002