Barney Bubbles - Career - Stiff, Radar and F Beat (and Other Punk and New Wave)

Stiff, Radar and F Beat (and Other Punk and New Wave)

Barney Bubbles joined Stiff Records as designer and art director early in 1977. With the label's co-founder Jake Riviera he generated a body of creative work that helped to secure Stiff's reputation as an exciting new independent label. Bubbles created sleeves for bands including The Damned, Elvis Costello, Ian Dury and Wreckless Eric. Often these were accompanied by quirky logos such as the face logo for Blockhead, advertisements and promotional items. The marketing of Elvis Costello's My Aim Is True included advertisements in three UK music papers from which a poster of Costello could be constructed, and the first 1,000 pressings contained an insert headed Help Us Hype Elvis, which, if completed and returned to Stiff, ensured that a friend would received a free copy.

When Riviera left Stiff in late 1977 Bubbles joined him at his new label Radar Records and later at Riviera's F-Beat Records. Bubbles created designs for artists such as Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Carlene Carter and Clive Langer & The Boxes.

Bubbles also maintained his freelance output, producing designs for Peter Jenner (Ian Dury and Billy Bragg's manager), and others, creating a prodigious output by working for such bands, musicians and performers as Vivian Stanshall, Generation X, Big Star, Johnny Moped, Whirlwind, Billy Bragg, Clover, The Sinceros, Roger Chapman, Phillip Goodhand-Tait, Dr. Feelgood, Inner City Unit and The Psychedelic Furs. As a result his work appeared on releases by labels such as Aura, Chiswick, Utility, Go! Discs, Epic, Charisma, CBS, Line Records, United Artists and Riddle Records. His signature style emerged as one that was colourful, playful, loaded with geometry, art-history and music-history references, jokes, cryptograms and symbols. The overriding appetite was for going against the grain of accepted design standards. His work is simultaneously complex in meaning and simple in its delivery. Examples include:

• Elvis Costello - This Year's Model, which was designed to have a deliberate miscropping so that the entire design was off-register;
• The Damned - Damned Damned Damned, a limited number of which were deliberately printed with a photo of Eddie and the Hot Rods on the back of the cover, rather than The Damned playing at The Roxy Club, and with an erratum sticker apologising for this "mistake", and on the front of the LP, on top of the original shrinkwrap, a red food-fight sticker saying 'Damned Damned', thus completing the LP's title when read underneath the band's name;
• Elvis Costello - Armed Forces, with an extended back panel consisting of folding flaps, postcards carrying the instruction DON'T JOIN (advice against joining the armed forces), and a message that these postcards had been die-cut away from the rest of the sleeve;
• Ian Dury and the Blockheads - Do It Yourself, which was released in 28 sleeve variations, all of which were designs supplied by Crown Wallpaper.