roger cavas presents … a peter saville day, featuring (mostly) his work with New Order *

* (restored)

 

…so where do you see yourself fitting in?

I don’t really know. To be terribly honest, as a graphic designer the one period of my life when everything felt right and fell into place was from 1978 to perhaps 1986, the period during which I was doing record covers and happy to be doing record covers. I had the benefit of being considered successful at it and I had had some recognition. But in 1986 i was 31 and that is a fairly critical age. The time had come to go somewhere else. There is no shortage of things to do with my life, but what should I keep doing to be happy? In order to answer that I think you have to find out who you are. Over the last ten years there has been a lot of asking myself “What is that I do?”

 

Peter Saville, Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus outside the Factory Club

 

“When I started out working for Factory I was spoilt, absolutely spoilt. Now the motivation for work is to achieve something for your client, I’ll be sitting in meetings and somebody will say “hey, let’s not forget, we’re all just here to make money”. Well, actually that’s not why I’m here. I’m here to make things better.”

 

Factory 1978 – 90

 

FAC 1 – The Factory (1978)

Unknown pleasures (Joy Division LP, 1978)

song: New dawn fades

 

 

Closer (Joy Division LP, 1980)

song: Atrocity exhibition

 

 

Love will tear us apart (Joy Division 7”, 1980)

song: Love will tear us apart

 

working with Joy Division, 1979-1980

“What we had in Manchester in the late 1970s was a group of people who just came together to do things that they wanted to do. We started The Factory, the club, because all of the other clubs had been closed down by the authorities. Punk had unsettled the establishment a little bit the same way that the rave scene did in the late 1980s. Suddenly there were no venues and so Tony took it upon himself to try to organise a new one. By default it became a record company mainly because Joy Division chose to stay with Factory and release an album rather than sign a deal with a major record company. Joy Division became a group because they wanted to make music. They didn’t really want to be in business or to make money, they just wanted to release the records that they wanted to make. What seems to have distinguished the work that I actually felt motivated by and interested in is working with people who are doing something because they want to do it and not because they think that there’s a business opportunity in it.”

 

 

New Order

Ceremony (12”, 1981)

song: Ceremony

 

 

Procession/ Everything´s gone green (7”, 1981)

song: Procession

 

 

Movement (LP, 1981)

song: Dreams never end

 

 

Blue Monday (12”, 1983)

“How successful are you?

By my mother’s terms I’m not successful at all! I don’t live anywhere. I don’t have any money. What I do have is a reputation. The sleeve to New Order’s “Blue Monday” is exceptional; it’s on its way to the Museum Of Modem Art.

Is it?

Well, it’s not yet. But it will be.”

song: Blue Monday (12”)

 

 

Blue Monday (Japan promo, 1984)

early work for New Order, 1980-1983

“When Ian Curtis (Joy Division’s lead singer) killed himself a month before the second album came out, it led to a kind of notoriety around Joy Division which seems to have lasted ever since. What was left of Joy Division after Ian died had to kind of reinvent themselves. It took them a while to find who they were going to be and to reinvent themselves as New Order. Releasing the single Blue Monday in 1983 was a defining moment for New Order. The cover is based on a floppy disk – I’d discovered one for the first time when I went to visit them in their studio. The single is an almost entirely sequenced seven minute track and the equipment plays it better than the group, so it seemed appropriate to wrap it up in a floppy disk.

By this time an unusual relationship had developed between me and my client in that they didn’t really ask what I was doing. By virtue of being a co-founder of Factory, I was in a way a detached director of the company and nobody really asked what I was doing. Everybody just got on and did what they did, and really there was no one to answer to. And in the case of New Order there was no one to answer to. When Ian had been alive he wrote the songs and I felt a certain responsibility to interact with the person whose work I was interfacing, whereas with New Order nobody really wrote songs and there was no obvious hierarchy within the group. There was a kind of argumentative democracy where they just agreed to disagree, so whenever we had any kind of design meeting I would ask them, for example, what colour would they like for something and one would say red, and one would say blue. As I was left to my own devices I kind of did what I wanted to do and used the work as a platform for either a) what I was interested in or b) what I felt was missing.

Doing record covers is a bit like playground art – you get open access to thousands of young people. Joy Division’s first album Unknown Pleasures was well received but maybe 50,000 or 60,000 people bought it, but because Ian had died, Closer sold hundreds of thousands of copies. And Blue Monday became the biggest selling 12” single of all time. So this kind of fairly self-indulgent work of mine occasionally went to a lot more people than I expected when I was doing it. I probably would have been terrified doing Blue Monday if I’d thought this is going to sell hundreds of thousands of copies.”

 

 

Confusion (12”, 1983)

song: Confusion (12”)

 

 

Power, corruption and lies (LP, 1983)

song: Age of consent

 

“At the time I was interested in the juxtaposition of historical culture and modern technological culture, and I was interested in the idea of what did history look like when it came up on a retrieval system on a computer screen and I wanted to juxtapose the kind of hieroglyphics of technology with historical classicism. The colours down the side are a colour alphabet and I converted the alphabet into a colour code in order to have an abstract code with which to work. The wheel on the back (of the album sleeve) was the only indication of the code but New Order fans still managed to work it out. They even pointed out there was a spelling mistake on the album.”

 

 

the code

“To decode the wheel, use only the outer two rings. You could divide the outer two rings into full colour, various on green, and various on yellow. The inner segments appear to be meaningless. Start with the full colour sections, the first of which will be the green one… This is ‘A’. Work your way clockwise naming each colour the next letter. There are exactly 26 segments around the disc. From ‘Z’ work back into the full colours, the first of which is ‘1’. This means that the full green segment is either ‘A’ or ‘1’, and the colour for ‘I’ is also that for ‘9’. You should be able to decode the squares now. Start with the 5 on the front of Power Corruption & Lies, and you will find (if you have the vinyl) that the first 4 squares spell ‘FACT’ then next square is divided into two, with the lower half being ‘7’ and the upper half being ‘5’. Therefore the code is ‘FACT 75’ which is the Factory number for this release. The code for the CD front cover is ‘FACD 75’.”

(from http://carriewhiteburnsinhell.blogspot.com/2007/06/peter-saville-factory-records.html)

 

 

Thieves like us (12”, 1984)

song: Thieves like us (12”)

 

 

Murder (12”, 1984)

song: Murder

 

 

Low-life (LP, 1985)

song: Love vigilantes

 

 

Shellshock (12”, 1985)

song: Shellshock

 

 

Brotherhood (LP, 1986)

song: Bizarre love triangle

 

Brotherhood album for New Order, 1986

“I knew of Yves Klein from college but I didn’t really get it. And then in 1986 I did get it. I found an Yves Klein catalogue at a friend’s house in Paris and it made sense immediately. There was a kind of nothingness to it, a kind of romance and an excitement of nothingness. There was this show he did (in 1958) called The Void where the people at the opening were the show and the gold leaf and the monochrome blues. It was exactly the mood I was trying to find a way to express myself. By this time I’d just about grown up enough not to transpose things literally so I tried to do my own version of Klein. Trevor Key, a photographer who’d become my best friend, helped me and we bought cheap sheets of metal from a builder’s yard. It’s reflective and iridescent and goes different colours depending on how the light falls on it. For me it was 1986 and 1987 and it was my version of Yves Klein – just nothing. And Trevor said, “What do we do with the pictures? Are we going to retouch them?” And I said: “No, nothing. Just leave it. Just take the picture and leave it like it is.”

 

 

Substance poster (Joy Division LP compilation, 1987)

song: Atmosphere

 

“All the early Factory product had been on vinyl, but people wanted CDs of it so Tony Wilson invented a series of albums called Substance which were like early ‘Best ofs’. He asked me to do the cover and it was really difficult. What was the cover? This is like ’87 and seven years had gone by since Joy Division. I didn’t know how to do Joy Division in 1987 and I didn’t want to just reproduce the old covers. Finally Lecturis, the Dutch printers, sent me a catalogue they’d done for a Dutch sculptor called Jan van Munster and I saw this piece called Energy Peak. It’s a two metre steel cone that freezes up at the top and has a refrigeration unit inside. I was looking at it and went: “Wow, it’s so Joy Division.” Luckily nobody gave me any deadlines for this work back then. If I’d had to do this cover in two weeks I probably wouldn’t have done it, but given a month or so I finally stumbled over Jan van Munster. He was happy about his work becoming a cover for Joy Division so Trevor and I went to Holland, and took a photograph of Energy Peak. While we were away, Brett Wickens, who had started as my assistant and became my partner in the studio, figured out the type. We knew that Joy Division were this sort of tense relationship between the spiritual and the modern and that the sound is quite timeless with a juxtaposition of emotion and hard machinery, so Brett put Garamond and Crowel together which was a ridiculous idea but worked quite wonderfully.”

 

 

True faith (12”, 1987)

song: True faith (12”)

 

“It all comes down, though, for me, to the record sleeves. The sleeves are the thing. Against a background of Yves Klein blue, a golden leaf floats down, or is suspended, on the cover for the 1987 New Order single ‘True Faith’. It was the great song of that year, and the artwork seemed even at the time to distil the moment’s optimism, yet it also slowed everything down to let Saville-style contemplation sneak over the noise of everything that was happening that summer. And what was happening, really, was drugs, the new drugs soon to be taken up by young people in every corner of Britain. Saville has always been an interlocutor, not a preacher, and his designs of this period underscore and eventually describe a new mood in the country’s towns and fields and underpasses.

The actual leaves used for the ‘True Faith’ shoot are in a cardboard box in the Design Museum. In other parts of the gallery are artworks that set the tone for later bands, the leatherette glamour of Pulp and Suede, but it is the leaf that stays in my mind. It’s amazing, the continuing, personal-seeming drama of pop culture. The golden leaf is now under glass, and you feel certain that if you touched it, it would crumble away to nothing.”

(From Andrew O´Hagan, “At the design museum” [http://www.btinternet.com/~comme6/saville/essay5.htm])

 

 

Substance (2 LP compilation, 1987)

song: Perfect kiss (12”)

 

 

Substance (inner sleeve, 1987)

 

 

Touched by the hand of god (12”, 1987)

song: Touched by the hand of god

 

 

Fine time (12”, 1988)

song: Fine time

 

 

Technique (LP, 1989)

song: Vanishing point

 

“One day I said to Trevor: “I want a picture of a flower for the lobby of IBM in the year 2000.” And he was like: “Mmm, like an X ray?” And I said: “Well maybe like an X ray but not an X ray.” A few weeks later Trevor proposed a new way of making pictures which became like silk screening but with light. By 1988, we were really playing around and experimenting with this technique and at the same time New Order made an album called Technique. They went off to Ibiza in 1988, discovered ecstasy in the clubs and came back to England with one of the first rock-dance-ecstacy tracks, Fine Time. I was looking for something to use this photographic process that Trevor had developed and I found this cherub in an antique shop in London. A year ago someone writing a piece about this cover referred to the cherub as being bacchanalian. At the time, I hadn’t consciously thought of that but bacchanalian was quite a good reference point for 1988 and 1989.”

 

 

Round and round (12”, 1989)

song: Round and Round (12”)

 

The Haçienda and the demise of Factory Records, turn of 1990s

When Closer, the second Joy Division album, sold a lot of copies and Factory had hundreds of thousands of pounds that it didn’t know what to do with, we built the Hacienda which was in a way a kind of a dream of a club. But when we built it in 1981 it was a dream for the ten people who were there each night. It was like Yves Klein’s The Void – a 15,000 square foot industrial entertainment zone with no one there. It was a gift to the young people of Manchester but in 1981 they didn’t want it. By 1988 and 1989, when they were looking for somewhere to deal ecstasy, they found the Hacienda and it became the epicentre of drugs culture in Manchester. By 1990 the Hacienda on a Monday night was ‘Hallucienda’. It really was quite an amazing moment, but it was tragic as well. The first ecstasy death was there in the club – a 16 year-old girl, who was two years too young to even be in the club. By 1990 there were 1,500 people in there on a Saturday night and too many of them were carrying guns. It was very, very scary and no one had any idea how to deal with it. Ultimately The Hacienda closed and ultimately Factory fell apart as a result of it all.

 

 

post-Factory 1990 – ?

Regret (CD single, 1993)

song: Regret (New Order mix)

 

 

Republic (CD album, 1993)

song: Special

 

 

World (CD single, 1993)

song: World

 

 

Ruined in a day (CD single, 1993)

song: Ruined in a day

 

“To escape the recession in Britain and to escape Pentagram (the London design group) where I’d ended up, I had a kind of Hollywood fantasy. I’d gone to Los Angeles to do a television identity in 1991 and been fascinated by the way Hollywood makes the world look. It’s quite interesting that you feel a bit cheated when you first go to Los Angeles because you realise that to make television and movies they just go out in the street, the whole place is just like a 24 hour movie studio and you drive around Los Angeles and you just keep seeing locations from movies. I came back to London and there was a New Order album (Republic) to do so I did it as a parody of the way the media repackages the world, with slightly cheap titles that look like an HBO movie. It’s what seemed to happen every year in Malibu. Every autumn there are bush fires and everybody’s house burns down and it’s OK because everyone just goes to the beach and builds a new house. It was very strange to us, this was a kind of fantasy. The images came together because Brett was experimenting with what you could do with the blend filter in Photoshop. Within a year we were living in LA. Brett stayed and I didn’t. I couldn’t bear it actually.”

 

 

1963 (CD single, 1995)

song: 1963 (Arthur Baker remix)

 

 

Get ready (album, 2001)

song: Crystal

 

“I didn’t believe in the New Order’s Get Ready cover at all, I didn’t even go to the session. When I arrived, it was already finished.”

 

 

International (CD compilation, 2002)

 

 

Krafty (single, 2005)

song: Krafty

 

 

Waiting for the sirens´ call (album, 2005)

song: Waiting for the sirens´ call

 

________________________________________

life

“The legendary cover of the New Order single Blue Monday (1983) and for example, the sleeve of the Joy Division album Unknown Pleasures (1979), were to bring the Manchester graphic designer Peter Saville worldwide renown. Using a reduced, Modernist style Peter Saville has made key innovations in the field of visual communications, and in recent times he has had a profound effect on the interplay between art, design and advertising.

Born in Manchester in 1955, Saville was brought up in the affluent suburb of Hale. Having been introduced to graphic design with his friend Malcolm Garrett by Peter Hancock, their sixth form art teacher, Saville decided to study graphics at Manchester Polytechnic from 1974 to 1978. At the time Saville was obsessed by bands like Kraftwerk and Roxy Music, but Garrett encouraged him to discover the work of early modern movement typographers such as Herbert Bayer and Jan Tschichold. 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.”

read more… [http://www.btinternet.com/~comme6/saville/biography.htm]

________________________________________

live

Adidas Adicolor Peter Saville

Bernard Sumner talks to Peter Saville, Hacienda 1984

The Hacienda – Fact 51 –a discussion about the most infamous and original clubs in the world. Peter Hook, Peter Saville, Ben Kelly and hosted by Miranda Sawyer talk about each other´s involvement in the club. First of nine parts

 

________________________________________

more

Peter Saville´s webpage
http://www.btinternet.com/~comme6/saville/

A nice interview with Peter Saville in Clash Music…
http://www.clashmusic.com/feature/peter-saville

…and the rest of the Clash Music special on Factoy Records
http://www.clashmusic.com/feature/why-factory

Joy Division and New Order catalogues (including covers) on a French site
http://www.enkiri.com/joy/records/records_jd_official_albums_f.html

The same site, on Peter Saville
http://www.enkiri.com/joy/associates/p_saville_f.html

A Japanese site with a most comprehensive Peter Saville´s catalogue
http://www.tosq.com/petersaville/

Jan Tschichold (in German)
http://www.tschichold.de/

The Yves Klein Archives
http://www.yvesklein.com/

Factory Records: The Complete Graphic Album in Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/Factory-Records-Complete-Graphic-Album/dp/0811856429/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222760993&sr=1-1

 

________________________________________

“Q: You don’t think a culture like The Factory could exist now?

Saville: Factory only existed… One great investment happened in Factory, and this is what made Factory happen. The investment was someone’s life. Literally, the life of Ian Curtis was the investment that made Factory happen. That’s what made Factory happen. Without it, it couldn’t have happened. Ian’s life created the platform from which Factory was able to survive and New Order were able to continue for the next decade. That was the investment in Factory Records. And actually in modern Manchester. I mean, the last three years I’ve been creative director to the city of Manchester, and I see it very, very clearly and plainly. Ian’s life was the sacrifice that made it all work. So it couldn’t even have worked then without that.”

 

 

soundtrack to the Peter Saville Show (around half an hour long, 2003)

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** David, Hi. Sad story, man. That poem was edging into Robert Pollard territory, which is a high compliment. Dry ice? Wow, really? I thought that stuff went the way of the dinosaurs. Sounds fun: Gahan. Except for the Nazi push. Or even that too, ultimately. Seems like you accrued a fan here, bud. Nice going. ** Our Aveline, Hello. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yes! Does Ru Paul still sing and make albums and stuff? Excuse my ignorance. It is really nice how wearing masks brings back secrecy a little bit. And how they make having bad breath less of a worry. Love inhaling through his mouth until there’s a concave dent in his mask and offering upholstered blow jobs to guys with small dicks, G. ** David Ehrenstein, Everyone, Mr Ehrenstein’s FaBlog has a new upper echelon called ‘The Talented Mr. Crumbley’ here. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. I don’t know for sure, but Ryan and I are doing the conversation tonight, so perhaps they’ll tell me then. I’ve heard the term sibilkore, but I haven’t delved into its contents yet. Sounds pretty fun. Thanks, I’ll imbibe. ** T, Hey, T. Yeah, that’s why I thought it had to have a weekend slot. I like how positively you think, my friend. We are birds of a feather. Yes, same to you and your week, and I hope it’s just a little more Xmas-y every day. xo. ** _Black_Acrylic, Me too re: google. And after how horribly they treated my blog. We’re all suckers, I guess. ** godlov3r, Hi, godlov3r. Welcome! Oh, hm, I don’t do that website about me, and I don’t think the guy who does it has updated it in years, but I’ll alert him to the link problem and see if I can get him to transgress the cobwebs and fix that. Thanks for letting me know. And I’m glad you’re back here. How are you? What’s up? Where’s the Xmas season leading you? ** Misanthrope, Well, you’d better keep your nose clean, buddy. Your mom’s celebration sounds most pleasant. You deserve a buche, a really great buche, but I don’t know how in the hell you can get one. I’m ordering mine (or my first one) today, and I’ll say a little prayer for you. ** Brian, Hi, Brian. I hope the ‘Jerk’ film will make it over to the US in some form. It’s really quite good. And intense. Trust you got some restorative sleep last night, yes? Are your finals imminent? Do you have a ton of studying to do, I hope not? I think a peaceful week full of life changing input from the world of culture is what you need, so that’s my prescription. ** Okay. Today you get another formerly dead post from my murdered blog — a dedicated and excellent look at the sights that Peter Saville brought to New Order and co. by a fine fella who used to hang out here named Roger Cavas. Hoping you dig it. See you tomorrow.