Classic Barney Bubbles Stiff Records “If it ain’t STIFF, it ain’t worth a fuck” t-shirt.

This t-shirt illustrates nicely the music hall/vaudeville aspect of Colin Fulcher/Barney Bubbles’ work and is probably influenced, if not actually composed or passed on by his dad, who was a working class man of the people sort of bloke. Dad had a fairly extensive mental joke book. He was a fan of Max Miller the radio joker who was banned from the BBC for 5 years for telling a bawdy tale of which Lord Reith (founder and director of the BBC) did not approve. Goes like this, ” I was walking along a narrow mountain pass, so narrow that nobody else could pass you, when I saw a blonde walking towards me. A beautiful blonde without a stitch on, yes lady, not a stitch. Cor blimey. I didn’t know whether to toss myself off or block her passage. “

There is some confusion as to whether it was a Max Wall or a Max Miller joke, but I’m fairly certain it was Miller. Don’t matter either way, Mr. Fulcher, a News Of The World sort of man, liked ‘em both. I can remember the day in 1962 when Barney showed me his Paolotzi lookalikes standing in the entry to their house on Tranmere road, and ol’d man Fulcher telling that very same joke along with the story as how Miller got banned by the Beeb.

(I got my copy of this t-shirt in ’83 when I swapped with Barney for my T-shirt celebration of the repeat integers date 7 7 77.)

Note to readers unfamiliar with colloquial English, “Cor blimey” is a cant phrase derived from the medieval curse “God blind me if I tell a lie.”

It is amusing that until recently there was no Googlable picture of this t-shirt except for an inferior Bowdlerized knock off.

Barney Bubbles artwork (detail)

Revelations.

Today I’m in a mixed time awareness of the ages, reading a slew of overlapping novels, from 1948′s 1984 Orwell to the 1996 or so Ladbroke Grove of M. Amis. I’m also reading Northanger Abbey, by the eighteen-year old Jane Austen of 1799 and sitting on a fold-out mattress in the company of my eighteen-year old daughter Alessandra and her Chinese friend Dghzou here in 2012. The young women discuss the boys in the Occupy Oakland demo they were at last night, “They should have left when we did. No sense those men. I expect they got arrested. Let’s send them pictures of our food.”

As they chat, I listen to the now six week old recording of The BBC Radio-4 programme about Colin Fulcher, alias Barney Bubbles, on Dghzou’s lap-top, a show about how my ol’ friend Barney went nuts.

It’s a clever and emotional piece of detective reportage from the front lines of Barney’s life.

Such a revelation, I had no idea he was so troubled. We were the best of friends but in the style of blokes of the time we shared no intimacy of the sort that might lead to telling it all in such a forthright way. Not like in California today when every body tells their woes.

During my visit to his place in Islington in May of 1983, six months before he died I didn’t hear his hidden voice telling me his troubles. Not so hidden in retrospect, he said it to me out loud, something like, ‘I have a date with death.’ But I took it as metaphor at the time.

No matter that death stared us down, that both of our parents had gone in a moment, his the year after mine, we’d never admit such a sentiment as loss to each other, no, not cool. No, he wryly looked away as I asked, “So. How did your parents die?”

He dismissed me with, “They just died, di’n't they.” Not a flicker of emotion.

But he went on to say that the Australian Aborigines had given him a death, had put a stone on him and that he would die to protest the ways of the world, did I believe such things?

“Yeah, they work, I’m sure.” We both agreed that how killing stones worked was that they were believed in, and that objects were alive, like shapes, a conversation we’d had over the years.

On the radio show Fulcher’s sister, Jill, was astonishingly and appealingly forthright, so dramatically different than my remembered youthful fear of her, of what I imagined was her dangerous wrath and disapproval of me, her brother’s odd friend. No, Jill showed, through her clear telling, some of her brother’s hidden emotion. She sounded so real and poignant, with that radio sound effect of a ticking clock in the background, giving off a powerful whiff of the suburban, glassy-tiled fireplaces of Whitton, as I sat eight-thousand miles away on a fold-out here in San Francisco.

What a great piece of BBC magic, of emotional and you-were-there detective work this is. I grew up listening to the radio and this show is as good as it gets. Now all this telescoping of time muddles the world of radio and novels into a confused memory, with Cassandra Austen, Jane’s sister, editing a movie of Barney Fulcher slicing his face mask, all the while adding adding bits of Burrough’s Naked Lunch to the mix.

A minor point of fact about the radio programme, I don’t think ‘Colin Fulcher’ become ‘Barney Bubbles’ in 1963, He adopted ‘Barney’ in maybe ’66(?) and it wasn’t until 1967 when he started his light show that he adopted ‘Bubbles’. Hmm, I seem to recall I am wrong by a couple of years.

Another thing of which I’m less certain, but do feel, is that I don’t think Barney was ever really in ‘fashion’, so I don’t think he ever really went ‘out of style.’ He was always too far out in front to be really accepted for the seer he was by his paymasters. I think the reason he got used so much was because his employers were connived at by Barney’s force of personality. His “Cheap and Cheerfiul,” won the day despite their misgivings about his ideas. But when things went wrong for him in ’83, probably I now realize because of a bad cocaine and speed habit, he was less able to cope, and so off he flew with the Australians.

Colin Fulcher went in a ritual which was Barney Bubbles’ ‘Look what you made me do’ to the music industrial-complex. Plus I think warmonger Margaret Thatcher had just been or was going to be re-elected. His arch-enemy, Town mag publisher Michael Heseltine, then Minister of Defence, was weaseling for PM. Elvis Costello. HM Govt. There were many reasons to protest but his seedy metaphor turned deadly. It wasn’t just the disease, as Wiki calls it, that killed him, he was saying something. The bag and the cuts were masks in a performance.

Stupid idea. Don’t do it Barney.

Barney Bubbles artwork detail

Mark Hodkinson’s BBC Radio 4 documentary about Barney Bubbles now has a broadcast date: 2 January 2012 at 16:00 GMT. Or for us folks in California, 8:00 PST. Also available at other times in other locations around the world. Turn on, tune in, drop out. The visual accompaniment to this newsflash shows two antennaed daschunds, and are of course, a product of Barney’s tripped-out imagination.

(Thanks to R&M for the image.)

Barney Bubbles Chilli Willi sticker (courtesy R and M)

Here we see Barney Bubbles in cheap and cheerful mode, rapidographing up an image with references.

There’s Walt Disney’s Pluto’s bent ears – but with four fingers and thumb style hands, deliberately non-Ub Ewarks-like (Ub was the originator of the Disney three fingered hands).

The Harris Tweed jackets are amusing, each with their own weave. Improbably for a time of experiment in all things garment, we were still wearing such things back then, a tweedy jacket with elbow patches being useful for its pockets. In ’73 I was featured in the Times on the fashion page doing a layered clothing strip tease in Covent Garden by Ed Bell, in which I believe I was wearing two such jackets as well as an overcoat or two, and many underlayers.

Talking of layered clothing, it was Barney, back in his ‘Colin Fulcher’ days who preached the no-underpants style of dressing, with a view to avoid the presumably unseemly seam lines viewable through skin-tight denim trousers (OK, ‘Levi’s') that he shrank wearing them in the bath so he said (I don’t believe he did). This was a person at Conran Design inspired piece of fashion sense.

The border lines are drawn sharp (real sharp!), in contrast to his oft-used wiggly jagged line that was deliberate and not the product of a shaky hand. His ‘shaky hand’ drawn line was evident in the drawings he did for the Book of Egg Cookery in 1967, but which I in my innocence redrew, much to his annoyance.

Hand lettered, the type seems to vary in weight with ‘Chilli Willi’ perversely appearing lighter, I wonder if that was intentional? It was quite likely a product of not particularly caring if it was or wasn’t, just the way it came out of his fingers.

The line up of jolly chaps is a tip of the hat to Music Hall’s ounce of flash and wit, which influenced him in his BBC radio Light Programme Arthur Askey “Are y’ courtin’?” mode. He did enjoy that pounding the boards scene.

However, note that the music isn’t the originally intended soundtrack – it is a new song by Michel Parry’s daughter’s band ‘Bear Driver’ - and the footage has been re-edited by ‘Bear Driver’ band member Harry. Some of the locations are recognisable as Soho square and Crystal Palace Park, where the monsters are! Here are some stills:

Barney Bubbles film still: The Caterpillar sitting on a mushroom smoking a hookah.

Barney Bubbles film still

Barney Bubbles film still: Mad Hatter's Tea Party, Barney is on the right, looking towards the camera.

I’ll have many more words to add soon about this escapade, so as usual, check back for more…

Top: Illustration by Barney Bubbles (one of a series) Bottom: Magazine logo by Barney Bubbles.

Unveiled above are a couple crackin’ lightning designs by Barney Bubbles, the top one is from a series of illustrations, and the other a magazine logo, both dating from around the mid-1970s. ‘Tis true Barney was a real force of nature, so the adept use of lightning bolts is not unsurprising. More words to be added to this lighting post very soon ’bout me and my times with Barney, and ’bout nature and tempestuousness.

Yah. Barney didn’t like working with Let it Rock. And Let-it-Rock didn’t like me… Let it Rock was in next building but one to where I lived (in) on Long Acre, Willsdon Mansions, I did a couple of pictures for ‘em and they tried to steal my art, so I left for America and San Francisco. My art was stolen by some writer who had ‘em screwed to the wall in the corridor on Long Acre. I walked in the front door and got the George Harrison art unscrewed from the wall when I did some graphics for  ’em.  

But the painting of  Pete Towshend in the pin-ball alley on Charing Cross Road with Meha Baba I couldn’t unscrew. I had to dash when I heard footsteps and scarpa back down to the elevator shaft, which I knew in detail from the days when it was Odhams Press.

(I had recomended the typesetters there for use as a bizarre film set to a lady friend of my roomate Graham Norton, who was scouting situations for a movie company, also included was the Curious garret on Wardour Street, and the entrance my dad’s office at the Air Ministry Office).

Back to the tale, down I went an old brown back corridor, out a back door, climb up the fire scape iron ladder onto the roof,  across the new tar coating on the Welsh slate tiles, to the lead sheet intercourse, up over the brick parapet, my art held under my arm – and I get back into my place at Willsdon Mansions through the window above the potato merchants.

(Hear the song by Pamela Poland, “Remembering all the days we spent in [or is it 'at'?] Willsdon Manor.”)

This was a favorite pastime of us  loose gang of chaps and chicks in the A1GGz, who hung around West Kensington, London, in the 60′s. The art appears to be a graphic drawn entirely by Barney Bubbles but is, I think, based on various preceeding games of  ’consequences,’ played to while away stoned evenings of  ennui. I recognise the lower squiggling concoction as being derived from a particularly good result played, if memory serves me truly, with Barney, his ever faithful friend Lorry and myself one dark night during a power failure when we worked by candlelight.

With its ‘Right awareness of Past, Present and Future’ and ‘The universe falls into chaos and the stars hurtle into disorder’ it is obviously in tune with the passing Buddhist sensibilities of Barney during our underground mag Oz 12 days, when he’d been reading Herman Hesse (unfortunately recently outed as a sometime Nazi) and considered himself a bit of a Boddhisatva ready to take on the world.

In Barney’s ventures into the steamy world of godly reason, he’d previously incarnated, very briefly, as a  Jewish student of an uncle up North, who’d told him about the mystical Cabbala that, like some early chip circuit, held the graphic answer to the Theory of Everything.

Reading about the Russian Suprematist, El Lissitski, it is apparent that he had much in common with Barney apart from a premature, self induced demise, in that they were both excellent robbers of graphic symbolism, taking their ideas from wherever. Like the Russian expat Jewish carrousel carvers of imaginative horses for their round-abouts in New York of the early 20th century who took their skills at creating Temple adornment, which included fancy horses, to commercial advantage, Barney and El  were both adept at creating new symbols from old ideas.

El went on a tour of the Jewish walled setlements, the schtetlach*, villages of tzarist Russia, places  ‘beyond the pale,’ documenting the carpentry Temple structures with their eloquent wooden carvings, images that were often borrowed from other cultures, English heraldic crowns and lions  for instance, or the squares, circles and triangles of Greek geometry used to describe their deic mysteries 0 and lots of horses. El took the ideas of this vibrant art and turned it to his own use, using the cube of Jewish mass as his signature. As did Barney, who could take a greasy hamburger bun wrapper and turn it into a  graphic meal. All graphic property is theft in deed.

*Shtetlach (plural) Shtetle (singular) according the book ‘Joys of Yiddish” by Leo Rosten

Colin Fulcher snaps Margaret Minay. The top pic shows the invitation by postcard, the bottom pics show the results.

Margaret Minay writes: “I’m not sure what pictures you are going to use… The ones in Colin’s bedroom, or the ones in Syon Lodge. Or both?

Either way, you can be sure that on both occasions I was terrified.
I was very unsure of myself, and couldn’t really think why anybody would want to photograph me… But I was also very attracted to Colin, and as I said before, in awe of him.
When he was taking the photographs in his bedroom, I felt slightly more confident than when he took the pictures later in Syon Lodge, because we were alone and he was quiet and thoughtful, unlike when he was in college with his mates.
We listened to music, Leadbelly, I think it was, and, we spoke about a lot of the things I was interested in… namely jazz and politics… Because of my father’s influence I was brought up to be very left wing and we spoke about CND and my close friendship with another student, whom Colin had dubbed ‘Ban-the-bomb’ because of her involvement with the CND marches.
He also knew I was going to a concert to see Thelonius Monk and I think he was quite impressed… It was later that he sent me another postcard with a beautiful little painting of who he thought was Monk, but in fact it was Stevie Wonder. He’d just found a picture in a magazine and copied it without realising who it was… He cracked up when I told him.
The session in Syon Lodge was more difficult, because I was so self-conscious. He was cracking jokes all the time just to make me laugh. Nothing ever came of the photo-shoot, I don’t know why he thought anything would.

Now I just feel melancholy, thinking of that long time ago… “