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.

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I’ve been recalling that graphic wiz Colin Fulcher (AKA Barney Bubbles) in 1959 (or it may have been before art school in 1958, possibly could be) worked with his Twickenham art school friends, Roy Burge, Bax (1st name ?), and Jim Bunker in the Kent hop yards picking the ingredients to flavor beer. This is/was a traditional summer job of gypsies and their caravans and London Eastenders who camp, or used to, in growers’ tents or modified old WW1 prisoner of war shacks.

If he didn’t have all the three Bs with him in the hop fields, I know for certain that he did pick hops and told me about it. I have a feeling he got the idea for the job from his dad, who may have been an Eastender hisself.

Fulcher said he didn’t get along with the other ‘traditional’ workers, they probably picked on him because he was not of their ilk and easily riled. The living conditions were awful, cold hard beds and lousy food. But he did like the fact it was a real working class hero sort of experience. They had “a regular knees-up” of an evening “round the camp fire” said Fulcher. The Eastender pearly kings and queens may have put on a show too
.
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After the Hop picking, Bunker, Burge and Fulcher went off to the Norfolk Broads and looned about. Next year they went to Cornwall and King Arthur’s whatsit? Tintagel Castle.

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His three friends, Burge, Bunker and Bax were the impetus for him to find a name beginning with B, which gave rise to the idea for ‘Barney’ but which he didn’t start to use use ’till 1966. The ‘Bubbles’ was even later, in ’67.

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Bax left school fairly early, Jim B went on to be art ed of Mayfair, perhaps he might contact us. Roy Burge (see Inspector Burge Investigates) went into video and seems to prefer being silent, most likely because Fulcher/Bubbles most definitely wasn’t the ‘sweet’ person that some have described him as in this weblog, and he treated Burge to the skilled malevolent slow burn of Fulcher Fury. Having experienced the gnarly acid of the Fulcher wrath myself I can see why Burge may prefer to forget about it. As for me I got over it easily enough with passing time, although the full Fulcher Fury did sting when it happened to me in in 1968.

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Barney’s relationship with beer was mixed, he hated the idea of business meetings in pubs, but designed the Strongbow Beer label, was into PubRock – but mostly disliked drinking the stuff, acid was his brew.

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In Marianne Faithfull’s excellent bio she talks of the misogyny of the ‘boys club’ rockers and ain’t that true, In one of Barneys letters to me (see the post on it somewhere back in the older posts) he mentions “getting over misogyny” or similar, and I think that although he may have been surrounded by beautiful women, they were a problem for him. Lady Wordsworth recently described how at school he was a “sharp mod,” but when she met him later in about ’65 at an art galley he appeared to be a “slow druggy.” He told me at the time he did that act just to annoy her. Yup Barney was a real piece of work all right.

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I just read that often the principal reaon for suicide is to get back at those who have crossed you and, boy, can I see that at work in Barney’s case, watch out Elvis and jake! (Not to mention a certain author who is haunted by the ghost of Barney, taunting him at night with snidely put-downs for printing such a bodge job rip-off of the Muleskinners ‘Lorry’ T-shirt design.

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Moron the ‘re-created’ T-shirt thing – I’m riled. Here’s what I have to say about it.

This attempted reproduction of the award winning and brilliant Muleskinners ‘Lorry’ T-shirt by some Johny-come-lately rip-off person was a flaccid dry-bob cock-up.

The type was the wrong, the logo of the circle and heart graphic was wrong, and wrong was the fact it was done at all.

More wrongnesses are that it was printed in white text on a black t-shirt whereas the Lorry t-shirt, as photographed by Barney, was black text on a white T-shirt, and when it appeared on the final printed poster it appeared as white and orange text on a blue t-shirt.

Out of respect for Barney’s memory and his original intentions, you might think that any ‘re-creation t-shirt’ would be done in either one of these two ‘original’ ways, with white and orange text on a blue t-shirt being the more sympathetic way.

So why did the ‘recreation t-shirt’ get done in white text on a black t-shirt? Why? I think the thing was based on a black and white picture of the muleskinners poster instead of a colour one, with cheapness of production and modern convention as futher unimaginative reasons.

Of course it may all have been a ruse to change the design so that any copyright claim by whoever owns the copyright can’t sue, but that just shows how pig-ignorant the perp is of copyright law. So there. Grrr.

Hi David,

Well, it’s Spring-time, so we thought you might like us to make a Spring-related contribution to your blog.

Quiver Gone In The Morning LP 1972 - Designed by Barney Bubbles

Tulips (spring-blooming perennials) grow from bulbs, and these bulbs can be seen towards the bottom of the design on the front and back of the LP. Tulips respond to the daily rhythm of light and dark, causing them to open and close, and so on the back of the LP Barney has shown the tulips closed (accompanied by a photo of a partially obscured sun, presumably a sunrise), and on the front of the LP has shown the tulips open (accompanied by the fully lit stained glass design). The tulips’ opening and closing  - or coming and going - with light and dark is a reference to the LP’s title ‘Gone In The Morning’. It doesn’t stop there though, the flowers and bulbs also represent arrows (the bulbs are the arrowheads and the flowers are the flights), a reference to the band’s name Quiver.

Barney’s work is like a visual cryptic crossword, but a crossword that doesn’t help by letting you know how many letters are in the answer!

The band’s bassist Bruce Thomas subsequently played with Elvis Costello and The Attractions, which regular readers of your blog will know Barney did a lot of work for too.

Best wishes,

RandM

.. And here ladies and gints, is the song itself, which seems to imply carnal love of a horse, nabbed from the Wikki entry for ‘Barney Google’, who was the eponymous character from the strip cartoon out of Chicago begun in 1911:

Barney Bubbles lights up Marilyn's smile in Elvis Costello's Clubland video

Barney Bubbles gives Squeeze a squeeze by magnetically distorting a TV's cathode ray tube

This list of videos below is from Wikipedia’s elegantly revised, and suprisingly acurate bio of Fulcher/Bubbles. (The live links below take you to YouTube videos.)

As a video director, Barney Bubbles directed several videos. These included The Specials’ “Ghost Town”, Squeeze’s “Is That Love” and “Tempted”, Elvis Costello’s “Clubland” and “New Lace Sleeves” and Fun Boy Three’s “The Lunatics Have Taken Over The Asylum”. Two promos for punk act Johnny Moped – “Incendiary Device” and “Darling Let’s Have Another Baby” – were never commercially released.

In the kitchen, an amused Barney, arm well braced in measured anticipation of the recoil, smiles with anticipation as he takes aim at the enchanting Allison.

Allison, inspiration for the song of that name, sitting across the kitchen table, brazenly  ignoring the gun pointed at her, enchants me with what I hopefully imagine is the gaze of a beautiful woman interested in my presence. Photographed by myself (David Wills) in 1967 ten years before the Elvis Costello songs, so if there is any connection, it is difficult to imagine what. But the gun and Allison episode did happen, and these are the photographs to shew so.

From an older post:
“It’s bein’ so cheerful what keeps me goin” – Saying of the character, Mona Lott, on the 1940’s BBC radio show ITMA, probably taken from the patter of the King of the Music Hall, comedian Dan Leno, aka Little Willie. Dan Leno was the great -grandfather of the muse for the Elvis Costello song ‘Allison.’ Allison, a beautiful and insightful woman, a temp (I think) who had worked at Conran with Barney, lived in Fleet in Hants. in 1978, and was a good friend. I think of Dan Leno as a key to the humour and wilfull wit of Barney Bubbles.

One of this blog’s oft-repeated real historic fun filled facts is that the influential Music Hall comedian Little Willie and Dan Leno were, as many have suggested, the same person, and never appeared on stage at the same time. A fact sworn to by Allison, his multi-grand child, and the inheritor of his wry wit.

My Aim is True

With Barney in London and me in San Francisco, we spoke on the phone in early 1977 maybe, arranging to meet. I mentioned how i thought that Elvis Costello (EC) had so many songs he could do a show using a TV-type roulette wheel to dial for songs on stage. EC tried doing this in San Franscisco in the seventies sometime, he had a wheel of songs and somebody would come up on stage and spin a song. Got a lousy review from Joel Selvin. I just read about it, didn’t go.

The picture shows the idea in practice, you spin Elvis and his guitar points to a song title, the item promotes the ‘My Aim Is True’ LP, which dates to 1977. This is a USA piece of memorabilia, not a UK one, and the chances are that it WAS NOT done by Barney, but was done by the marketing guys at Columbia Records in the USA. Quite whether this ties in with my spinner story god only knows, but the idea had to come from somewhere and maybe travelled thru a series of conversations. Yeah that seems right, “it was an idea they were trying out to see if it worked,” don’t recall where I heard or read that though.

I know there was a review of it in, as I say could be in SF Chron by Selvin I think. The reviewer said it mixed-up EC’s love-sick-sadsack songs with his wry-detached humor jibes and it was difficult for Costello to switch emotions unprepared. It must have appealed to the music-hall-Vaudeville performer in him to try it on.

I hereby mention with glee:

alphainventions.com

condron.us

blogsurfer.us

RandM writng: Here is the original cassette release for Elvis Costello’s ‘Get Happy’, designed by Barney Bubbles in 1980. the artwork is entirely different to the LP artwork which you showed in an earlier post.