Barney Bubbles – Turned On, Tuned In, Dropped Out
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.)
Rebecca and Mike is discussing. 
Rebecca and Mike 6:23 pm on January 2, 2012 Permalink |
The Radio 4 documentary by Mark Hodkinson is currently available online. Go here http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b018wh7h
Rebecca and Mike 6:09 pm on January 9, 2012 Permalink |
Review in The Guardian, 8th Jan 2012:
“Back to Radio 4, where us grey-hairs should be, for a revealing documentary on Barney Bubbles, the legendary album sleeve artist. Presenter/producer Mark Hodkinson was excellent, sensitively interviewing Bubbles’s sister Gill (sic) and son, asking the hard questions – “How did you feel immediately afterwards?”: to Gill (sic), on finding her brother dying – as well as keeping in telling detail. (“He looked like he came out of the ground,” said Brian Griffin, a friend.) And I liked the blasts of music from Elvis Costello, Depeche Mode, Nick Lowe, without the tedious “and that was…” back announcements. Lovely, careful, touching stuff.”
Review in The Telegraph 3rd Jan 2012
In Search of Barney Bubbles (Radio 4, yesterday) was sad and strange. Mark Hodkinson was tracking down a man who designed brilliant sleeves for record albums in the 1960s and 1970s. Barney Bubbles was the pseudonym of Colin Fulcher, clever, inventive, sensitive, influential, born in London in 1942. He did covers for albums by Ian Dury, Elvis Costello, Billy Bragg, Hawkwind, was the in-house designer for Stiff Records. He also did drugs, was a manic depressive, self-harmed, committed suicide in 1983. You could tell how it was all going to end and, to be honest, I did start thinking “oh, I don’t want to hear any more…” but then Hodkinson did that essential radio magic trick. He turned his dreams and memories into something we could share so that, just for a second, you could feel what it was like to be him, a teenager on a Lancashire housing estate, looking up at the night sky, listening to Hawkwind, being taken to unexpected places of the heart and mind’s eye. A second or two is all it takes when the radio is this good.