Welcome to a digitally inflatable copy of Oz 12. Click on an image once, and then when it has opened in a new screen click on it again and it’ll go supersize XXXL as never seen before on the world-wide-web.
Been reading the brilliant ‘Life’ by Keith Richards. Seems as how Keith and Co, The Stones, lived over in Edith Grove, Fulham, in 1962. Well, my flat-mate Chris Higson went to a party there, “Scored.” whatever that meant. They lived just down the road from us. We lived on Peterborough Road in Parsons Green where Higson, Mick Jackson, both illustrators, John Steele (for a while), and I, graphics, lived with cardboard walls and a mould problem. Plus with Nook and Jim Bunker at one time for a bit, when she was pregnant with Zoe and wanted by the cops as a runaway from Staines. I lived there in 1961/2, real taters, coldest fucking winter since ever. Like Keith, we sold beer-bottle empties we found littering the floor and crevices of the ugly apartment the morning after the night ‘afore. Sold ‘em back to the off-licence, got enough, about 3s/6d (3-shillings and sixpence) for a bacon sandwich and a cuppa in the morning at the Station Caff.
(There’s a photo in the Box of Tricks by me of Higson and a Tiger scull.)
I recently played a compendium of Vaudeville tunes and heard for the first time a song with a catchy hook called, “Barney Google with those great big googly eyes” which Barney Bubbles may have been familiar with, he certainly had the googly eyes to match. (Possibly this song was an antecedent of the search engine Google’s name too.) He never mentioned that song – but I know he was a fan of ‘Barney Rubble’ from the Flintstones (he would have been ‘Flintstoned’ no doubt) and their phrase “Yabbadabadoo !” which he frequently used.
.. 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.
This pic was drawn by Barney Bubbles in 1968. It is based on the results of the parlour game ‘consequences,’ where a folded piece of paper is passed around and the guests add to the unseen drawing above, using over-the-fold clues of where to begin provided by the previous artist.
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
In Peter Coyote’s oh so too true memoir of the sixties he shews the driving force behind Colin Fulcher’s switch to ‘Barney Bubbles.’ By 1967 Colin had been reading Naked Lunch, On The Road, Howl, was keeping up with the Doors, and Floyd, read up on events in Frisco too. We were lectured by the visiting merchant Seaman, Hippie Jim, who told of the Dead and drugs and the Diggers in the Panhandle.
Somewhere amongst all the Marxist jargon around at the time, the simplicity of the Diggers working ethic stood out. It was they who stole food from Cala (or was it another predecesor of what is now Whole Foods?) on Haight and the Safeway out in the Avenues, euphemistically called ‘dumster diving.’ No sirree. The fabled 70′s Haight Ashbury venue, Shady Grove’s character (and collector of my work), The Beast, ran with the lads who aquired the goods to feed the people, aquired fair an’ square under cover of jostling crowds, push carts, sou’westers and the like. They got food and gave it to poor. Robin Hood in real time.
It was Emmett Grogan who amassed the Diggers in the Haight, to quote Peter Coyote in ‘Sleeping Where i Fall:’ “Emmett’s personal relationship to these formulations of “anonymous” and “free” was always ambiguous and complex. His notion of anonymity was to give his name away and have others use it as their own nom de plume. So many people claimed it for so many purposes that eventually some reporters would assert that there was no Emmett Grogan and that the name was a fiction created by the Diggers to confound the straight world. While Emmett’s largesse was one way of demonstrating lack of attachment to his name, it also made the name ubiquitous, and incidentally made Emmett himself famous among cognoscenti.”
Cheap and Cheerful
The reason I quote this is the obvious contemporary influence on what was the working relationship of Barney and myself in the A1 GoodGuyz, The oft discussed reasons for Fulcher’s dalliance with Anonymity and Free that led to Bubbles and Sqeeek’s working modus, can be found most immediately in the San Francisco Golden Gate Park Panhandle’s Digger history. Coming out of the meld of Morris and Marx with a dash of Manic the Digger’s were cool.
One also can see here,for instance, the background to Warhol having a sub for his speeches, or in another timezone to explain my use of the Barney Bubbles credit when working on Black Dwarf.
***
I recently accessed a neuron arrangement that told of why I was giving credit to Barney B on Tariq Ali’s Black Dwarf in 1967/8, for work I that had done. When I did this, I amused myself thinking how in the future this would cause attribution concerns for graphic historians. And there was that ‘switched at birth,’ Mark Twainian ‘Pudd’nhead Wilson’ switcheroo going on that Barney espoused. Also the name change was partly because I thought he should have done the work anyway – because that was our arrangement when we started, we’d do alternate issues. I don’t think Barney really wanted to work at Black Dwarf. Yeah, he wouldn’t work in Tariq’s ‘studio’ because there wasn’t one - I had to work on the floor. I’d take his work in with me and present it at the last minute so Tariq couldn’t mess with it.
This photograph, that may have been a time delay release exposure taken by Colin Fulcher (later known as Barney B) of himself and a friend who I dimly rem as being a co-worker, in 1964(?). He showed the photograph to me when we moved into Leigh Court in West Ken, London. In explaining it to me he said he was holding the unretouched humanity of a friend in one hand and the lie of the studio model in the other. I think the pinup is from the 1963 Pirelli calender by Bob Gill (facts anybody?) Fulcher said he was trying to show an idea visually; he explained it to me at length, saying he was not happy with the setup or the lighting, but liked the idea, of contrasting the unreal mask and his friend’s ‘real’ face. Maybe someone else took it, either way, he was unhappy with it. The lighting’s too flat. He thought I could do better.
But anyway, apart from the fact of what he intended to be doing visually, Fulcher felt that doing this as just an exercise was a waste, that we (everything was ‘we’) needed to be more realer, to do stuff in fact. This was to be his last piece as a ‘student’ from now on he wanted to do real. I said “OK. So let’s…” That led to us working on making that idea solid, we’d make an actual ‘real’ poster to create an Image, with Burge as the star. We’d create the Image before the band.
This set of objects, nicely arranged here by clever artists in a faux Paolozzi/Barney head and shoulders set-up, remeniscent of Oz 12, was given to me by Barney in 1971, when I was preparing to travel to the West country, and the Scilly Isles, dispersing my collectables for something lighter. They were in exchange for the two type books I gave him, one with the Chicago signwriter’s ‘Chinese’ type face that he used on Poppa MMM Mao Mao, the other for the decorative borders he used on another record cover (I say, RandM, what was name?). Later when preparing to leave for Mill Valley CA in 1972/3 or maybe later on a visit, I also gave Barney the wallpaper pattern catalogs he used for the famous Ian Dury covers in answer to a specific request. This may have been in 1974. “(H)’ey, you still got those Sanderson wallpaper catalogues your Auntie Whatsit gave you? I could use ‘em, got an idea to use ‘em .”
Addendum: I now think these were just some of the many cool things in the Big Box I got offa Barney in May 1983. One piece was his membership card to the club, at the Station Hotel, the club we frequented, and where Keith Richards opens the first paragraph in his really insightful bio.
The record at top is a pirate recording of the Rolling Stones from, I think, around 1962, although I expect the actual disc was made later, the Beatles cards he collected in about 1967.
Hello. The name of the record you ask about in your post was ‘Three Parts To My Soul’ by the band ‘Dr Z’. The date ties in well with your recollections; ‘Three Parts To My Soul’ was released towards the end of 1971.
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rebecca and mike are discussing. 
For new readers, the famed graphic artist Colin Fulcher used the name Barney Bubbles.
The Specials video that he directed is very similar in construction to what Fulcher had in mind for the First Music Video Ever that we made in 1963 for a BBC competition to find an idea of what to do while music played on TV. Abstract repeated pattern, an action, fin. Made with the Modrock band, ‘them’ Muleskinners, the editing of the ‘video’ by Derek Wallbank was not to Fulcher’s liking, and I never saw it.
Anyway, the Band broke up before the ‘video’ was finished. (it was on 8mm because he didn’t have a video camera.) Fulcher designed a really cool poster that I thought was to go with the ‘video.’ Although the poster was made earlier, it was associated in some way with the ‘video,’ and maybe featured in it, but probably not, since it would not have reproduced well in black and white. The red and blue were of equal intesity and tone, with blue condensed type on a red field – clash city in color but monotone grey in B&W. But as far as I know it has not yet (2011) been recovered from the trashcan of history. Come on lads, where is it?
A note on ‘them’ Muleskinners. As has been pointed out elsewhere ‘them’ wasn’t part of their name. The ‘them’ came from me. When I saw the poster and asked him about it he reminded me that I’d said earlier while slapping my metaphorical buckskins, “They ain’t no goddam The Muleskinners, they be Them Muleskinners” in a rousing Westcountry American accent and that he credited it as my idea to use it on the poster. This led on to a discussion of layers of meaning in design.