The other day I caught a snippet of Joe Strummer talking on the radio (an archive show) about how the visual identity of The Clash was almost as important as the music. As mentioned in my previous blog on 40 years of punk rock attitude, the visual creativity of that period fired me and many others up.
It’s why I still love records, the covers are/were often affordable pieces of art. I love gig posters too and whenever I am in a foreign city I am scouring the walls for the posters giving clues to the emerging and popular cultures particular to that place, i.e. the stuff that most tourists are oblivious too. It’s always an adventure finding a small club in a foreign country, taking you somewhere off the beaten track, especially if at the end of it you find a bunch of enormous Norwegian death metalheads preparing for Ragnarok.
For these reasons I like to put some effort and care into producing the artwork related to Wild Hare Club events and especially important for the upcoming punky reggae party.
The punk explosion was of course pre the days of personal computers and Photoshop and much of