The Greatest Designers of our Age #11: Peter Saville
“I never had to answer to anyone.” Peter Saville.
Americans do it better. “It” means anything. Whatever you care to mention. I can spend the rest of my life writing about American designers, because anything America does, its size, its weight of talent, the sheer numbers – the mass of talent means that everything they do – eventually rises to the top. Cars, pop, industry, tech, sports… “God bless ‘Murica” as my American flatmate used to say, occasionally ironically. But he was right. When I think of designers, Saul Bass, George Louis, Massimo Vignelli, Paul Rand – all geniuses who made their mark in America.
It would be remiss of me though, not to write at least some posts about European designers. There are a few Brits who deserve a mention on our hallowed design ground here at Zenn, and the first on the list is Peter Saville.
Peter, it should be said, is no Paul Rand. Peter has not created icons, or mega brands that fundamentally shifted global thought. He has not created ad campaigns that revolutionized industries and brought millions of dollars in revenue through his client's doors. But he has created some beautifully stylish work, that set a very high standard for ‘Pop’, ‘Rock’, and several other genres of music and style that really have never been matched. His early work for Factory Records, Joy Division, and New Order in particular, defined an era of music and defined a cultural movement of geographical importance in the UK (Manchester) in a way that no other city could ever dream of replicating. Indeed, no other city in the world could have made him, or indeed become so indelibly intertwined with its own graphic design son. The fact that Manchester and its people embraced Saville’s work so lovingly and deeply is a testament to their surprisingly good taste, in a unique moment of aesthetic sophistication that was never again repeated.
Early life
Peter’s early life is of zero consequence to anyone apart from possibly Peter himself. He studied graphic design for 3 years at Manchester Polytechnic, and his youth can be described in 4 words: It’s Grim Up North.
Peter’s life in fact, only began in 1978, 23 years after he was born. He attended the gig of perennially overrated Punk misfit Patti Smith, and it was here that he met legendary provocateur and business incompetent Tony Wilson. You can read Saville’s manly tribute to Wilson, here and wiki here. It was from this moment in 1978 that Peter’s light began to shine so very brightly…
“Factory wasn’t a company, it was an autonomous opportunity that just occurred for us in Manchester, manifested by Tony. He had a job in broadcasting, so he didn’t need to make any money. It was what you’d call a folly, a collection of individuals doing exactly what they felt. No one was answerable to anyone.” Saville, 2001.
At Factory Records, Saville worked with numerous bands, his work with New Order yielding the most memorable results. Both bands were happy to contribute ideas to the covers, but ultimately, Saville called the shots. Joy Division were too busy working out how to play their instruments, and New Order were too busy arguing with each other to focus much on the record sleeves.
Saville’s work through the late 70s and 80s is widely regarded as his most influential and productive. (Although he did return from a depressingly unproductive stint in the US, where he began a renaissance of sorts in the 90s with Suede and Pulp, both bands at that point were slowly declining in popularity, creativity, and cultural importance.) Peter’s creative bloom during this period was due to a multitude of powerful forces – his fortunate timing of meetings with influential people and the period of political angst across the UK, which flowered some of the most innovative bands in decades.
During this tumultuous period in the UK, from the late '60s to the late eighties, the UK (and the “North” in particular) saw a gradual decline in coal production and a following collapse in the mining industry, which was prominently located in the north of England. This gradual decline produced much anger, rioting, unemployment and bitterness in the north, and out of this bleak atmosphere in the late 70s saw the beginnings of Punk rock in England. During this period, Factory Records signed the post-punk indie band Joy Division, fronted by epileptic-prone frontman Ian Curtis. Only productive for 4 short years, the band produced only 2 albums before frontman Curtis tragically topped himself just before the band's first US tour. Joy Division, though not commercially significant, remains an iconic band that continues to remain popular and influential an incredible 40 years after their demise.
On 15th June 1979, Unknown Pleasures was released. Says Saville of the record: “This was the first and only time that the band gave me something that they’d like for a cover. I went to see Rob Gretton, who managed them, and he gave me a folder of material, which contained the wave image from the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy. They gave me the title too but I didn’t hear the album. The wave pattern was so appropriate. It was from CP 1919, the first pulsar, so the graph likely emanated from Jodrell Bank, which is local to Manchester and Joy Division. And it’s both technical and sensual. It’s tight, like Stephen Morris’ drumming, but it’s also fluid: lots of people think it’s a heartbeat. Having the title on the front just didn’t seem necessary. I asked Rob about it and, between us, we felt it wasn’t a cool thing to do.
It was the post-punk moment and we were against overblown stardom. The band didn’t want to be pop stars.” The cover does indeed seem most appropriate, and dark black and white image, no color, only waves that look and feel like some kind of computer-generated heartbeat. Even though the band was several years away from their evolution into the electro-friendly iteration of New Order, this album design seems to be the perfect fit for Saville and Joy Division. You can read a hilarious article about various Joy Division obsessives here.
Low Life In 1980, New Order arose out of the ashes of Joy Division’s pyre. Over the years, they would go on to develop a loving, mutually respectful relationship, as nostalgically reminisced below by famed New Order bass player, Peter Hook:
“Peter’s an artist and a piss artist who never turns up on time and makes you months late. We’d have the record ready to go and it would be delayed, ’cause of the sleeve. And where was he? He was fuckin’ walking around Paris with some model looking at perfume bottle shapes, the twat.” Peter Hook, New Order. 1998
On 7th March 1983, Blue Monday was released. Factory lost money on every record they sold, such were the printing costs. (Anything from 10 – 50 pence on every record, depending on whose story you listen to.) How very British. Who cares? It was art and it looked fabulous. The original release sold more than 700,000 copies – and was later re-released and remixed twice – eventually totaling 1.16 million sales. Saville: “I’d been to see the band in the studio and Stephen gave me a floppy disk to take home. I thought it was a beautiful object. At the time, computers were in offices, not art studios. The floppy disc informs the design and the color coding was from my interest in aesthetics determined by machines. It reflected the hieroglyphic visual language of the machine world. For example, the numbers in your checkbook aren’t really for you, they’re for a machine to read. I don’t know if the story about the label losing money on the cost of the sleeve is true. I sent the cover straight to the printers because everyone was in a hurry. I doubt the printers even gave a quote for Factory to respond to. The band had handicapped themselves as no one was likely to play it on the radio because it was seven minutes long. Ironically it sold a lot, and with an expensive sleeve”.
It’s another visually stunning masterwork from Saville, minimal, bold, and yet this time with some color, thank God. Notice again the Saville style of omitting the name of the band from the front cover. At Factory, Saville was granted design favors that no other record label would give to any other designer in the country. It was primarily because of this unique relationship with the company that Saville, the artist, was given complete creative freedom to express his genius and he consistently managed to produce some of the most influential record sleeves of all time.
In 1983, Power, Lies and Corruption was released. Saville: “The title seemed Machiavellian. So I went to the National Gallery looking for a Renaissance portrait of a dark prince. In the end, it was too obvious and I gave up for the day and bought some postcards from the shop. I was with my girlfriend at the time, who saw me holding a postcard of the Fantin-Latour painting of flowers and said, ‘You are not thinking of that for the cover?’ It was a wonderful idea. Flowers suggested the means by which power, corruption and lies infiltrate our lives. They’re seductive. Tony Wilson had to phone the gallery director for permission to use the image. In the course of the conversation, he said, ‘Sir, whose painting is it?’ To which the answer was, ‘It belongs to the people of Britain.’ Tony’s response was, ‘I believe the people want it.’ And the director said, ‘If you put it like that, Mr Wilson, I’m sure we can make an exception in this case’”. There was a certain value to the cover, despite Saville’s lack of design input. It was one of the first album covers to use classical art on its cover and in its own way, still stands as a beautiful piece of art – but only because of its appropriation regardless of its context.
From Wikipedia: Peter Saville‘s design for the album had a color-based code to represent the band’s name and the title of the album, but they were not actually written on the original UK sleeve itself (they were present on some non-UK versions), although the catalog number “FACT 75” does appear on the top-right corner. The decoder for the code was featured prominently on the back cover of the album and can also be seen on the “Blue Monday” and “Confusion” singles and for Section 25‘s album From the Hip.
UK, HMV, 6.99 GBP. Good times. Love the typographical approach here – searingly original for the mid-eighties, and a design that would set the tone for UK minimalism in music for the next 20 years. Mark Farrow (among many successful successors) would go on to ape this minimal design style. Low Life, 1985. Even though the photography and typography seem a little simple and outdated now, some 35 years later, the package as a whole stands the test of time well.
Low Life, 1985: Saville: “The only sleeve with the band on it. I was at an impasse at the time – there was nothing conceptual I wanted to put forward – the unexpected thing to do was a photo of New Order, which for the band was beyond the pale: they didn’t even want to do a press shoot. They were photographed individually, so no one felt self-conscious, and we used a Polaroid film so they could see the pictures. As soon we got one they liked, we stopped. The tradition was that you would put the singer on the front, but I wanted the strongest image on the front and that was of Stephen, the drummer. Later, I found out that they never really believed those photos would end up on the cover. The next time I saw them, at a gig, they said, ‘You bastard.’ I don’t think they liked the sleeve. This was the nature of the relationship.”
I love the simplicity of these designs – having always been a fan of black and white and minimalism in graphic design. Space for the copy to breathe. Lots of white space. I believe at one point I saw this sleeve printed onto tracing paper, where the title was printed onto the translucent paper and the image on regular stock placed underneath it. Basically, it was a regular sleeve wrapped in tracing paper. No doubt another commercial success for Factory…
Saville: “I had heard of Peter Gabriel back in 1986 but I wasn’t a fan. I didn’t actively dislike him. He was just not somebody I knew that much about. It was my assistant and creative partner Brett Wickens who was terribly excited about Peter and I became aware that Brett and Gail Coulson, who was Peter’s manager at the time, had started collaborating on some visuals for a new Peter Gabriel album. At the time it was going to be called ‘Good’. Brett actually got as far as a proof which I saw and I thought “God, this is awful!” Then when Brett and Peter got together to discuss the proof, suddenly there was a crisis. They didn’t like it. They’d used up the time and spent lots of money and it wasn’t ‘good’.
Brett called me and said, “We have a problem.” The result was that Brett and I drove down to Bath one evening to see Peter. This was my first meeting with Peter and he was lovely. This is often what happens with musicians. You may not be a fan of theirs but you meet them and they’re kind of engaging. I said, “Look I don’t really like this. Can we just start again?” I guess I came across as fairly positive so Peter said, “Ok, let’s do it. Let’s start over.”
What happened next was very strange. It was actually a very important day in my life. At that time Peter lived at the Old Farm which was on that high ridge between the M4 and Bath. I have some very personal affiliations with Bath and back in ’85 it was a very, very sensitive place for me to go. It was like the scene of the crime. We left the Old Farm at about six in the evening and I think it must have been winter because it was dark and misty. During our conversation Peter had said that the album might be called ‘So’, instead of ‘Good’, and as we were leaving he gave Brett a cassette and said, “I think it’s finished.” So we drove off towards the M4 and the first thing we saw was a crash, which happened right in front of us. Someone went right off that curvy road and into a copse of trees. We stopped. The police came and eventually, we were able to leave. But it shakes you up when you see a car crash. I’m already feeling a bit edgy and then this happens. It was like “fucking hell!”.
We were driving towards the motorway and Brett put on this cassette and I said, “Oh God, please, I don’t want to listen to Peter Gabriel right now.” But Brett said, “Come on, it’s work,” and I acquiesced. The first track was ‘Red Rain’ and if you’re in a sensitive mood and you’ve just seen a car crash and you hear ‘Red Rain’ for the first time… it’s quite like, Woah! There was a real passion in Peter’s voice and it was very listenable. I didn’t mind it. As we approached the motorway ‘Sledgehammer’ came on. We stopped the fucking car ON THE SLIPROAD! You know when you’re hearing something important. It was like hearing ‘Blue Monday’ for the first time. Brett and I just looked at each other and then looked at the cassette player and almost simultaneously we said, “That’s a number one single!” It was fucking brilliant. By the time ‘Don’t Give Up’ came on I cried a little bit. I hadn’t gotten far away enough from Bath and that just completely did me in actually.
Doing the cover for a record that you know is going to be a hit is really exciting. We didn’t have much time left but we kinda knew what our duty was. Gail Coulson had briefed me privately that Peter had to come out of himself for this record. She knew that he had made an emotional album and that he’d written songs and made music that crossed over to other people who were not Peter Gabriel fans. We had to give a face to that. Of course, Peter’s natural inclination was towards shyness and not showing himself. But that wasn’t going to do the job because this was 1986, you know. We had about two weeks to deliver the cover.
So we started.
Trevor Key was going to help me take a photo of Peter. Trevor was my best friend and we shared the studio together. Twelve months earlier we had done a portrait session, a very unusual and exciting one, for New Order. It was for ‘Low Life’. There’s nothing worse than taking a picture of New Order. They can’t bear it. But to get a photo session out of them we used a new invention… Polaroid roll film. It came out in 1985 and as well as being instant, it had some very special qualities. It was black and white with weird tones and you could push it and do funny things with it. It was very graphic and very dynamic. The grain and the texture made everything look like a movie film. New Order were so totally and utterly disinterested in presenting their own identity but I wanted to do ‘Low Life’ with them on the cover because I was tired of concept covers that year. 1985 was called my year zero essential year. New Order didn’t want to do the session but because we used this magical Polaroid film, each of them was able to engage in the grooviness of their own picture and perform. When they saw themselves looking a bit groovy they thought, “Hey! This is fun. Let’s do another roll.”
And that’s exactly what happened to Peter that day. At first, Trevor sat Peter down to do a traditional tripod portrait and it looked lawful. To be honest, Peter came out looking like a middle-aged Wiltshire farmer. So I said, “Look, get the Polaroid out.” So Trevor reluctantly put Polaroid roll film in his 35mm. I reckon we had the cover of ‘So’ in two rolls. That’s the brilliance of this film. It looks great and the person having their picture taken SEES the result instantly. Peter’s a good performer. If you give him something to aim at he’ll deliver. He saw himself looking cool, looking groovy and he and Trevor got it within an hour. Personally, that picture is, well it was anyway, for many years, the public image of Peter Gabriel, the benchmark image that lasted Peter for nearly 10 years. It made him look contemporary, young but grown up, mature.
Originally I didn’t want to put a name on the cover. Brett had been working on this fantastic lettering for the title ‘So’. A quite beautiful, brilliant piece of typography. At the time my biggest artistic influence was the ’60s period. It was black and white, kinda reportage photography and Yves Klein. The Yves Klein bit comes in the blue box and the blue is Klein blue. But I didn’t want to put anything on the picture. I mean I hadn’t on ‘Low Life’. But in the end, the record company insisted on it. So we had the blue box which was kinda like a brand logo. I mean I wouldn’t do it now but 17 years ago the idea of a brand logo on a record cover, which I knew could repeat across everything to do with this album, was quite groovy. Basically, the picture and the lettering are the logotypes. Blue box, this iconic picture of Peter Gabriel, and this amazing lettering saying ‘So’. That was it. It was a benchmark picture but that album deserved it.”
This is one of my favorite Saville pieces. I say Saville, but Brett Wickens designed the type and Trevor Key took the photos. So err…not so sure what old Peter did here. I suspect “Art Direction” will be the appropriate technical term here. The Wicken’s type is just So beautiful, stylish and simple. The Trevor Key black and white, grainy image is just fantastic, capturing Peter at his most handsome and beguiling best, and the way the image has been cropped is sensational, his shoulders drifting off the sleeve with the harsh light from above, with Gabriel gazing past the camera as if distracted by something else. It’s just really a beautiful piece of work, created by 3 men at the top of their game. Stunning. It was Saville’s best-ever payment for a record sleeve design (20,000 GBP) and for once, I’d say he almost deserved it. The album was insanely successful, selling five million units in the US – 5 times platinum. Wow.
True Faith, 1987: Saville: “This was a first work from real life. In 1986, I happened to have a trauma in my personal life and it made me very attuned to the world around me. Suddenly, I had no filters. I was parking the car one night and a leaf drifted by the window and I thought, ‘That’s so beautiful.’ It was framed by the windscreen, which is probably why I saw it as an image. So we did a leaf. I went to Windsor Great Park with photographer Trevor Key, came back with about 50 leaves and shot two or three until we found the right one. It had to be the right shape and look like it was falling. There was no digital manipulation at this point. I still have the leaf although I keep thinking that one day it will fall apart”.
By 1987, New Order had thankfully moved on from the mirthless drudge of Joy Division's depressing output. They had embraced digital and dance, not to mention a huge global fanbase and the most elusive of all – commercial success. Armed with a more upbeat positive musical direction after the tragic dissolution of Curtis’ resolve, they also discovered the joy of contrasting colors, with this mind-altering masterpiece. You can find the visually unrelated bonkers video (The release of “True Faith” was accompanied by a surreal music video directed and choreographed by Philippe Decouflé and produced by Michael H. Shamberg.) here.
This sleeve represents a high tide mark for Saville, with the design so visually unique and perfect, one feels like he maybe should retire as soon as the designs hit the record stores. With the golden leaf gently floating through the air on the eye-shattering blue background, Saville created something so memorably unique that the design looks as fresh and modern today as it did in ’87. (This is of course, in large part again thanks to the mastery of Trevor Key’s photographic genius.) It was here that Saville’s work finally transcended beyond pop and climbed the visual ladder up to high art, the place where he always wished to be. Stylish, intellectual and unmistakable Saville.
Completely original and unlike anything that had come before and after (in the record industry, at least) Saville cemented his reputation here as a design visionary who stood alone without peers, but instead with exceptionally good taste.
The substance album cover really represents the beautiful synergy Wickens and Saville enjoyed through their long-standing creative relationship.
Brett Wickens, June 2015: “Once a week I would take a trip from my hometown in Canada to the city of Toronto. there was a great import record store there called the Record Peddler. Every Tuesday they would get the new albums in and I would browse through them. some of the best designers of the day were working for bands, like Malcolm Garrett and Neville Brody. around 1979 though, a new style of album cover came along which attracted me. it was minimal, resonant—very anti-establishment to what was going on at the time. I soon saw a pattern—all of them were designed by Peter Saville, for my favorite bands of the time such as Joy Division, Durutti column, and orchestral manoeuvers in the dark. I knew I had to meet him. In the summer of 1981 I visited him in London (he was gracious enough to meet with me), and I showed him what little work I had from my time at the Ontario College of Art. he hired me on as an intern. 5 years later I was his partner. we worked together in London for 12 years. Peter once told me: ‘The solution to a problem might be as simple as choosing the right typeface, putting it in the right place, at the right size, and in the right color. Nothing more, nothing less.’”
The cover carried on Saville’s red-hot creative run through the late eighties and beyond. The cement grey background, continuing on with the uppercase type from the early Joy Division sleeves, keeps the antiquated theme of retrospect and classicism running from previous designs. The addition of Crouwels font adds a new dimension to the theme, at once becoming ultra-modern with the mixing of old and new school typography. Setting Crouwel’s font in the lime green color is the final masterstroke – if it had been in black or white the impact of the design would have been completely deflated – the green color brings magic and modernity to the design, cementing it visually as unique and masterfully memorable.
The title takes the main stage, as it should be, with the smaller Garamond as the supporting actor. Perfectly balanced, and beautifully designed, the typography was backed up with the gorgeous photography by Trevor Key, as always. (I have no idea what the cone shape object is on the cover. If anyone can tell me, please do.) Saville and Wickens, aware of it or not, were creating timeless work that stood without comparison, bringing incredibly unique components together in fascinating juxtapositions that other designers couldn’t dream of, nevermind emulate. This was the magic of their symbiotic and synergistic relationship – pulling together esoteric, seemingly unrelated ideas and elements together, and somehow making them work. The Substance album work is a perfect example of their incredible talents, pulling Crouwel’s modern font apart, making it even more abstract than it already was, pairing it with a 200-year-old font, and creating an ultra-modern design that will forever appear as state of the art. Imagine how difficult that is. The Garamond font has one foot steeped in classical typography, whilst the other wouldn’t be out of place in Kurick’s 2001 Space Odyssey. It’s a mind-boggling-balancing act, and in fact in design terms, is quite outrageous. In anyone else’s hands, the design would have been a catastrophe. In Wickens and Saville’s thought, we are sent into space on a timeless journey of discovery.
You can find an interesting reference article here on the fonts used by Saville and Wickens for the cover art.
Saville: I’d moved on from being interested in 80s consumer products and had begun going to Pimlico Road to look at antique shops. Which was where I saw the cherub statue we used on Technique. It was a garden ornament and we rented it for the shoot. It’s a very bacchanalian image, which fitted the moment just before the last financial crash and the new drug-fuelled hedonism involved in the music scene. It’s also my first ironic work: all the previous sleeves were in some way idealistic and utopian. I had the idea that art and design could make the world a better place. Even bus stops could be better. In some ways, it’s also quite neo-Warhol. And before he’d even seen the sleeve Rob Gretton suggested ‘Peter Saville’s New Order’ as the title of the album. As in ‘Andy Warhol’s Velvet Underground’. That went down like a lead balloon with the band.”
I can’t imagine why, can you? I’m sure I’d be over the moon if my band was asked to devote an album to the designer who did our sleeves.
Saville continued his hot streak with this seminal work, although much debt of gratitude was due (but rarely given) to his long-time collaborator, Trevor Key. Note in the quote above, no mention of the horrifically underrated Mr Key. (Of which information is criminally hard to find.)
The poster itself is of course dominated by the magnificent Key photograph. Such is the creativity and visual impact of the image, on the album it engulfs the whole sleeve and leaves space for nothing else. The colors are just outrageous and the cherub is so mesmerizing, translucent, and enchanting. Mystical and hypnotic. The poster, amazingly, manages to empower the visual even more – no small feat – but a tribute to Saville’s mastery of typography and delicate skills in the art of design. This typographic treatment was copied by numerous design agencies over the next decade, including the unbelievably brilliant Designers Republic and Farrow – not that any of them would admit it. The classical Saville treatment with the serif font at the top, jammed against the Helvetica Black italic in the magenta color – is so ultra-modern and cool that the combination tore the ass of everything that came before it – and remains one of the most beautiful typographical arrangements to come out of the eighties – if not the best.
This design represents an intellectual and creative high watermark for Saville. Though he continued to create several exceptional works of design after this piece, he never reached these creative highs again.
Saville, bizarrely, joined Pentagram in late 1990. I say strangely because it seems obvious (albeit in hindsight) that Peter was designed never to work in a large, company framework, going to work every day to lick the arses of corporate clients. Suffice to say, it didn’t work out too well.
Saville: “The problem at Pentagram was that they didn’t actually understand me. I particularly had a problem at Pentagram with the older generation. The younger partners were simply filled with petty envy, which I didn’t care for. I experienced the same problem after leaving Pentagram, for the next ten years, in fact, certain clients and marketing directors of corporations could not understand me. They don’t understand anything about me and they don’t attempt to learn. I appreciate that, in them not understanding me I have to take some responsibility to find the language to make myself understood. But I’ll only take half the responsibility. The other half of the responsibility lies with the partner or client to try to understand the person they are working with.
In the years after Pentagram, I got particularly frustrated with myself, by my inability to find the language to bridge my instinctive sense of vision about things with business. That frustrated me. In recent years I have come to appreciate advertising agencies. They have managed to find the language, to translate what you see and feel, and to translate that into terms that somebody else can appreciate and understand.
But the senior partners at Pentagram didn’t understand where I was coming from.
They didn’t like the work I was doing. They told me it wasn’t design.
They didn’t see the point in it, nor could they see any value in me nurturing fashion clients or luxury brands. Even Alan Fletcher told me while I was at Pentagram that the design for New Order’s Republic album was not graphic design. The problem was compounded, at the time, by the fact that I didn’t find a way to help them to get it. I didn’t do myself any favors either going in late and not wanting to be a part of the team and so forth.
And it seems Pentagram now values the work I did there, which in retrospect I find upsetting and ironic. David Hillman, in particular, takes a distinctly hypocritical position towards me. I was put forward to be a Royal Designer for Industry this year, and David had it stopped. He lodged a personal objection, which didn’t surprise me. What surprised me was when I then heard that Pentagram now includes my work in presentations. The value of those fashion projects with Nick Knight for Jil Sander and Yohji Yamamoto and Nick’s book was questioned when I was there. The work was resented because it wasn’t profitable. They doubted the value of it then, but it would seem they don’t now.”
Regret, 1993: Saville: “I was broke after the recession and it made me look more critically at the world. I’d picked up a copy of Richard Prince’s Spiritual America at the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis. It made me appreciate how strange contemporary America really was. Later I spent a month in Los Angeles – and there was something about the experience that was like the end of the world. There’s nowhere further to drift, it’s the terminal beach where the Western world washes up. It was the first time I did a New Order cover listening to the record – I wrote down everything that came into my mind. I wrote ‘cowboys’ for Regret because of the way it rolled. And cowboys referenced Richard Prince and the Marlboro Man on Sunset Boulevard. Juxtaposed imagery blending into something molten, the way you might see the world if you were hallucinating”.
The power of Saville’s work always resided in his ability to wrestle with interesting visual problems and produce highly original graphic solutions – whether it was the graphic brutality of the Blue Monday computer disk or the dark, linear beauty of Unknown Pleasures. Potent, memorable images that were stunning in their graphic originality, immediately recognizable but somehow strangely mystical – beautifully balanced with style, minimal typography, and subtle cunning undertones.
Perhaps it was the skin-searing sun in Los Angeles that had bleached his darker Mancunian edge, or simply a flaccid, burned-out middle-aged malaise that had engulfed him – one thing we can be sure of is that this was Saville at his least innovative – sadly financially and creatively bankrupt.
In 1997 there were new kids on the design block, many of whom grew up with Saville covers on their bedroom walls. By this time though, they had stolen the majority of Saville’s work and style and run with them. Towards the end of the decade, a new revolution in electronic music design bloomed and a golden age of creativity bloomed in London, led by Farrow Design, whose masterworks for artists like The Pet Shop Boys and Cream borrowed heavily from Saville’s foundations and took the production of music design to new levels of creativity. (And profitability). You can read more about this wonderful golden era of club design with the fantastically comprehensive book by Face37, simply entitled “Clubbing.”
“If you want to get a bit of insight into what I do, there is one piece of press worth reading. Andrew O’Hagan wrote a piece for the London Review of Books, titled “At the Design Museum“. I have never met him, nor spoken to him, yet after reading his piece I was astonished. As I read it, I thought, finally someone actually fucking gets it. He quotes me on my influences, on film noir meeting yellow Daytona (a reference to The Long Goodbye). O’Hagan actually understands what I do.”
Having trawled Peter’s entire design back catalog, it seems as though the experience at Pentagram really knocked the stuffing out of him. I won’t dwell on his most recent catastrophes – the unbearably tragic piece of shit that is the Burberry re-design (with some great comments on the ‘gram post and the tragi-comedy that was the Calvin Kleinclusterfuck. You can try your design knowledge with this fascinating pop quiz here. I have the distinct feeling that Peter in his later years at least, was dancing with his own shadow, as were many of his wannabe clients.
From 1995 onwards, the nuggets of gold we can find in Peter’s back catalog are few and far between. Not that we are too bothered. We can still wrap ourselves in the knowledge that we have witnessed not only some of the finest, most stylish pieces of design – masquerading quite beautifully art – that we have ever seen, during Peter’s most productive and fruitful years.
You can find the most incredible collection of Saville’s design work here. And if you’re a glutton for punishment, a hideously self-congratulatory interview here. You can also find a much more interesting interview here.
I think it appropriate to end with a great quote, from the man himself, courtesy of www.designindaba.com/ “I am motivated by pride. I want to do the right thing, I want to do something great and I want to be associated with doing something great. For me doing something great is doing the right thing – in all ways of understanding the right thing. Timely right, prestigiously right, conceptually right, intellectually right, and culturally right. More often than not I can see the right thing. These days, at 48 years of age, if an 18-year-old band is brought to me by some record company, I do not know what the right thing is. I have no idea.
I had to do an interview with a magazine the other day about my show opening in Manchester. They asked what my favorite album covers were. I don’t have any favorite album covers. Sure, I have some from when I was a teenager but I am not interested in album covers at the age of 48. I am not interested in them at all. And I don’t know whether the album cover for The Darkness is right, or if The Darkness is any good or not – I don’t really care. (Incidentally, The Darkness isn’t any good.)
When it comes to questions about what to do with Jaguar, what to do with Fortnum & Mason, what to do with Mandarina Duck or the Aramis division of Estee Lauder, I have a pretty good idea what a company should be doing. Very rarely, however, do I meet anybody in the corporate world who senses that I might know, that I might be able to help them. And I don’t court it. I don’t go through the act of nurturing that kind of business.
In London in particular, it is a very high-energy, high-profile competitive marketplace for design, brand positioning and marketing. There are a bunch of guys out there with agency backgrounds who really do that stuff, the PowerPoint presentations and all that. It is kind of grubby and it doesn’t interest me. It doesn’t motivate me. I am motivated by the situation when someone sits down and discusses it with me. I don’t need to go off and research for six weeks.
As I have got the hang of things over the last ten years, and also got to the right age to be able to do it, because that’s crucial, being of equal age or older than the CEOs, the balance is right. I remember John McConnell saying to me at Pentagram, “Peter, one of the problems is that you don’t have any grey hair.”
Well, he’s got grey hair now. I guess they just didn’t get it. We did though Peter, we did.
