Peter Saville Presentation notes

Slide 1

- Ever since his first work for the fledgeling Factory Records in the late 1970s, Peter Saville has been a

pivotal figure in graphic design and style culture. !

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Born in Manchester in 1955, Saville was brought up in the affluent suburb of Hale. Having been introduced to
graphic design with his friend Malcolm Garrett by Peter Hancock, their sixth form art teacher, Saville decided
to study graphics at Manchester Polytechnic, where he was soon joined by Garrett. At the time Saville was
obsessed by bands like Kraftwerk and Roxy Music, but Garrett encouraged him to discover the work of early
modern movement typographers such as Herbert Bayer and Jan Tschichold. He found their elegantly ordered
aesthetic more appealing than the anarchic style of punk graphics. !
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Slide 2+3!
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It was Britain's defining youth culture of the late 80s and early 90s, both in terms of sounds
and styles, and its effects are still felt today
Madchester is a British music scene that developed in the Manchester area, England, towards the late 1980s and
into the early 1990s. The music that emerged from the scene mixed alternative rock, psychedelic rock and electronic
dance music. Artists associated with the scene included the Happy Mondays, the Stone Roses, the Inspiral Carpets,
Northside, Paris Angels, 808 State, James, the Charlatans, and A Guy Called Gerald. At that time, the Haienda
nightclub was a major catalyst for the distinctive musical ethos in the city that was called the Second Summer of
Love. Although the scene spawned several widely acclaimed acts, it has also been described by critic Penny
Anderson of The Guardian as "the breeding ground for aggressively marketed mediocrity!
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HACIENDA

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When Tony Wilson decided to release a record of music by some of the bands that played at The Factory, he
asked Saville to design the sleeves and when he launched a record label Factory Records in 1979,

Saville became its art director. As a co-founder of the label, he was given an unusual, if not unprecedented
level of freedom to design whatever he wanted, just as the bands were with their music: free from the
constraints of budgets and deadlines which were routinely imposed on designers elsewhere. Saville treated
his artwork for Factory acts such as Joy Division and Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark (so-called because
it was the most self-indulgent name they could think of) as form of self-expression to articulate whatever
happened to obsess him at the time. He was allowed to do the same at DinDisc, the label which signed hired
him as art director after he moved to London in 1979. There he met and befriended the photographer Trevor
Key, and Brett Wickens, a young Canadian who joined Savilles studio as an assistant but later became his
business partner. Together they helped Saville push his work forward by experimenting with new techniques
of photography, production and typography. !
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Co-founder of Joy Division and New Order
Without Ian Curtis there would have been no Haienda [the club was built with Joy Division/New Order/Factory's
money], and without the Haienda there would have been no Madchester. It changed the face of Manchester,
whether you like it or not. The whole indie music merging with dance music, the fashion, everything, it all came from
the Haienda. - Peter Hook!

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Slide 4!
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This poster is one of Peter Saville's first items of commercial art/design for Factory Records. It
promotes one of the first Factory nights at the old Russell Club in Hulme, intended to showcase
some of the company's staple bands. The design is a very obvious visual pun based on the look
of BSI work-site hazard warning signs, and it firmly established one of Factory's multifarious
design remits. The conceptualisation of this item alone seems to embody quite a range of
ironies, the allusion to industrialism strikes a chord with the ethos of Manchester as the worlds
first industrial city. The design concept resonates with that embodied by the word 'Factory'
though there was a popular belief / assumption that the organisation took its name from Andy
Warhol's famous New York studio.
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This is the first piece of commercial art Saville designed for Factory. It was used to promote the first live bands that played at
the club on its opening night.!
The design Saville chose for this poster is rather unusual in the way it does not look like a traditional music advertisement, in
fact the use of a humorous BSI work-site hazard warning sign theme makes the poster look more like an advertisement for a
construction company or a factory. I find this is a clever design technique Saville has used as with the design making you think
of factory it helps you to connect the poster to the company, also the unusual appearance makes it more memorable.!
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Tschichold was the inspiration for Savilles first commercial project, the 1978 launch poster for The Factory, a
club night run by a local TV journalist Tony Wilson whom he had met at a Patti Smith gig. Having long
admired the found motorway sign on the cover of Kraftwerks Autobahn, the first album he bought for himself,
Saville based the Factory poster on a found object of his own an industrial warning sign he had stolen from
a door at college.!
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Slide 5+6+7!

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In fashion and art projects as well as in music, his work combines an unerring elegance with a remarkable
ability to identify images that epitomise the moment. !
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The images that Peter Saville created for Joy Division, New Order and, later, Suede and Pulp were so
compelling that they struck the same emotional resonance with the people who bought those albums and
singles as the music. Just as the musicians in those bands wrote and produced their songs as catalogues of
their thoughts and feelings, so Saville has conceived his images for fashion and art projects as well as
music as visual narratives of his life. !
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But many designers and art directors who studied in the eighties will cite him as a seminal figure, the third prong of
the Brody Garrett Saville triumvirate which dared to question all that was assumed about graphic design, and

turn much of it on its head. If Saville felt that neon was the way to go, then off he went. If he felt it was time to
appropriate De Chirico, then why not. If he felt that obscure sixties Dutch modernist typefaces were worthy of a comeback, come on down.!

Saville continued to design covers for the band after they reformed as New Order, taking images from historical
artwork out of context and adding modern typography withgeometric graphics.

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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. Theyre
seductive.!

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Slide 8:+9!
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This is one of Peter Savilles cover deigns for A Certain Ratios single All Night Party. Saville was given a photo of an
American comedian Lenny Bruce who was found dead from a drug overdose, to use on the cover. The other side of the cover
showed another photo given by the band, of the actor Anthony Perkins in Alfred Hitchcocks Psycho. I find the use of the
horrific photos works well for the cover because it connects with the twisted lyrics of the songs such as I saw a man get
stabbed.!
Saville designed the cover based on Andy Warhols 1960s Death and Disaster series, in which horrific images where used as
a statement on the desensitising of violence in the media. The bright pink and yellow colours Saville has used on the photos I
find help the cover to catch your eye, and also help to make the horrific photos appear more subtle as they make them
friendlier in appearance.!

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Slide 10:!
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Joy Division:!
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Joy Division were an English rock band formed in 1976 in Salford, Greater Manchester!

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Slide 11:!
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UnKnown Pleasures!
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April 1979!
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This was the first and only time that the band gave me something that theyd 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 didnt hear the album. The wave pattern was so appropriate. It was from CP
1919, the first pulsar, so its likely that the graph emanated from Jodrell Bank, which is local to Manchester and Joy Division.
And its both technical and sensual. Its tight, like Stephen Morris drumming, but its also fluid: lots of people think its a heart
beat. Having the title on the front just didnt seem necessary. I asked Rob about it and, between us, we felt it wasnt a cool
thing to do.

Slide 12:

The pulsar itself was first discovered in 1967 by Jocelyn Bell Burnell
The image of its radio pulses first appeared in an American Scientific in 1971

It turns out the diagram actually first appeared in a January 1971 issue of Scientific
American, and is credited to Jerry Ostriker (thanks to this page for that info, though Im not
convinced Ostriker was the one that published the image).
Slide 13:
The image then made a second cameo in Graphis Diagrams in 1974:

Slide 14:
And finally, it appeared in the CambridgeEncyclopediaof Astronomy in 1977, which is
where Joy Division drummer Stephen Morris saw the design:
- FINAL IMAGE IS INVERTED AND CROPPED
Final Slides:
Peter Saville as a legacy. Tattoo, Modern Youth cult
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