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What is it about fine art and rock music? Many rock stars studied at art college. Jarvis Cocker, Glen Matlock (of the Sex Pistols) and Sade were students at Central St Martin’s. Bob Handy (Franz Ferdinand) and Fran Healy (Travis) were at Glasgow, whilst two guitar giants, Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton both studied at Wimbledon College of Art.
Legendary performers like John Lennon, Keith Richards, Bryan Ferry (Roxy Music) Ian Dury (Ian Dury and the Blockheads), Freddie Mercury and Ray Davies (The Kinks) were also art students.
Perhaps Pete Townsend, of the Who, did most to incorporate his art background into his performances. For example, he appropriated Pop Art images for the band’s clothing. He must also have been aware of the interest in destruction in art during the early 1960’s. Gustav Metzger had developed the theory and practise of auto-destructive art and would paint nylon sheets with acid, so they would ultimately disintegrate. He also pioneered the light show, projecting light through liquid crystals so they would change structure and form with changes in temperature. Light shows became essential features of many concerts at this time. A number of artistic events or “happenings” entailed smashing up pianos and it is surely from these that Townsend derived his frenzied finale to Who concerts, where he would smash up his guitar, speakers and anything else within reach.
The link between Pop Art and Pop Music is perhaps best personified by Peter Blake. As well as depicting rock stars such as Elvis, Bo Diddley and Eric Clapton, he has designed album sleeves, most famously for the Beatles’ “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”. This has been a continuing interest with the sleeves for Paul Weller’s “Stanley Road”, and work for Oasis, the Who, and for the Band-Aid single “Do They Know it’s Christmas?”
Peter Blake was Ian Dury’s tutor at the Royal College of Art and designed the cover of his tribute album “Brand New Boots and Panties”. Dury’s own tribute to Blake is his song “Peter the Painter”, one verse of which is:
“It’s not a fake it’s a Peter Blake
It’s navy blue, it’s crimson lake
It takes the cake and no mistake,
For goodness sake take a look at those Blakes”
SPOT THE ARTIST
Can you identify the artist from this far from complimentary description by the artist Maria Marevna? (Answer below)
“He had a short neck, high shoulders and he stooped. His face was broad and jowly….His thatch of coarse, dark hair was cropped like a Russian peasant’s, but a fringe came down to his eyebrows and hid his large, protruding ears and low forehead. He had expressive dark eyes, sunken and tilted upward; the lids were red and swollen. His nose, narrow at the bridge, widened into a thick wedge. He smacked his thick lips when he talked, and flecks of white foam gathered at the corners of his wide mouth……His smile exposed his unhealthy, dull, dead looking teeth, greenish at the gums”
As if this appearance was not daunting enough, he was pathologically afraid of washing, wore shabby, filthy clothes and was spattered with paint from head to toe.
When he consulted an ear specialist about chronic earache, the doctor discovered a nest of bedbugs in the canal rather than the expected abscess.
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