TRACES

If you don't know the name, you almost certainly know the work. Born Colin Fulcher in 1942, Barney Bubbles became one of the defining graphic designers of British music through the 1970s and into the early 80s, the mind behind Hawkwind's In Search of Space, Elvis Costello's Armed Forces, Ian Dury's New Boots and Panties!!, and sleeves for The Damned, Nick Lowe, Billy Bragg and Depeche Mode, among many others.

He treated the record sleeve as more than packaging. Folding it, die-cutting it, reshaping it entirely, pulling from constructivism, surrealism and pop culture in equal measure, at a time almost nobody else was thinking about album art that way. And in a move that says everything about who he was, he almost never put his name on any of it. Much of the design world didn't know who was actually behind these covers until years after his death.

Barney Bubbles died on 14th November 1983, at just 41 years old. His influence on graphic design, and on how we still think about album art today, runs deeper than most people realise, and more than forty years on, he remains one of the most quietly important figures British music has ever had.

This wasn't a cold approach or a licensing deal off the back of an email. Honestly, it's one of those funny life things. They say it's not what you know, it's who you know, and we happen to know Paul Gorman through one of Ryan's neighbours, of all things.

Gorman is the writer and curator widely regarded as the world's leading authority on Barney Bubbles' life and work. He wrote Reasons to Be Cheerful: The Life and Work of Barney Bubbles, the first and definitive biography of Bubbles, named Mojo's Book of the Year, and followed it with The Wild World of Barney Bubbles in 2022. He's curated multiple exhibitions of Bubbles' work in London and France, and has spent longer than almost anyone studying and preserving this archive.

What started as a neighbourly connection has become a real friendship. Paul and his partner are close friends of Ryan's now, and we love them both dearly. Their generosity in letting us bring this artwork into the world means more to us than we can really put into words.

This is the first time in decades that a new album cover has used original, previously unseen art by Barney Bubbles. If you believe in that sort of thing, this felt like one of those moments where the universe just lines something up for you. We're endlessly grateful, to Paul and his partner, and to whatever it is that put us in the same postcode as the right people at the right time.