Strawberryluna,Tara McPherson
Art Beat
Until recently, the gig poster has been seen as the poor relation of the album sleeve. But now its art is finally being recognised for its style and daring
My first ever gig was not an occasion I was likely to forget in a hurry. Firstly, it involved my favourite band, The Clash, playing at Cardiff’s Top Rank as part of their 1978 On Parole tour. I got to meet the band during their soundcheck, and halfway through the show I was headbutted by a deranged skinhead whose pint I’d haplessly spilled. Bruised but not beaten, I returned home clutching the tour poster I’d ripped from the wall outside.
The poster is a classic of its kind. The tour dates announce themselves with stark utilitarian simplicity. The graphic punch is provided by a shot of The Clash adopting defiant rebel poses. All four members are caught in a rifle sight’s crosshairs, which are trained on an eye-catching diagonal strip of shocking red. Instantly arresting, completely unforgettable, pure rock’n’roll.
This Clash poster would be the first of many I’d tear from walls through the years. Just as album sleeves helped to create a potent visual connection to the music I loved, so these posters kept alive a similarly emotive link to some of the best nights out of my life.
Thriving sub-culture
Recently there has been an extraordinary creative resurgence in poster art. Even as its last rites were being read in the digital age, a thriving sub-culture was gaining momentum, yielding thousands of eye-popping posters by some of the classiest and edgiest designers around. Their designs embrace a seemingly endless range of styles and typographies, and are tantamount to a drastic redefining of rock music’s visual vocabulary.
Undeniably, the gig poster has come a long, long way from its humble origins. Back in the mid-1950s, rock’n’roll might have been changing the world but there was no revolution in the design of concert posters, which stuck rigidly to the form of traditional flyers for boxing matches – the name and photo of the performer in large letters along with the date and place of the show.
Hallucinatory images
It wasn’t until the mid-to-late 1960s that gig posters began to move in adventurous new directions. In San Francisco, rock promoters began commissioning posters to advertise shows by the likes of Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead and Jimi Hendrix. With the blurring of lines between commercial graphic design and fine art, the result was a series of legendary posters that borrowed extensively from Art Nouveau and Art Deco to create the hallucinatory images that lent the psychedelic era its universal graphic language.
With the advent of punk and the emphasis on DIY, most designs reverted to the artless simplicity of the 1950s, notable exceptions being Jamie Reid’s work with the Sex Pistols and much of The Clash’s gig artwork. Only in 1987, with the publication of Paul Grushkin’s weighty book The Art of Rock, did gig posters begin to receive any serious critical consideration, but it would still be a long wait before these designs would hang in art exhibitions.
Divided opinion
As to whether the current wave of gig posters should be considered art, opinion is divided even among the designers themselves. What is certain is that contemporary posters are no longer seen as mere messaging vehicles. Numerous books on the subject have been published, notably Paul Grushkin and Dennis King’s definitive Art of Modern Rock, which showcases no less than 1,800 posters from recent years. Pearl Jam have gone so far as to publish an entire book (Pearl Jam v Ames Bros) compiling their own tour posters dating back to 1995.
This time around, the art galleries have been quick to respond, with exhibitions held across the world from Manchester to San Francisco and Sydney. The internet has been crucial in spreading the word, with a whopping 85,000 plus poster designs up for view (and sale) at the user-friendly GigPosters.com site. Here, the archive is updated daily and the images sufficiently defined to look truly spectacular when dropped onto your MP3 player to add visual oomph to your song collection.
Eagerly anticipated by fans
Though the UK is catching on to the gig poster renaissance, US-based designers rule the roost. So in demand have some of these artists (Rob Jones, Emek, Jay Ryan, Tara McPherson, Scrojo) become, their latest works are as eagerly anticipated by fans as the latest album by a favourite band.
The experience of encountering a new poster from any of the artists above is like the sheer joy of hearing new songs by an artist that you love. More exhilarating still is to stumble across the work of lesser-known artists such as Strawberryluna, Nate Duval and San Miguel for the first time and be completely seduced by the thrill of the new.
If you want to investigate further, prepare to have your eyes opened and your mind blown…
Story by Jon Wilde
This is an edited version of the magazine story. To enjoy the original illustrated feature, subscribe to Sony Magazine here