Category: Journal

Off With Their Heads was a run of gigs at Islington Mill that I designed and printed the posters for, and helped put on. Each poster was hand screen-printed rather than run off a printer. Here is one on the print bed, pink on paper, and a later one, Off With Their Fat Heads, still drying.

The posters were half the point. A gig night where the flyer was a print you might want to keep, made in the same building the show happened in, in editions small enough that no two were quite the same.

Part of the Islington Mill case study.

A second release on Balearic Mike's Fascinating Rhythms label, screen-printed by one69A. By now the printing was steadier and the registration tighter.

Two labels was enough to make you feel like a proper print shop, even when the shop was still a basement.

Part of the one69A case study.

The first proper job. Record sleeves for Balearic Mike, printed by hand for his Fascinating Rhythms label, red on cream, one69A pulled across every one.

The record was his remix of Reckoner by Radiohead, and Radiohead signed it off, which made a first job feel like a much bigger one.

one69A started in 2009 in the basement of Folk in West Didsbury, the cafe and bar Justin ran. Sally Gilford and I set it up. The name came from flat 169A, where the two of us lived with Justin.

Before this there had been tests and experiments. These sleeves were the first thing someone actually paid us to print, stacked up to dry with the ink still wet. A business, more or less, from a pile of record sleeves.

Part of the one69A case study.

A poster for Folk Mystique, an event at the Albert Club, designed and screen printed for Folk, the West Didsbury bar. The text does the inviting: DJ sets, a luxurious cake stand, a rustic barbecue, secret-recipe sangria and a promised hint of debauchery, all in the register of a hand-written note signed off Yours truly, Folk x.

I drew it up with a Balearic, faintly nautical theme, orange fish and a mermaid’s tail trailing off into stars, printed over a soft blue-lined ground. A print that is as much illustration as poster, made to be kept rather than flyered and dropped in a bin at the end of the night.

Banners for Riot Jazz, made for the Mad Fer It festival in Platt Fields Park. This was a set of hand-worked fabric banners with riot jazz and mcr painted across them in red, strung up around the site and flown from a pole against a grey Manchester sky. A black studio cat kept getting in among them while they dried.

Rough, hand-painted, made to be read from across a field and to look good coming down again at the end of a long day. The photos are later re-scans, so the date is approximate, but the work sits in 2009, early on, when a lot of the jobs were like this: quick, physical, made for one weekend and one specific crowd.

The first screen print I ever made, done in the basement of Folk, the bar in West Didsbury. The job was a Folk fanzine, folded round a free CD, the cover reading a tale of future post-folk, one whole English pound. I set up a rough darkroom and a print bench down there among the cellar pipes and learned the process by doing it.

Everything since has come off the back of this. Without knowing it at the time, this was the start of One69A, the studio that grew out of that basement. It looks basic in the photos, a screen clamped to a bench under a red bulb, but this is the room where the whole practice began.

A window installation in the back of a Suzuki sandwich van. I was living in Moss Side at the time, doing a job that came with the van, and someone on our street put the rear window through. Rather than just board it up, I took the hole as an invitation and built into it, a burst of angular white card filling the gap and pushing out past the broken glass, all sharp folded planes, the geometry that would end up running through everything I make.

This is one of the earliest things in the archive, from 2008, before any of it had a name. A smashed window on a work van turned into a reason to make something, on a street in Moss Side, where nobody was expecting to find a sculpture. Half the practice is just that, treating whatever happens to be in front of you as material.