totalcontent - the blog.

word of the week – ‘ding-dong’ (dɪ́ŋ- dɒ́ŋ).

As Englebert Humperdink gets cosy with the throat gargle on the eve of tomorrow’s Eurovision Song Contest, I thought I’d take a quick delve into the Netherlands’ fortunes over the years.

Like the UK, the Dutch glory days were the 1970s, notably when Teach-In scooped the top prize in 1975 with the quintessential Eurovision ditty ‘Ding-A-Dong’, and various other patriotic crooners snaffled second and third places. There have been another three Dutch winners all told, but you have to go right back to the 1950s and 1960s to sniff those out.

Some of the more curious names to represent the Netherlands include Frizzle Sizzle (1986), Mrs Einstein (1997), Mouth & MacNeal (1974), Hind (2008) and the curiously British-sounding Humphrey Campbell (1992). In latter years entries have tended to be sung in English, though personally I feel ‘Een speeldoos’ (‘A Musical’), ‘De mallemolen’ (‘The Whirligig’) and ‘Blijf zoals je bent’ (‘Stay As You Are’) have a certain authentic ring to them.

However, Teach-In’s strategy of using catchy but meaningless words clearly doesn’t always pay off… in 1967, Thérèse Steinmetz came last and managed only two points with ‘Ring-dinge-ding’.

The 2012 entry ‘You and Me’ by Joan Franka didn’t make the cut, which means the Netherlands have failed to make the Saturday night final for eight years on the trot. Still, so long as the boys in orange make it to the other Euro final, who cares?

word of the week – ‘glam’ (glǽm).

Size matters... The Sweet touted the more obvious side of Glam

Last year ‘Electric Warrior’, T-Rex’s seminal sixth album turned 40. This year ‘Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’, Bowie’s breakthrough record hit the same milestone. So I thought I’d quickly doff my spandex cap to Glam Rock, the genre that made it OK for boys to deviate musically and sartorially… and make the odd foray into their girlfriends’ make-up bags.

Of course, not all the lads were comfortable with the Glam look. Word magazine ran a picture last month of Trevor Bolder and Woody Woodmansey from Bowie’s original backing band, looking more like Men from C&A than Spiders from Mars. They revealed that Bowie’s sideman Mick Ronson hated the clothes so much, “he packed and left for Beckenham Station”. ‘The Great’ Paul Thompson, drummer with Roxy Music, former apprentice welder at the Palmers shipyard in Jarrow, was another who had something of an allergic reaction to glitter and platforms.

While Bowie, Bolan and Roxy have stood the test of time and remain hugely credible artists, I’d like to put a quiet word in for The Sweet. Unashamedly poppy, with brazenly catchy songs written by the prolific Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, they scored an amazing 13 top 20 hits during the 1970s, with ‘Blockbuster’ topping the charts in 1973. Though the title of highly successful 2006 BBC time-warp series ‘Life on Mars’ nods to a Bowie song, its 1970s soundtrack, tellingly enough, was dominated by The Sweet.

With it’s rejection of hippie mores and free licence to experiment, Glam paved the way for its spiky younger sibling Punk… and for that, we a have a lot to be grateful for.

word of the week – ‘pointer’ (pɔjntər).

By George... this looks damn familiar

I’ve just been reading a book by the celebrated US art director George Lois. Lois was not only responsible for some of the most seminal ads of the 1960s and 1970s, but his extraordinary covers for Esquire magazine are now on permanent display in New York’s MoMA. The slim volume is called ‘Damn Good Advice (for people with talent!)’, and consists of a series of illustrated lessons culled from his many years in advertising and publishing.

If you’ve read Paul Arden’s ‘Whatever You Think, Think The Opposite’ and ‘It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be’, you’ll get the gist. It’s a collection of snappy, from-the-horse’s-mouth pointers on how to be creative. In fact, the format is remarkably similar — standard paperback size, white cover with bold black type. Inside, brutally straightforward, sometimes irreverent headlines, accompanied by a couple of paragraphs of wisdom or anecdote, and a carefully chosen image that colours or juxtaposes the point being made.

The pace is staccato and relentless. You feel you’re being hit over the head with page after page of ‘damn good advice’ — ‘Make your surroundings a metaphor for who you are’, ‘Never eat shit’, ‘A trend is always a trap’, ‘Tell the Devil’s Advocate in the room to go to hell’, ‘Speak up, goddammit!’. For full effect shout rapidly in a Noo Yoik accent.

The first few pages are fine, inspiring even. You’re thinking, right on, don’t compromise, fight the good fight, believe in yourself, stick it to the man. But as they keep coming (and coming) small seeds of doubt start creeping in. Firstly, it starts to become apparent that a lot of the ‘damn good advice’ is pretty self evident. Like ‘Don’t sleep your life away’, and ‘Don’t expect a creative idea to pop out of your computer’. You can’t argue with either, but most people will have worked this out for themselves. Unless they were sleeping, of course.

Arden fast rules... an adman’s wisdom

Secondly, if I took every leaf out of Lois’s book, I’m pretty sure my clients would run a mile. For example, he recalls a time when he stood on a window ledge and threatened to jump unless his poster idea was accepted. Or dropped the biggest book he could find on the floor when his boss was ignoring him. It’s the kind of ‘maverick’ behaviour that pervaded UK advertising in the 1980s, ‘crazy creative guys’ throwing more and more outrageous stunts to get noticed.

Of course be determined, confident and original. Of course stick up for your ideas and take inspiration from wherever you find it. And I tip my hat to Lois for his single-mindedness, chutzpah and towering achievement. But, I can’t help feeling that if there were 100s of creative people out there following this credo, we’d have mayhem on our hands. The point is, we’re all creative in different ways, and realising this is the first step on the path to originality.

‘Damn Good Advice’ is a damn good ad for George Lois, but you need to take it with a pinch of salt. Or as he might put it ‘You can't be creative if someone has to tell you how’.

D&AD Writing for Design judging – the post mortem

It almost goes without saying that being foreman of this year’s D&AD Writing for Design jury was the next best thing to shaking Johan Cruyff’s hand. As you walked into the vaulted expanse of Olympia, with the sun shining through the latticed ceiling, it felt like you were in some kind of creative heaven — only without the blessed harps and angels. There was table after groaning table of the best work in the world, stretching off into the horizon, a seemingly endless feast of ideas and perspiration.

On our six tables, there were 70-odd entries including books, bottles, posters, mailers, annual reports, leaflets, cards, websites, three bikinis and a pair of vibrators. My fellow jurors (Nick Asbury, Fiona Thompson, Chris Doyle, Lisa Desforges, John Weich and Anelia Varela) were as keen as I was to get stuck in, to be inspired and informed, amused and amazed. But it soon became apparent that, although the overall standard was well above middling, there was very little to make the soul rejoice and the heart sing. Yes, there was plenty of perfectly accomplished, lively, well-crafted writing, but very little with the glimmer of greatness required for the pages of the hallowed D&AD Annual.

Read on...

word of the week – ‘legacy’ (ˈlegəsiː)

When I was around 17, I had the best pair of jeans. I wore them virtually every day for three years, and by the end of that time, there was more patchwork repair than original material. To this day I remember my mother compaining they ‘gave her the pip’, as she spent so much time sewing them up. Which sounded hilarious in her Dutch accent.

I remember they were Wrangler drainpipes, but I have no idea where they were bought or made. I liked the Ws stitched on to the back pockets — maybe it was a latent appreciation of typography which was to kick in properly a few years later. But the point is, I truly loved them, and they were always with me whatever I happened to be doing.

Read on...

word of the week – ‘wisenheimer’ (wajzɛnhajmər)

Frazier Crane... undisputed king of the wisenheimers

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of Twitter. It can be fun, informative, timely and even occasionally inspiring. I like the way it punctuates the day with little morsels of interest — quips, links and banter — although admittedly I’m sometimes a little too easily distracted by it.

But there’s one thing that really, really annoys me. And that’s people who use it as yet another platform for self-congratulation. Wisenheimer is an Americanism, but I was struggling to find a noun which so perfectly summed up this kind of pompous, self-regarding type. Someone who constantly has to reaffirm their greatness and superiority, who assumes the world is interested enough to want five-minute bulletins on their majestic progress. It’s the digital equivalent of the dreaded Christmas round robin letter.

At least it’s short, I hear you say. Short but incessant, death by a thousand pats on the back.

word of the week – 'flip-top’ (flɪ́p-tɑ́p)

Just been doing some research into the semiotics and visual language of packaging for a piece I’m writing for Uusi, the Nokia brand magazine. In the course of this rooting around, I came across some interesting stuff about Marlboro cigarettes.

Firstly, that these macho tabs were originally marketed at women — back in the 1950s, real men scoffed (or coughed) at filters. They came in a soft, white packet, covered in a foil wrapper with lots of feminine script lettering.

The brand was utterly transformed in 1955, when a designer called Frank Gianninoto came up with a design that had to look good on black-and-white television. The white arrow jutting into the red space at the top was simple, bold and graphic, and seemingly never went out of fashion. But it was the new-fangled flip-top box that broke the mould, contributing to the brand’s built-for-the-tough outdoors image. It became an enduring symbol of Americana, and only 20 years ago was pronounced the most valuable brand in the world.

But who’d have thought that the Marlboro man had had a sex change?

In his book ‘The Total Package’, Thomas Hine notes: “Everybody knows, intellectually at least, that great packages don’t always hold good things. But that is a truth that the best packages try to make people forget.”

book review – ‘Electrical Banana’.

Groovy Man. So here it is, the latest foray into the obscure nether reaches of graphic design by my old mate Norman Hathaway (with Dan Nadal).

You really can’t accuse Norm of tackling the obvious subjects. A couple of years ago, his brilliant book ‘Overspray’ brought us the super-slick, sexually charged excesses of 1970s US West Coast airbrush art. And now, ‘Electrical Banana’ takes us on an LSD-fuelled journey into 1960s psychedelic art, “the look that defined a decade”, according to the blurb.

He may be right … Any Beatles fan will already be familiar with the trippy, exaggerated comic book aesthetic and garish tapestry-like landscapes of Heinz Edlemann, the illustrator behind Yellow Submarine. But the work of the other six artists, whose shared influences are apparent, seems strangely resonant too. Generously illustrated, with insightful interviews, this is a rare and fascinating glimpse into a colourful lost world of sex, music, mayhem and mild peril. And look out for the introductory Q&A featuring Macca himself, offering his take (or should that be toke?) on the psychedelic era.

From the inside flap:

Heinz Edelmann... a pre-release drawing from Twen magazine

The artists include MARIJKE KOGER, the Dutch artist responsible for dressing THE BEATLES; MATI KLARWEIN, who painted the cover for MILES DAVIS’ BITCHES BREW; KEIICHI TANAAMI, the Japanese master of psychedelic posters; HEINZ EDELMANN, the German illustrator and designer of the YELLOW SUBMARINE animated film; TADANORI YOKOO, whose prints and books defined the '60s in Japan; DUDLEY EDWARDS, a painter, car decorator, and graphic embellisher for the London scene, and the enigmatic Australian MARTIN SHARP, whose work for CREAM and the underground made him a hippie household name in Europe.

Electrical Banana
By Norman Hathaway and Dan Nadal
Damani
£17.55 on Amazon

word of the week – ‘higson’ (hɪ́gsə́n).

Remember the Higsons, spiky purveyors of ‘funk-punk’? Back in the 1980s, studying publishing at the London College of Printing, I was a huge fan, avidly following their progress in the NME and buying every single the day it came out.

And then this great silk-screen poster appeared on the LCP refectory wall. I was too law-abiding to pinch it myself, but luckily a friend of mine was more than happy to do the deed on my behalf. Just call me ‘the Don’.

Ever since then, frontman Charlie Higson has been something of a hero. He just kept popping up everywhere — producer, performer, comedy writer, Vic and Bob, Fast Show, Have I Got News For You, QI, and many more. And now my boys are huge fans of his Young James Bond and vampire books. A prolific and versatile talent.

Some 30 years later, it turns out we have a mutual friend — Andy Altmann of Why Not Associates. Earlier this week, I told Andy about my coveted poster, and he forwarded this pic on to Charlie. His response… “Wow. that’s a lovely poster – wish I had one!”

Probably the only time Charlie Higson will be envious of me.