Peter Saville's Apartments.
Late 1970s Britain was, visually, a dull old place. The high street was a beige desert of poorly fitted, badly lit shops; packaging and most magazines were designed in a style that was a hangover from the 1950s, and graphic design was preoccupied with the visual gag (think Milton Glaser's I * New York). "It was awful," says Saville. "But my friend Malcolm Garrett and I looked back through our art books at movements like the Bauhaus in prewar Germany and constructivism in 1920s Russia, and saw a blueprint for a better looking Britain."
As house designer and a founding partner at the newly formed Factory Records, Saville had almost total creative freedom, providing cool graphics for new electronic groups such as New Order, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark and A Certain Ratio. In some instances, the quality of the presentation was superior to that of the music; in others, it was a nuisance -- the 1980 sandpaper cover of The Return Of The Durutti Column ruined any other record sleeve next to it in the rack.
By the late 1990s, Saville had taken his recycling of ideas and imagery to a post-postmodern extreme in a new body of work, the Waste Paintings. Although he was at least partly responsible for the growing thirst for new looks and products, he now says, "I was concerned about the speed at which things were coming and going. People were spending weeks or years working on a product, designing a new chair, making a film, and it was lasting as long as its PR cycle. You spend five years designing a new chair, and it's all over in three months."
Saville and Wickens moved again, this time to Los Angeles and the design company Frankfurt Balkind. But for Saville this was an even less constructive episode, and Hollywood was a huge disappointment. "You feel a bit cheated when you first get to Los Angeles," he says. "You realise that, to make movies, they just go out into the street. There's no effort involved. You think, shit, they didn't even go anywhere special. They just went outside."
Saville returned home to the excitements of Britpop and Brit art. The high street had apparently learned from his and others' 1980s style revolution, and replaced drab with design. New clubs such as the Ministry of Sound (b. 1991) were emulating the slick industrial interior of the Factory-owned Hacienda in Manchester (b. 1982), and Ministry flyers borrowed liberally from the graphics Saville had used on Hacienda flyers a decade earlier. He found that his trademark style was being applied by a generation of designers who had grown up with his record covers.
News of The Apartment reached a new generation of musicians. Brett Anderson of Suede recalls being lured there -- "I'd done a mural of Unknown Pleasures on my bedroom wall when I was 11," he says -- and Saville and Knight went on to create a string of suitably lush Suede covers. For one, Filmstar, Saville himself appears as the song's subject. "I said, if you want someone to look and act like a sleazy old film star, then it's got to be you," says Knight affectionately.
"By the late 1990s, when the next big thing after me had run its course, there was a reassessment and I was elevated to the hall of fame. At least I still had integrity. I wasn't doing nappy wrappers for Mothercare."
The Guardian
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