Coming This Spring! The Barney Bubbles Online Shop
This spring, for the first time ever, the amazing artworks created by the graphic design genius Barney Bubbles will be available on an official range of apparel as well as limited editions of posters, prints, stickers and other media.
The launch of the Barney Bubbles online store celebrates the rich legacy of the radical and inventive British artist who was responsible for some of the most significant designs in popular music for Elvis Costello & The Attractions, The Damned, Depeche Mode, Ian Dury & The Blockheads, Generation X, Hawkwind, John Cooper Clarke, Johnny Moped, Nick Lowe, Squeeze and many, many more.
The first apparel drop will feature classic graphics while the posters and prints will include works which are now highly collectible and will be made available to design and music fans for the first time in decades.
The shop is being launched in concert with the Barney Bubbles Estate. Sadly Barney Bubbles died in 1983, but since then his reputation as an innovator has grown as he is cited as an influence by contemporary artists and designers from Peter Saville to Aries Moross, while his works have been featured in design histories, exhibitions and museum collections, including those of the V&A and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The new Barney Bubbles website and online shop will keep the flame alive by showcasing collections from his deep archive – he is believed to have produced thousands of designs in the 60s, 70s and 80s, all of them of premium quality.
The shop’s apparel, posters, prints and stickers are made to the highest quality from sustainable materials. In the first drop will be such notable Barney Bubbles artworks for Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick for Ian Dury & The Blockheads, I Love The Sound of Breaking Glass for Nick Lowe and logos for Generation X and Johnny Moped.
The Barney Bubbles Shop is at: shop.barneybubbles.com
The Barney Bubbles website is at: www.barneybubbles.com
For more details contact: info@barneybubbles.com
Biography
Barney Bubbles was born Colin Fulcher on July 30, 1942 – this year marks what would have been his 80th birthday.
Spending five years as an award-winning student at Twickenham art school in south west London, where his first poster was for an early concert by the Rolling Stones, he honed his craft in the 1960s by working for a typographic studio in Soho before being recruited as senior graphic designer by the lifestyle mogul Sir Terence Conran.
After producing ‘straight’ product designs for Habitat and such clients as the cider company HP Bulmer (his logo for their Strongbow brand endured for decades) he tuned in, turned on and dropped out, changing his name to Barney Bubbles, operating psychedelic light shows at underground venues in London and San Francisco and art directing such underground magazines as OZ and Friends.
Soon Bubbles was designing eye-popping record sleeves and posters for such counter-cultural acts as Hawkwind and was one of the few designers to make the leap in the 70s to work with punk, new wave and post-punk acts such as Elvis Costello, The Damned, Depeche Mode, Ian Dury, Johnny Moped and Nick Lowe. He also directed music videos, including for The Specials’ era-defining number one single Ghost Town, produced furniture, redesigned the New Musical Express – creating the logo the music paper uses online to this day – and painted privately.
Sadly, the fragile Bubbles died at his own hand on the day US nuclear weapons arrived in the UK in 1983.
His work has subsequently been featured in major exhibitions and is avidly collected all over the world; examples reside in the permanent collections of such institutions as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and London’s V&A.
In June 2022 the third edition of Paul Gorman’s monograph about Bubbles – titled The Wild World of Barney Bubbles – will be published by the world’s leading visual publisher Thames & Hudson, accompanied by the limited edition A Box of Bubbles containing a portfolio of reproductions.
