Anja Klüver reviews 'Factory Records: The Complete Graphic Album'

Factory Records was the UK birthplace of indie music, where punk attitudes met the avant-garde, and rock music mixed with techno. Joy Division, New Order and The Happy Mondays all emerged from a 70's and 80's Manchester cultural scene that was bursting with creative, underground energy.

Factory Records: The Complete Graphic Album describes the label's ground breaking communications approach, based on musician/producer/designer collaboration. Fueled by a DIY attitude, the collaborations led to a unique visual identity that flew in the face of conventional values and marketing budgets. It took the ethos of the punk movement and crafted it, through design.

In his foreword, Tony Wilson, co-founder of Factory, describes their cottage industry approach to packaging production, saying it was a 'laboratory experiment in popular art'. He includes the tale of Joy Division gluing sheets of sand paper to a Durutti Column album, in an attempt to damage the other record covers it would come into contact with, claiming it was a radical gesture and an embodiment of punk agitation. ('Alan shouldn't have brought in the porn video, as the guitarist, drummer and bassist watched the vid and left their singer to do the gluing').

Factory's design legacy is most associated with Peter Saville. He got Wilson hooked on the design language of Jan Tschichold, Constructivist posters and Penguin book covers, and these provided the inspiration for Factory's first visual expressions. Saville's early work laid the foundations for Factory's design programme, not only in the field of record covers, but in advertising for their clubs and the general identity of the company's output. Saville favoured a constructivist and Bauhaus inspired minimalist design approach, and as a result Factory record covers often included almost no information about the artist or content.

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