Interview with Four5one
Hi Shaughn. We’re just wondering how you feel you guys have held onto U2 as a client?
They’re remarkably family-like in some ways. There has been a core amount of people, creative and otherwise, who’ve been with them for a very long time and I often wonder if it’s not those people themselves who decide whether or not to work on a project with the band, because working with the band is a trial of strength sometimes.
So we should really be asking how have the band kept you as designers?
It could be that’s the actual question to be asked! We enjoy working with them: we’ve done it a very long time and at some point a symbiosis occurs whereby there’s a sort of meeting of minds. On some level, when they think visually of things, they think of things we’ve done for them. Despite the shifting fashions, there’s a kind of core ideology and iconography that still prevails throughout the years that makes it a good fit between it all.
How has the work with the band led to other commissions, music or otherwise?
We do get commissioned, but not music. A lot of music stuff is done by band’s mates. We do get commissioned for work other than music but perhaps by someone who’s a fan of the U2 stuff. Music design is fashionable for young designers to have a go at it, so there’s a lot of competition from that point of view as well. It’s also quite price-conscious.
That how it started with U2 of course. How much did they pay for the Boy sleeve?
Steve probably got a new pack of Rapidograph drawing pens for it.
I asked Steve this, but I was just wondering where you see graphic designers fitting into to this MP3 world?
It’s a large question, because what you’re really asking is how does a band visually display its own iconography. How does it get a chance to show its face? How does it give them a chance to show the world themselves as multimedia artists apart from being sound artists?
Are we going to lose the link between artwork and the album?
At the moment, no matter what the device or media, no matter what the screen, there’s still the sensibility, the sacredness of a beautiful photograph reproduced through paper. That sense of the pure, of the still image, isn’t really being conveyed via electronic media. Not yet – there’s still a case for paper. However, recorded music via physical product, well, it’s gone now really isn’t it? There are still many millions of CDs being bought but their value is through the floor through the sheer prevalence of your free music and music via your supermarket.
As soon as you mention, say, U2’s Boy, or Velvet Underground’s Andy Warhol album, the first thing you picture in your head is the sleeve artwork…
And that doesn’t come without considerable effort and design and thought. And these require investment of time and skill. If you completely reduce music to the ubiquitous level of a file being downloaded, all of that is gone. All of us own an MP3 player and you’d be hard pressed to know a single thing about the songs you’re listening to. You stick it on shuffle and it simply is wallpaper. You’ve removed entirely the identity of music. It has become truly elevator music. No matter its quality, you’ve taken away its individuality utterly.
But that is the reality of it. As soon as YouTube and any other download facility became the universal accepted medium, and the quality thereof, that sense of the precious, the unique things that somebody might have spent two years of their lives making – it’s become a hobby. You probably are taking about the end of TV and recorded music as we know it. I’d say within this generation, it will no longer be a viable thing people do as a career. You will quite literally have no newly made music or TV, and maybe even films. It’s an extraordinary thing to witness. People call it exciting times, visual age and so forth. I think there’s two ways it could go and one of them involves a giant hole in your foot. We could possibly be seeing the death of the visual arts, as we know it. As people pay for visual arts, or recorded music with a visual face, that could be ‘the end is nigh’. In which case, we all better get good at something else.
I can’t imagine albums without a visual reference to them.
But originally, when the first gramophone albums came out, they didn’t have a sleeve. The rise of this art form is fairly recent. It’s not until you had rock n’ roll proper and jazz did you get the rise of the picture sleeve. Plus, some purists say the death of the album sleeve arrived with the CD. Special packaging has given it certain life-force to mass produce music. There are some tremendous special packages out there and they’re everywhere now, but all kinds of visual media are suffering now – magazines, newspapers – and it seems to be wrapped up in this younger generation’s love of everything electronic, plus the fact that no-one wants to pay for anything anymore.
Naturally enough, we are delighted that U2 still are lovers of all things physically made. They take tremendous interest in the tour in terms of the merchandise and they still sell heaps of that stuff, so we’ll see. But finance is a large part of it too and it’s all quite expensive to produce. There’s no way any 14 year-old would think of spending 20 quid on an album. It’s crazy. It ain’t gonna happen. So who are you actually making it for?
A sample of Four5one’s work with U2. Click to see full-size.
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