Marking the 80th anniversary of the big bad bomb that brought an end to World War II, I’ve dug out a magazine that I published back in the 1990s. It’ll end in chrome.
Issued in September 1995, the rear cover of Crankin’ Out issue 4 featured two images: an untrimmed proof copy of a poster digitally designed by David Bowie featuring his dastardly doppelgänger Ramona A. Stone, and, to its right, a fold-out programme flyer for that year’s 29th Montreux Jazz Festival.
An incongruous triptych you might say. However, the poster the Thin White one designed was for the aforementioned musical festival in Switzerland, and the magazine I edited and published was all about the dear old dame himself.
In a conversation we had in London, at a Minotaur exhibition launch in Berkeley Square the previous November of 94, Bowie had let slip that his friend Claude Nobs, the founder of the MJF, had approached him to create the impending artwork.
By early spring of 95 the final imagery was completed, and Monsieur Nobs chose to announce the festival line-up one midweek lunchtime in a front ground floor function room that looked out on to Leicester Square at the Swiss Centre (where else?), that now demolished cultural centre in London’s West End, with its distinctive glockenspiel and all.
Claude Nobs gave a little speech and video presentation for us assembled press rabble where he beamed that he’d decided to share the directorship of the festival with Quincy Jones, was launching a MJF website, and made Miles Davis an honorary host to boot. Then he pretty much let us hardened hacks wine and dine.
I must say Claude was a genuinely delightful host, and with both of us being trained chefs, gay, and hugely enthusiastic music fans we seemed to hit it off. When he learned via Bowie’s personal art representative Kate Chertavian that I was behind Crankin’ Out he went out of his way to make sure I had as many posters and other assorted ephemera as I wanted.
Due to a horrific skiing accident Claude passed on 10 January 2013, three years to the day before David, in the city where the singer was registered for tax reasons for much of his later life, Lausanne. Requiescat in pace to a very fine human. It shouldn‘t ever have to end this way.
Was Bowie at the shindig? Sadly not, as he was woefully behind with what would eventually become the partly Eno-produced Outside album, as well as finalising a shiny new label deal with Virgin America.
However, the esteemed veteran journalist Roy Carr was there, though — representing Vox magazine, and on fine if occasionally vitriolic form. He and Charles Shaar Murray had co-authored the very first Bowie book I owned — 1981’s An Illustrated Record, a beautiful picture-heavy compendium still unsurpassed in many ways.
When I told Roy I was NW6 neighbours with his erstwhile colleague and that they should maybe consider a sequel to cover DB’s post RCA years he didn’t sound terribly enthused and seemed more interested in tearing apart Medusa, a new collection of reinterpretations that had just been issued by a certain Eurythmics front-woman.
Indeed, he laid into the set with such savage ferocity as only a former editor of the NME could, spitting his words out with deeply felt rage:
“How fucking dumb is Annie Lennox? She’s just done this album where almost all the tracks are classics that should never be touched, by anyone, and certainly not her. The stupid cunt.”
Moving swiftly on, the finished Bowieart is an extraordinary piece of art which anticipated the 50th anniversary of the dropping of the world’s first atomic bomb in Japan, and the effects it’s had upon all of our lives. What that had to do with a music festival in Switzerland is anyone’s guess, but I’m sure it made sense to him.
The following text wasn’t used on the poster but was featured in various press kits and assorted mediums. As magazine editor I made an executive decision to use the copy verbatim, with its transatlantic vacillating between British and American English, as well as minor typos like “MacDonalds”.
A Montreux Jazz Festival Poster for 1995
“Since the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, the idea of an apocalyptic process has fully integrated itself into our consciousness. This suggested “violence transience” co-exists with feelings of chaos-surfing in the way we perceive our social condition. There seems to be no moral authority. The trusted canons of truth seem to have collapsed. There are no natural conclusions to the events in our lives. Even public memory is contested memory.
Many see the dropping of the atomic bomb as the beginning of nuclear proliferation. Others saw it as the most rational way to stop an ever escalating war. Some have no knowledge of the event at all. The poster I created for the Montreux Jazz Festival incorporates layering, juxtaposition and image manipulation, all managed in a Mac computer.
The main subjects of the poster are:
1. A simplistic graphic of the dropping of an atomic bomb circa 1946.
The sea-scape content of this illustration gave me an impression of Lake Geneva, this presenting an ambiguous focal point.
2. An “M” symbol.
The “M” symbol placed at the centre of a small explosion-cloud has a resonance that intimates power. This can be interpreted as the positive power of music or the negative power of nuclear warfare. There is also a vague allusion to other famous “M” symbols. MacDonalds or MTV for instance.
3. The female figure of “Ramona A. Stone”.
Ramona is a character that I’ve been incorporating into a number of recent work projects. She is powerful looking, subversive and extremely in touch with a fragmented society. She is both participant and creator. A member of society or its destroyer.
Overall, the unpredictable nature of the combined images in the poster produce a sense of unease. For me, the poster suggests both the festivity of the event itself but also resurrects the spectre of an unwilling alliance we have made with destructive forces. As in any social confrontation, it contains contradictory information. It is not presented as the pairing of dichotomies but, rather, as a full spectrum. It can be seen as a merging of cultural conditions rather than their polarization.”
David Bowie © Montreux Jazz Festival Switzerland
Edited by Steve Pafford
