MUSIC REVEALS A TRUTH THAT REALITY OBSCURES
Music has been a driving force behind Black Limelight, from the first cut n’ shut fanzine to the latest guerilla marketing push.
We forged our own culture in the early 1970s, squirrelling away the scraps of meaning and mystique that drifted across our paths and shoring up our own defences against the looming conformity of adulthood.
We mapped our unsteady path by the studied obscurantism of sleevenotes and the minutiae of a music press intent upon cloaking sweet nothings in the dazzling garb of profundity and portent; seduced and traduced, but often knowingly.
The scrapbooks and the sketchbooks started early, outflanking even the voracious accretion of vinyl as various forms of radical boredom and affectation coalesced into the guided autonomy of Punk. The promise and the curse of interesting times.
By the time that DIY recording and publishing had become achievable dreams, the ritual aspects of the live experience had begun to pall, in favour of theory, reportage and the treacherous allure of meta-fiction. Music – that battlefield of ideas and aesthetics – could interrogate itself anew, with a graphic accompaniment free to plunder decades of semiotic style and subversion.
Plagiarism may be scorned in music and the visual arts, but pastiche holds its corner.
Black Limelight illustration has graced the pages of many leisure and specialist titles, from Time Out and City Limits to International Musician & Recording World andWire. Brochure design for the popular Coin Street Latin American festivals led to cover-to-cover responsibility for WOMAD’s South Bank and Barbican events, and promotional involvement with the Albert Hall’s groundbreaking African Prom.
As satirist in residence for Soul Underground magazine, I cast a jaundiced Hogarthian eye over the ‘Second Summer Of Love’ and nascent developments in the rave and rare groove scenes, and made regular contributions to Etna, Belgium’s leading independent music newspaper.
Alongside commissions from Sony (Japan) and major music venues throughout London, Nottingham and the South Coast, Black Limelight has been proud to serve numerous independent promoters and arts organisations, drawn to the successful formula of innovation and flexibility within clear budgetary restraints.
It’s a truism of design that people crave variations of a pre-existent trend. Our appetite for music works differently; the visceral gives way to exigencies of taste, familiarity and expectation – and nobody refers to a graphic approach as a ‘guilty pleasure’, however kitsch or ironic…
Marrying these eddying streams to evoke the nebulous in visual terms would be challenge enough, even without the delicate tension of booby-trapped ego. Fealty to ‘the vision’ has primacy, but designing for music requires a punter’s eye and the fleeting attention span of a consumer besieged by choice. All that, before the terms of creative collaboration can begin to be thrashed out…
Black Limelight offers bespoke design, in time at the right time. CD and vinyl packaging, press and promotional, print and digital, with a dash of wit and the emotional intelligence of a genuine music lover.
If Jimmy Tarbuck was ‘the fifth Beatle’ (as incessantly claimed – at least by Jimmy Tarbuck), and Dom Angus had in Roland an indispensible companion, then Black Limelight has been design partner to some musical mavericks of note. They also serve, who only wield a mouse…
SOUNDS LIKE DANGER
With an unrivalled library of high impact sounds from vintage Jamaica, the Junglistic underground and the avant-Punk hinterland, Black Limelight is currently accepting select bookings from bodega bars, shubeens and arts centres alike. Midlife crisis DJs are ten-a-penny, but few can boast such a wide-ranging armoury – from yesteryear to tomorrow year.
Strictly vinyl – with no soft wax after midnight!
