STUFF BOOKS & DVDs
Too Fast To Live, Too Young To Die
Andrew Krivine ROCKET 88
Excellent, lavishly illustrated compendium of Punk & Post Punk Graphics 1976-1986.
Although sleeve and poster art has always been a vital component of rock, never was it more so than with punk and post-punk. This was because the music was as much conceptual as it was musical, confrontational, determined to grab you by the eyeballs.
American-born Andrew Krivine had family in London whom he would visit in the late 70s. He became besotted by the King’s Road punk shops and The Clash. His transatlantic perspective is helpful in recounting how punk visuals impacted both in London and the East coast, from images of a green-skinned, eyeless Richard Hell to the sleeve of, with a woman’s nipples replaced with bared teeth. Krivine is conscious of the influence of the early-20th century Dada art movement, particularly the collage work of John Heartfield and Hanna Höch; this book could form the worthy basis of an art exhibition. There are guest essays, including from Sebastian Conran, who had a hand in the Clash’s early design work, while Jamie Reid’s Sex Pistols artwork features strongly, torn from the fonts of the tabloids, ripping up and flinging their sensationalist hysteria back in their own face.
