The Sheffield Scenester

On December 11th down at The Boardwalk Soundclash & Sheffield Scenester have joined forces to put on a Xmas Mash-Up, a night including 4 bands, an acoustic collaboration, DJ’s and a late bar. So to promote it we asked artist Martin Bedford if he could do a poster for the event, he came back with a design the very next day and we were so impressed with it we wanted to find out a bit more about him. Meeting at The Frog And Parrot, Martin was sat near the side entrance along with his dog, Fly, and so we joined him for what turned into a lengthy but fascinating chat:

Scenester: If you could give us the gist of your history that would be great....

Martin: Raised in Gravesend in Kent, went to Canterbury Art College to do a foundation and then came up here to Psalter Lane, studied and left. I started out in painting, sort of fell out of grace with a few people, well we didn’t see eye to eye on what was fine art and what wasn’t......

Scenester: Yeah when I studied there they seemed to have very definite ideas and towards the end of my course I was very uncomfortable with it to be honest too......!

Martin: Towards the end I got the idea they were trying to create a school of their own style, and I just don’t paint like that. But yeah I left in 1979 and went on to do six months work as a graphic designer at the University and then became involved with The Leadmill!

Scenester: Do you mind telling us about that, cos I’m from Sheffield and obviously The Leadmill has always been there so how did that come about?

Martin: Basically a bunch of hippies, punks, Rasta’s and everybody that was on that sort of scene chipped in, you know The Leadmill, there was a hardcore set of people there all the time and I suppose were sort of structuring it, but a lot of the hard work was done by people who volunteered. It was a derelict set of messed up buildings and an old flour mill, what’s now the dance floor was an open courtyard, there were some old vintage cars which were in terrible condition and one or two little garages, but that was about it really! The guy who owned it, a guy called Don Fox, said to the guys “Yeah fine if you can do something with the place I’m not bothered about taking any rent at the moment!” which was very forward thinking of him, so that’s how it started with two guys, John Redfern and Chris Andrews who wanted to set up an arts centre. I think they found the building a week before I was introduced to them and I was brought in to do the posters and I just got really heavily involved in the whole thing and sat on the committee for about six years…..

Scenester: Being so involved in and around the music industry, what sort of music are you personally into then?

Martin: Anything that stems from the heart, though if I had to restrict myself it would have to be Blues, which is pretty all encompassing. I’d put Hendrix in there, thank God!

Scenester: When I saw the poster you did for the Frogstock weekend, I noticed it was done in a pop art style……

Martin: Yeah it was a pastiche of the original Woodstock poster……

Scenester: Obviously you take quite a lot of pride in your work so do you do it for the love of the job?

Martin: I’m passionate about it, I remember seeing things like the Jimi Hendrix album cover ‘Axis: Bold As Love’, which completely blew me away and is still my all time favourite album cover. I grew up in a time when I would get into London quite a lot and hang out at clubs like The Roundhouse, UFO and things like that, I got to see a lot of people very early on and be in places I shouldn’t have been in cos I was far too young! I remember seeing Howling Wolf which was just phenomenal, so from a very early age that’s what I wanted to do, I fell in love with music when I was really, really young. But I realised really quickly that I wasn’t a musician and didn’t have the bravado to go on stage and be a singer, apart from anything else I don’t have the voice for it. So I wondered how could I get involved with this by doing what I could do, then of course I discovered all the psychedelic posters and I thought ‘that’s what I want to do!’ For me its more than just putting a name on a poster, for me it’s a mark of respect all round, to the punter, to the venue, to the band, its saying “This is worth spending some money out for!” And anyway when the gig is gone the poster still remains!

Scenester: What amazes us is how quickly you got back to us, I mean we weren’t expecting it to take months but you sent us the poster the very next day!

Martin: Well I’ve been doing it for a long time and a lot of the stuff I work on doesn’t have a reason to exist. When I don’t have any work in I’ll be creating stuff thinking that’s an idea, I’ll play with that, so I’ve got a lot of stuff that I’ve already jettisoned but I’ve also got a load of stuff that I’m just waiting for the right thing to come along and with regard to the poster I made for you I’d already laid out some of that. I’d already been playing with the image on a number of occasions thinking ‘I know I wanna use this, I know I wanna use it but what am I gonna use it for?!’ Sometimes the image derives directly from the name of the band or it comes from what I know about the band, very rarely will I use anyone else’s image; I wouldn’t use Motorhead’s classic logo, I might do an adaption of it, my version of it. So with yours I decided to use the whole thing which in this instant was ‘Xmas Mash-Up’ so that gave me free reign really, so I picked something that was like a 1950’s fairy at the top of the Christmas tree, but it isn’t, cos she’s dressed up as a bi-plane!

Scenester: So if someone asks you to do a poster for them, take us through the creative process involved in making the final design…..

Martin: I look at all the details, which in the case of your brief, everything was there because it’s amazing how many people send us details and then at the last minute come back and say “Oh yeah we’ve added three bands!” The first thing I do is look at the amount of detail that needs to go on and are there any special requests by the client in the sense of anything specific they want on the poster. For example I’ve just done the Heaven 17 poster, they contacted me saying they wanted a poster for this event, it’s not part of the Heaven 17 tour but it’s got to be Christmas and it’s got to have the cave on it, which I thought Ok, it’s pretty non-specific. So at that point I look at all the other details, is there anything else of major prominence there, outside of that I can do what I like with the other details. You see my theory is if the image is good enough people will read it, now there is the counterpoint of people saying “It’s got to be legible from a bus!”, hence the big bold lettering style of advertising, well I just don’t agree with that! That’s not what I do, what I do is limited edition prints for an event and I would hope that they would want to be collected, so it doesn’t turn me on to have a poster on a wall that just says ‘The Ramones’…..

Scenester: Yeah cos if we wanted a poster that was to be used to be put on a bus we wouldn’t have come to you, we would of just got a sign writer……

Martin: Yeah, well its horses for courses and when we did them for The Leadmill, we were able to do them really big, we had posters which were twenty inches by thirty inches. We were printing those ourselves and although in relative terms silkscreen printing was still expensive, because of the way we went about it we were quite brutal and experimental about it, costs went down but we were only doing a hundred at a time so if one of us screwed up then it was just a case of lessons learnt! At the highpoint I was getting details in the morning and by the end of the afternoon they were on the street, they may only have been one colour but sometimes they were three colour silkscreen’s and we turned them round in a day! So I learnt a lot while I was at The Leadmill, like with your poster, that’s one of the things that I’ve trained myself into I suppose, it drives my girlfriend up the wall cos she says “You never stop!” and I don’t, but I don’t see myself as a workaholic it just that my hobby is what I happen to do! Getting back to the Heaven 17 gig at Castleton, I had the specifics I needed to work out how much spatial area I had to work with, so I looked up several images of the Castleton area. Originally I thought of putting hot rod flames coming out of the cave but scrapped that because it didn’t go with the Heaven 17 image! So after downloading one image from the internet, I just stylised it from there, added the snow, moved the castle over so it was in view……

Scenester: Wow, it’s quite methodical how you put it together isn’t it?

Martin: That is quite formal for me, I mean if you look at a lot of my stuff I try not to use straight edges, I like to mash up the images on a poster. The beauty and the trouble with working on a computer now is that I still start from a hand drawn, what I mean is I don’t just allow filters to do the work for me. I still use the computer as if I’m doing a silkscreen print, I build it up on layers which is obvious in computers, that’s the way they’re designed. A lot of people can’t get their heads round that at times but the advantage for me, using Photoshop, is that this is silkscreen and that’s all it is. The down side is that when you are trying things out, you go right up your own arse using every bloody thing that is on it, I can look back at some posters I did about ten years ago and think ‘My God, what was I thinking?’

Scenester: I was going to ask how you find working with computers compared to more traditional methods?

Martin: The strange thing was, when I was at The Leadmill I was also an illustrator doing everything from brochures to children’s books, but suddenly my business went straight down the pan. Everybody wanted something that had been done on a computer because all the designers in London all had their computers and if it didn’t look digitalised than they weren’t interested, even though it was crap! But because it was the new thing, that’s what you had to do, but I couldn’t afford a computer that could do anything close to what I could do by hand but nobody wanted that! So I had a bit of a divergence in my career, I started managing some bands, doing some club décor, even running some clubs and pubs at one point. Over the years I’ve managed to step back and one of the things I do tell myself is if there is any way of doing a poster for a particular client or whatever, then I just try and strip it down and treat it as if I’ve only got three colours and it’s a silkscreen! It’s good to set yourself a discipline but every now and then you’re asked for something different, like when I did Hawley’s Bushey Farm thing, it looked like a 1950’s beat up poster in that sort of American mid west style, there’s an awful lot of effects in there which to reproduce as a silkscreen print would be a nightmare. I’m not saying it would be impossible but I’ve actually got a print on file, not mine but someone else’s, that has 300 colours on it, each ones printed separately, we’re talking subtle tones rather than getting around it by using dots, I mean that is just unbelievable, really unbelievable!

Scenester: Do you ever see other peoples work and think ‘Now why didn’t I think of that!’

Martin: Oh all the time, there are so many people I want to kill, no really I know a lot of artists in town cos Sheffield is really buzzing with so many good artists but Phlegm is in my opinion a f*cking genius! I just love his work to bit’s, he’s on another planet to the rest of us, I’m a hack, really a hack but of all the other people I know he is just out there. That’s my recommendation…..watch that man!

On that final note we took the opportunity to photo Martin with a selection of his work, including the entire front window of The Frog And Parrot which had one of his posters on each pane. We’d like to thank Martin as well as his dog Fly for both an entertaining and fascinating afternoon, as well as obviously thank him for the poster he supplied us for the December 11th Xmas Mash-Up!