Chris Morton “F**K DANCE, LET’S ART...” - The Exhibition

A couple of weeks back I went for a scan at the Nuffield Hospital in Jesmond , I got there early so decided to take a walk up to Oxfam in Jesmond to see my friend Katie Knowles (who I met at an event curated by the wonderful Craig Puranen Wilson) but I hadn’t seen her since before the first lockdown. I was surprised that she was there at the till where we hugged but didn’t kiss (we were masked).

We made a date for lunch at Snackwallah but then had to cancel , and made it for Wednesday after, My friends Krista and Nicky told me about an exhibition at Newcastle Contemporary Art by Chris Morton the former Art Director at Stiff Records of his lifetime of design work in the Music Industry. I asked Katie if she fancied it and she said yeah lets do it so we did.

Like any Art Exhibition you expect to enjoy and be around in maybe twenty minutes , and although this contained album covers , singles covers , advertising , T Shirts and other miscellaneous art work, this ended up being much longer because we were taken round it by Chris Morton himself. I can’t really find much online about him but his Instagram feed is here.

Chris started with a demo of how a Theatre of Hate image was produced using several layers to form a composite image. Then the first image was one he had drawn for Stiff Records to the exact size when the normal method was to draw much larger so the reduced image became much sharper, but it still looks good. It was the first advertising artwork for Stiff.

The video explains what I remember of Chris’s tour and starts off with some single covers which I bought as a teenager such as The Damned’s “New Rose” which I always rated as a proper punk single as opposed to the heavy metal that was the Sex Pistols “Anarchy In The UK”. There was also the razor blade infested “Blank Generation” by Richard Hell (ex Television) and the Voidoids.

We then moved on to album covers and Chris told us how the artwork always related to the content of each album , often on a track by track basis , and surmounting copyright claims by applying various processes to images so they could be classed as new art. I am doing this by my very fallible memory , although the tour and exhibition are very memorable.

The Jimmy Pursey Alien Orphan was the one that was retouched to avoid copyright issues and the Philip Glass one displayed the difference between true North and Manetic North and Glass was very impressed with the concept.

The Seccession album had every song represented by a picture on the cover.

Next up was a bit of history , Siouxsie and The Banshees "Peepshow" was planned as a small peepshow theatre but due to the band taking off in the USA the cover had to be completed in a day and was the first cover to ever be Photoshopped . This process also resulted in the first totally digital record cover for Phil Rambow , with some extreme pixelation.

Andrew Krivine's book "Reversing Into The Future" features a lot of Chris Morton's work , but they didn't contact him because the thought he might be dead. Not a great excuse in my opinion, but funny in a very black humoured way.

Then finally on the posters he did for Dire Straits he led the names in lower case which had never been done before and he got an award for it.

This is just about the exhibition but I intend to do an interview with Chris. I saw him today with his friend Roman who was overseeing the exhibition and they were both great to talk to. If you can get there it is well worth a visit if you have any interest in the history of Album Cover design.