I'm Stuart Hammersley, give a part.
OK, where do we go?
Yeah, music matters, OK.
I was just looking when I was asked to do the tour,
looking at the kind of clients we've got at the moment,
and we've got quite a lot in the music sphere now,
from record labors that we were working with in the beginning through to...
..now we're doing stuff for, like, the official charts company,
and Block, which is a big music festival.
This is Ian Durian of Blockheads.
Hit me with the rhythm stick.
It was the first ever seven-inch I bought with my money when I was little.
I kind of remember that moment, because there's a B-side called
There and I've Been Some Clever Bastards.
I remember reading that in a car and getting a slap run ahead from my mum for swearing.
But like a lot of people in the room and a lot of designers,
music's always been a really important thing for me,
and something that I've always enjoyed, and I've always enjoyed design.
And I kind of discovered it through record sleeves,
and these are some of the sleeves that I liked as a teenager,
and moving on, that kind of got me to actually go to college
and start learning about this thing called graphic design.
But the main thing in about the year 2000,
a good friend of mine, Neil,
decided to start a record label and a club night with his friend Sarah,
and that record label was called Tempa, and a club night was called Forward.
So this is in about the year 2000.
I was working for magazines.
Tempa became a job that I did for Neil as a favour,
as something interesting to do to get a bit of free vinyl,
20 quid here and there.
So here's the logo for Tempa.
It's a funny thing.
I think I actually designed this on the phone to Neil in about half an hour
as a kind of a first idea from what he was talking about.
Great.
That was meant to be the Fiat Tempa logo,
which Tempa actually looks exactly like,
which Neil pointed out about a year later,
but it's pure co-incident, honestly.
OK, so Neil played me that tune in my spare bedroom in Ballum in the year 2000,
and I'm going to start a label.
There wasn't a word dubstep.
There was nothing like that at all.
I was really captivated by the music, really liked it.
Neil was a great mate who we bonded with through a love of music already.
So we started doing Tempa,
and like I said, the overriding aesthetic at the beginning
was a sort of reaction against the dodgy kind of club
and underground design that was going on.
Tempa began, it was all really cheap to produce,
two colours, two colour print for the labels,
the sleeves were printed on greyboard,
which was just regular record sleeves turned inside out.
That was the idea for Tempa.
The actual music, like the tune you just heard,
was a bit different, a bit stripped back.
There were a couple of reasons for that,
and partly I was doing it in my spare time,
so we were trying to do something that would be quick to replicate.
But at the time, like I say,
maybe they'd sell 100 records or 200,
and that would be about it.
Again, here's the design of Tempa.
We replicated the idea.
The first pictures were sort of evolved from a technique
called stealing them from a book, basically.
There's a wonderful book by T-Boar Cowman
called Unfashion that Neil bought me for my birthday,
and about the first six Tempa releases
are completely stolen from there.
It worked quite well.
We sort of got away with it for quite a few years.
OK, right.
About six months after Tempa started,
Neil Jolliff, by the way,
my mate from Dorset,
he's the man that invented the word dubstep, OK?
So that's Neil's fault.
He invented it. Neil Jolliff, everyone,
just so I have to say that.
So after he started Tempa, him and Sarah Lockhart,
they started a club where they could play these tunes,
and this club was called Forward,
and it started off at a little place called the Velvet Rooms,
which is now no longer with us on a Sunday night,
but we moved to Plastic People,
and if anyone's ever been to Plastic People,
that's the light show at Plastic People.
It was basically a box underground
with an amazing Function One sound system
and one red light,
and I'd already been hooked by hearing
the first few Tempa releases,
and then Forward started,
and I can't really sort of overstate
how exciting it was to be in the midst of Forward
at the beginning when this stuff was happening.
You kind of go down there, sometimes there'd be 30 people,
sometimes there'd be 60 people,
and you were just in this kind of cavernous room,
and one week you go down and the music would sound like one thing,
literally the next couple of weeks you'd go down again,
and it would have changed again,
and this was all sort of early 2000, 2002, 2003.
It was just amazing,
you get to meet the actual DJs and all the people,
and everyone was kind of really welcoming.
It was such an amazing vibe,
and I think I sort of knew then that it was kind of,
it was a bit special maybe,
I'm not really sure if I did, I don't know,
all I knew was that I was a bit older
than most of the people that were there,
and Acid House was my big epiphany as a teenager,
but this was literally like a second Acid House moment for me,
it just felt really English,
really exciting, really special,
and I was just really lucky to have the chance to do a bit of design for these guys,
and these were some of the sort of flyers for forward,
where much like the music over time,
we just tried to get them as minimal as possible.
Again, it was partly because of the time I had to spend on it,
I had a full-time job,
and anyway, that evolved.
So Neil invented dubstep, the word dubstep,
and it kind of went unnoticed for a while,
and then the kind of big breakthrough thing was in about 2006.
At the time I was art director of magazines,
and I'd become friendly with an older guy from Sheffield,
this chap called Sean Bloodworth, a really lovely photographer,
and I kind of condimined to doing a couple of jobs for Tempa
for absolutely no money.
And then the first kind of big thing was in about 2006,
we did them, it was the first Scream album.
So I've been to forward, I've seen Scream DJ,
he's about, I don't know, he's about bloody 12 or something,
he's like an amazingly talented kind of kid,
and I'd heard him DJ and he's so energetic,
and he was so mental,
the only idea I had was I wanted to photograph him,
the second he'd stepped off the decks,
dripping with sweat, and just to try and capture some of that energy.
So I met Sean, Sean's from Sheffield, I was from London,
we travelled up to Leeds, a West Indian centre,
this enormous place,
and on the night we were due to shoot the Scream,
we had these guys who were the Irish and Stepper sound system.
And the sound system's like having a lorry kind of parked on your chest,
just kind of revving, so fucking loud,
I couldn't hear an absolute thing.
Sean and I were trying to communicate with Sean, nothing,
you know, he was shouting in his ear,
and all we said was before we went in,
we'll grab Ali when he comes off the decks and photograph him,
and it was a round of people,
a lot of the shots we took, people's heads in the way,
anyway, we sort of lucked out,
and this is the shot we got at the end,
really pleased with it,
and this sort of idea of just turning up
and seeing what you could get,
seemed to sort of cement the way Sean and I were going to work
on a temper for, you know, right until now, to be honest.
It's became, it's quite a favourite shot of mine,
it's a favourite shot of Sarah who runs tempas completely,
and unbeknownst to us, you know, this is Ali in the white t-shirt Scream,
the guy on the right in the black,
he's an older brother Jack,
and then the girl in the red t-shirt is a girl
that Jack got off with on the night,
so, you know, there's a nice story to us,
but this whole kind of approach was informed by me,
me going to forward, getting so excited by the night,
wanting to, just wanting to really represent it,
as well as I could avoid those sort of dance music cliches,
give it something a bit special,
so there's Ali there,
and then the colour scheme we used,
which is this, you know, this was all fluoro, yellow and black,
so kind of harking back to my acid house days
of, you know, really, really bright, energetic kind of feel to it,
and there's us, you know, just sort of geeking out
and spending time on all the lovely, the lovely details
of the design,
and that idea of us just sort of rocking up
and seeing what we could get,
sort of spun out into some other releases for Temper,
they started a series called Dubstep All Stars,
where they get the DJs of the scene to sort of come up
and do a mix of what was sort of current at the time,
and this is before Dubstep, you know,
it really kind of blown up as it was.
And the next one we did was this guy called Mark,
who DJ'd under the name Entipe,
and he came from Rygate, which is Surrey or somewhere,
so, and we just liked the idea,
rather than just photographing a DJ in a club,
just kind of going to where they're from
and just seeing a,
I felt like I had a real validity,
just where they are,
where they grew up,
and it means a bit to them,
Sean and I would just rock up,
we turned up at Rygate Station,
and no idea who this guy was,
as me and Sean and an intern guy called Little John,
who was working with us at the time,
standing outside there, he was late,
you know, he's a DJ, so of course he was late,
saying, you know, I don't know what does this guy look like,
does anyone know? We don't know.
All of a sudden we kind of see this sort of,
you can just see it in this picture,
this sort of souped up Audi,
and he kind of comes rocking into the car park,
and there's a sort of a personalised number plate
that says N type,
and Little John's like, yeah, I think that's him.
So, I think retrospectively I've thought about this,
but the thing that Sean and I liked about it was,
you know, we're just trying to represent these people we got to know,
these people we got kind of close to,
it's like, well, so what, you know, he's from Rygate,
and it's kind of a boring suburb of London,
but you know, if you're from Tokyo,
or if you're from New York, and you'd like this music,
then, you know, you want to see where people come from,
it's just like when I was younger,
you know, I wanted to look at sort of hip-hop records,
I wanted to see Public Enemy in a basement in Long Island,
and this is that for them, you know, this is that for them.
Neil, who started temporary, used to joke and say,
Croydon was like Detroit,
just because it was sort of a forgotten suburb,
but when you think about the people that have come out of there
and what they're doing now,
then I don't think he's too far off, really,
so that was a thing with us, you know, that was a thing,
we didn't hire studios, we just thought,
well, we'll rock up, we'll see what we get,
and so we did that with N-Type,
and then another thing is, this is Laurie, DJ's is Apple Blim,
and we sort of rolled down to Bristol for the day,
and got a shot of Laurie,
and then, you know, it's just this beautiful shot of him,
one winter's day as the sun's going down across the track,
so, you know, DJ's sort of behind the decks,
it kind of becomes a bit boring,
so that was temper,
we'd formed this really lovely relationship with temper,
really lucky to sort of be with these guys,
and it's kind of bubbling along, they were selling a bit,
but they'd always sort of formed this relationship with them,
where they're always a perfect client in many ways,
they always saw the value of design
and what it would bring to them in terms of people recognising them and so on,
so I'm just going to spin through another sort of couple of projects
as the years went on,
and the next one was an album we did for Benga,
you know, we met him at Forward again,
and this was his sort of big shot,
the cover shot for Benga was done in a Truman Brewery,
in a spare office, up against a bit of white paper,
he turned up in a white vest, didn't look too good,
so he's wearing my very fashionable black top man cardigan,
and that was it, and I had this idea,
that Benga's music was very, very clinical and precise,
and quite dark and moody,
and sort of wanted to do this sort of spinal tap,
sort of all black kind of sleeve,
and to be fair to the guys at Tempe,
you know, they thought, well, he's quite good, he'll sell a few,
so they went with it, you know,
so we got an opaque black sleeve,
the CD's black, it's black on the back,
and then a whole sort of booklet is completely black,
so it's good fun with them, it was always good fun,
it was always easy, there was not a lot of money floating around,
and at the time, this is Benga,
he did a tune with a guy called Koki Knight,
which was sort of where Dubstep was getting a bit well-known,
but of course, Koki didn't turn up on the day
when we were shooting Benga,
so he turns up at their offices a couple of weeks later,
so again, get him in a corridor, stick him against a bit of white paper,
so we kind of had these two different shots,
which tried to put them together,
so they were in the same room,
but I just thought this kind of idea worked a bit better,
it's kind of got some lovely silhouettes going on,
so Temple were great, they were good fun,
we got to do some good fun projects with them,
die cut sleeves, fluorescent pink vinyl,
you know, where they could, they pushed the boat out,
so that was really fun.
So it's been forward a couple of years,
so we've done the first Scream album,
and now this is 2010,
and hang on a sec.
So it's a bit of a big noise now, Dubstep, I suppose,
and he's the poster boy for it, it's his Scream again,
did this album, he had this,
the name outside the Boxers album floating around for ages,
and it's trying to think of good ideas for it,
I hated it, I hated it, I couldn't think of anything good at all.
Sean and I, Sean Blobber, the photographer,
we had different ideas about building boxes
and going all over the place,
and in the end, because of his schedule,
he's flying around the world everywhere,
we kind of got him for an afternoon,
so this is shot in an office above the record label's office,
again another spare office, a bit like a bengah thing,
this guy's the biggest name in Dubstep at the time,
but I was sure to bring a close-up lens, blew out the background.
So the one idea I had, which I talked about to a few friends,
was this box idea, something simple, something very, very graphic,
which was sticking a big square over the front of their biggest artist
and the biggest name at the time,
who was having some commercial impact.
So fair play to Sean for letting me do this,
and especially to the record label who thought,
yeah, yeah, that's good,
they enjoyed confounding people's expectations temper as a label,
they were great.
The one thing they did make me do, which was put some type on a cover,
which I really didn't want to do,
so in the end, it's partially covered by the square thing,
so the whole square thing became the box idea.
Okay, so a lot of the temp stuff, I still freelance,
still do it in the evening,
so in a weird, incestuous way, the people that started temper
and the people I met up forward,
it's all about these relationships I've found with these people,
there are a lot of different people that would kind of go there.
Geesers from Croydon and people like me,
just been to art school and stuff, it was amazing.
People that you met were really inspiring,
and one of these was a guy called Genius,
and he'd started Rinse their Fem in his mum's kitchen
or something years and years ago.
In 2006, Rinse and Sarah from Tempa,
they got together to take Rinse on to the next level,
and this was around about the time
when Give Up Art actually went full-time,
we started doing it for real,
so one of our first jobs was to rebrand Rinse,
and Rinse were part of Radio Station,
this is their old label,
so it's kind of their old logo,
it's a typical sort of, you know, Photoshop nightmare, sorry, G.
So, you know, we kind of came up with this thing for Rinse,
and moving on from just doing sleeves,
this was our sort of chance to,
G and Sarah always wanted to push it as a brand
and to make the brand as important,
so with Rinse we sort of did the logo,
we kind of came up with this logo mark,
and they did a lot of,
they started to do a lot of events,
so cargo,
so I wasn't a burp, that was me earring.
So first ever magnetic man gig was on this stage in this room at cargo,
so Rinse were always,
it was our chance to sort of step out of just doing sleeves
and kind of approach the whole thing as a brand,
but not in a sort of serious way,
it was always, you know, you get an email going,
oh fuck, we've got a thing tomorrow,
can you do something and you'd work till two in the morning,
and invoice them for 45 quid,
and you get paid three months later,
but you know, it was fun, it was brilliant,
it was, you know, I'd just sat up and give a part,
it was brilliant, you know, I've got my own client,
so again, working with someone you knew
who wouldn't charge a lot of money,
Sean, we kind of did all the Rinse things,
and they sort of started putting these mixes out where
the name Rinse was almost as important as the DJ,
and we have sort of,
based on what we've done with Scream,
with those dubstep mixes, it's, you know,
let's find a way where we can just quickly rock up,
shoot a DJ, so a lot of the times
you'd have 10 minutes with them,
somewhere rainy and wet on a Thursday
before forward, or something,
you kind of got Spyro, or Sean,
you know, one man would be in Sheffield,
and he'd rock up with him, so,
this was a sort of idea of the photography
as the kind of branding thing,
and the Rinse logo and the Rinse mark
sort of lent itself to these sort of different colour treatments,
and G really liked it,
so you kind of ended up with these releases where
it was really simple, you'd always get
a dude on the cover,
a back of his head on the inside,
the Rinse, the nice circular CD on body,
and then they get a chance to show you
what their schedule is for that time,
so, like I say, so with Rinse it was great,
it was our chance to do lots of different event stuff,
the sort of ascetic for Rinse had moved on
from the dubstep thing of sort of
mean and moody urban dread into sort of this kind of,
I don't know, a bit more poppy,
a bit more type heavy, not too serious,
but just, you know, good fun to do,
a lot of events stuff that we do,
and the colour science seemed to become
a really easy way for us to sort of,
not only did it print well as a process colour,
it looked like a solid, but it just became
the key Rinse thing, so that when you saw
all these flyers discarded on the floor
at the end of the night, and they were signed,
you'd know they were Rinse, so Rinse were good,
you had a lot of freedom, like I say,
a lot of having to turn things around
at the last minute, but then it became,
so we did flyers, event stuff, stage designs,
light boxes, all this kind of stuff,
and as Rinse profile grew, you know,
we formed a really nice relationship,
they trusted us, and we just, you know,
they give us a chance to do stuff together,
so kind of event, sort of t-shirts, things like that.
Stage visuals, this was done for Sonar in 2010,
I think, you know, so based on the Rosco artwork,
so of course we still got the chance to do
nice packaging for them,
a fake white sleeves and cases and stuff for Rosco,
and this is a lovely job to do for them,
really fun, they like this kind of bright pop-up
kind of colour stuff, and we sort of span around
into a lot of their other releases,
and even with Katie, we did the stuff for Katie B,
which sort of turned into, initially it was,
there's this girl called Katie B,
can you spend an afternoon doing a little bit of type
for a digital single, and we kind of,
the Katie B type you see was,
some really cheap font from T26,
so I just kind of threw on, and then she became
one of the biggest things in them,
so we had to kind of redraw the whole font,
so I wasn't completely embarrassed every time
you saw her Katie B thing.
But again with them, it was, you know,
they hired these two French fashion photographers
that were sort of, with a team of four or five
different stylists and make-up people,
but we still kind of pushed it into this,
you know, it's just a London girl in the streets,
I kind of liked it, it was still sort of unfussy.
And luckily for us, so this is over,
maybe ten years, you know, Sean and me,
and Rince had sort of made this really nice
kind of friendship, stroke, partnership,
so much to the point that at the end of last year
they funded an exhibition of our work,
which for them was a chance to show people,
you know, what Rince were doing,
and how much they valued the artwork,
and for us it was, you know, we got a space
and it was a lovely thing to do,
so I'm going to play a little minute of this.
Go!
Go!
Go!
Go!
Go!
Go!
Go!
