PROFILE
Jules Vegas Stiff Records. Barney Bubbles. The Clash. Madness Words Mark Webster Photographs Ross Trevail
Being known for being unknown. Good trick if you can pull it off. Not necessarily the ideal way build a business, though. Bit hit and miss. I mean, can you really go on and on being Anon? Alternatively, you could go the way mercurial, influential designer Jules Vegas has gone throughout a career that now spans five decades, and provide a body of work (ensuring that your name is mainly always on the bottom in the process!) that speaks for itself and for what you’re all about, but never at the expense of the subject matter. As Jules puts it himself, “My big thing is I’ve 58
always been the background boy, a conduit to help artists express themselves. Of my generation, there are many well known designers, but you know more about them than the acts they work for.” This ethos has been played out in a career that started straight out of the London College of Printing at Dave Robinson and Jake Riviera’s seminal Stiff Records label (and where being unknown began, more of which...), before evolving through a symbiotic relationship with the Clash and on to include a diverse range of artists such as Cypress Hill, Adam & the Ants,
Madness and the James Taylor Quartet. Not only does he design groundbreaking sleeves and magazine advertising for the music business, he also produces posters, flyers, book covers, brochures and logos for the media and arts, and is house designer for the Riflemaker contemporary art gallery in Soho; all of which is handled with one thought in his mind – “if you’re actually going to cut down trees, and make paper, and print on it, you might as well produce something that is worthwhile”. The 1930s south London house Vegas shares with his wife, Karen, is simply busting out with everything that >