CHAPTER 1 - THE ROOTS OF INDEPENDENT MUSIC
PETER SAVILLE (9 October 1955)
The old hippy who produced Spiral Scratch, would take care of the music
A talented art school graduate, who created Factory’s distinctive look.
Was an English record producer and an original partner/director at Tony Wilson’s Factory Records. Hannett produced albums by a range of artists, including Joy Division, the Durutti Column, Magazine, John Cooper Clarke, New Order, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, and Happy Mondays. His distinctive production style utilized unorthodox sound recording and technology, and has been described as sparse, spatial, and cavernous.
Is an English art director and graphic designer. He came to prominence for the many record sleeves he designed for Factory Records, which he co-founded in 1978 alongside Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus.
Probably the best introduction to Martin Hannett’s psychosis is a quote from Peter Hook: “In the studio, we’d sit on the left, he’d sit on the right and if we said anything like ‘I think the guitars are a bit quiet, Martin, he’d scream, ‘Oh my god! Why don’t you just fuck off!’” Fuelled by heroin and marijuana, Hannett was brilliant, elusive and difficult all in one. He would request the band to do take after take, but rather than explicitly saying what needed to happen, he would vaguely demand, “do it again, but this time, more cocktail party” or “more yellow”. Once he famously asked for another take “slower but faster”, all in the same breath. While some of his behaviour was merely wild eccentricity, occasionally his antics would become obsessive, verging on the edge of (or spilling over into) lunacy.
THE STORY
MARTIN HANNETT (31 May 1948 – 18 April 1991)
Peter Saville designed many record sleeves for Factory artists. He was highly inspired by chief propagandist for the New Typography, Jan Tschichold, about whom he read in Herbert Spencer’s Pioneers of Modern Typography. In 1980, Saville designed cover for Joy Division’s last album, Closer. The album was released shortly after the punk-band member Ian Curtis’ suicide, featuring a controversial image of entombed Christ’s body. However, the cover was designed before the tragic loss of the band which was later proved by the rock magazine New Musical Express working on the feature based on the album, several months earlier. During 1980s Saville’s work took a turn from conventional graphic designing to unorthodox. A well-known design critic Alice Twemlow described Saville’s designing practice as that he would irreverently pick an image from some historical art and then de-contextualize and recontextualize it in another art.
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