Over the past year, we’ve developed our latest, large-scale, public art piece. This builds on the permanent public exhibitions created on Nether Hall Road, High Street, and Princegate Alleyway, around our Doncaster Sound Memories, project.
This latest work is an illustrated compilation of some of the music industry’s pivotal, outstanding, legendary, bizarre, funny, or just plain ridiculous, moments. Some of them are obvious and well known, and some are more cryptic. It was designed to be reminiscent of 1970’s / 80s kids’ bedroom wallpaper, with a repeating pattern.
Music train-spotters might guess most of these references. Can you? If you get stuck, we’ve created a legend below, which explains the stories.
The project concept, design concept and most of the image content, was created by our CEO, Steven Mundin. However, these types of pieces are always richer for the input of other people…
A couple of contributions came from Yorkshire social enterprise legend and departed friend, Dave Thornett. It also won’t come as a surprise that the actual execution of the individual designs are the handy-work of our long-time creative co-conspirator, Jamie Bubb.
We borrowed from The Fall, for the title of this piece, just because it seemed to fit.
This first rollout, now features around first-floor corridors in our city-centre HQ. We’ve fully committed to the wallpaper concept and actually had it printed on wallpaper.
(Even more audacious plans will follow…)
Who could forget the time that Icelandic music superstar, Björk, inexplicably attacked the journalist at the airport... Nobody got seriously hurt, so we can laugh about it now.
Not just the inventor of the first solid-bodied electric guitar, but a pioneer of multi-track recording. Thank you, Les Paul, for your contribution to music.
Anybody remember that time that Sheffield music legend, Jarvis Cocker, made a deserving mockery of the pomp of Michael Jackson's performance at the Brits, getting up on stage to gesture flatulence? Nice one, Jarvis.
Just one of those legendary performances that sends a shiver down your spine every time you watch it. Nirvana doing MTV Unplugged.
Janis Joplin. Jim Morrison. Jimmy Hendrix. Amy Winehouse. Kurt Cobain. Brian Jones.. All members of the 27 Club: music artists who died before their time, at the tender age of 27.
Aptly shown in purple, the genius songwriter, musician and producer, Prince, had a disagreement with his record label, so changed his name to, well, nothing! He became known as the symbol that is shown on his face, or sometimes, 'the artist formerly known as Prince'.
In the height of punk in the late 70s, when TV was still very stuffy, they made the mistake of inviting the Sex Pistols and friends onto the Bill Grundy show. He treated them with disrespect and got what he deserved, encouraging them to swear on live TV, and they gladly obliged. Hilarious.
Not only did a bunch of Americans absolutely nail the sometimes ridiculous culture of British heavy metal bands, but they invented the mockumentary in the process. Spinal Tap, directed by the late, great, Rob Reiner, a work of genius that gets better every watch. These ones go up to 11...
After mistaking it for what he thought was a rubber toy, Rock legend Ozzy Osbourne, frequently referred to as the Prince of Darkness, bit the head off a real bat that was thrown on stage at one of their concerts in 1980.
A simple and beautiful, iconic moment. Bob Marley showing off his football skills, having a kick about in the park with his band. A moment that really seemed to capture the soul of one of the world's greatest music artists.
Referred to as the '68 Comeback Special', Elvis Presley's legendary TV concert aired in December 1968. It marked Presley's return to live performance 7 years and is one of his defining moments as a pivotal music artist.
Taking a tongue-in-cheek snipe at clichéd rap music videos of the era, the creative chops of Aphex Twin, and Chris Cunningham came together to produce this boundary-pushing music video for the Aphex Twin single, Windowlicker. When you consider the tools available in the mid-90s it's difficult to believe that this was even possible.
In January 1969, The Beatles played their legendary and final public performance on the rooftop of the Apple Corps headquarters at Savile Row in London. Bet it was cold up there in January!
In 2012 members of Russian punk band Pussy Riot, were jailed for after staging an anti-Putin protest in a Moscow cathedral. The women staged a flashmob-style performance of their song 'close to the altar'.
Another groundbreaking yet simple music video. Directed by Spike Jonze, the video for Daft Punk's Da Funk, featured a man with a dog's head walking around New York with the ghetto blaster... and why not!
The never to be repeated frontman of legendary band The Fall, Mark E. Smith, was invited to the NME Awards to receive an award for Godlike Genius. In true Smith fashion, he insulted everybody involved, including the NME, questioned what the award even meant, and signed off by telling Jo Wiley to f*ck off. You have to wonder why they might have expected anything else. Legend.
In July 1976, the Sex Pistols performed two concerts at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester. In the audience were future members of Joy Division, New Order, the Smiths, the Fall, Simply Red, Magazine and Buzzcocks, citing the gigs as being inspiration for their musical careers. Other attendees included Martin Hannett, Tony Wilson and Alan McGee, who later launched influential independent record labels such as Factory and Creation. Sounds journalist Jonh Ingham, punk poet John Cooper Clarke, singer and writer Paul Morley, who later worked for music magazine NME, were also there.
With his second entry in the list, this music video by Chris Cunningham created for the single "Come On My Selector" by Squarepusher, is another miracle of creativity that really shouldn't have been possible in the mid-90s. The synchronisation of complex rhythms and moving image still stands as peak creativity.
Absolutely deserving a place in this list, and perhaps uniquely, just for existing rather than any specific moment, is the legendary, Frank Sidebottom. It's difficult to convey why Frank Sidebottom was creative genius, given it's simply a man with a papier-mâché head playing a Casio keyboard, badly... But in the late 80s and early 90s, Frank was an omnipresent phenomenon of the UK music industry, compering at music festivals, performing with his band and allegedly never breaking character to answer to his real name whilst he was wearing the head. Chris Sievey, the man inside the head, was a unique combination of performance artist, left-field comedian and frustrated recording artist. He was a constant heartwarming reminder of the very best of the human spirit; spreading inexplicable joy through his unique brand of eccentricity. He was also a pioneer of the art of hijacking celebrities with left-field questions, got booed by 30,000 teenage girls while introducing Bros at Wembley, and was such a hero in his hometown of Timperley that thousands of people chipped in after his death to have a statue of Frank erected in the town centre.
In June 1978, American rock and roll punk band The Cramps played a gig for the patients in Napa State Mental Hospital. Frontman Lux Interior, famously opened by saying "Somebody told me you people are crazy, but I'm not so sure about that... you seem to be all right to me." A beautiful moment in music, well worth a watch.
What a concept! What an album! What an artist! What a concert! Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense concert is one of the most inventive live filmed music performances, not just of the 1980s but of all time.
You probably never noticed it until it was mentioned, but this famous skit on Saturday Night Live, performed by Christopher Walken and Will Ferrell, highlights the omnipresent cowbell, which features on every downbeat in Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper." When you listen, it's one of those things where you have to ask yourself what they were thinking. Got to have more cowbell....
The only thing that would make an emaciated, open-shirt man with a quiff and hearing aid, stick out more on TV music chart programme, Top of the Pops in that particular era of British television, would be to wave a massive bunch of gladioli around whilst you mime. That was frontman of The Smiths, Morrissey's plan when the band performed their single, "This Charming Man" on the programme in 1984. An unforgettable performance.
Bob Dylan made waves in the folk music scene when he decided to play an electric guitar. This controversy peaked when playing at Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1966, when an audience member famously shouted the insult "Judas" at Dylan between songs.
Bringing his 1955 song "Folsom Prison Blues" to life, Johnny Cash performed live and recorded his first live album in January 1968, at Folsom Prison in California, aptly naming the LP which was released on Columbia Records, 'At Folsom Prison'.
How could we put something like this together and not include the Beatles' Yellow Submarine, which, as well as being a song, also became an animated musical film with the soundtrack released as an album of the same name. A landmark in music artist visual creativity, globally recognisable by nothing more than this simple image.
After accidentally becoming one of the biggest bands in the world, and making a pile of money they weren't particularly fond of, 'art-terrorist' duo, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, otherwise known as the KLF, burned £1 million (in real £50 notes) on the island of Jura, Scotland, in 1994. It was the ultimate act of proving a point, but nobody is quite sure of what that point was.
Jimi Hendrix famously set his Fender Stratocaster on fire for the first time on March 31, 1967, at the Astoria Theatre in London, but his most iconic guitar-burning performance took place at the Monterey Pop Festival on June 18, 1967. One of the most iconic moments in music history, gifted to us all by the greatest electric guitar player the world has ever known.
In June 2004, David Bowie got a lollipop stuck in his eye which was thrown by a fan while he was performing at a Festival in Oslo, Norway. Bowie laughed it off and told the crowd he would punish them by playing a much longer set. What a legend!
The centre inset and title of this piece, "The Wonderful and Frightening World of the Music Industry," is inspired by and borrowed from the Fall's 1984 album "The Wonderful and Frightening World of the Fall"
