The Work That Made Me: Jim Fry

Jim Fry is a visual artist, evergreen pop conceptualist and strategist with the glam-shock combo Earl Brutus (1994 – 2005) post-millennial pop-modernists The Pre New (both with ex-World of Twister Gordon King) and in 2020 joined forces with fellow snarkitect and accomplice in pop-culture deconstruction Luke Haines (The Auteurs/Black Box Recorder/Baader Meinhof) on the radio play Test Driving the New Prius.

Jim has now focused his perceptive panoptics onto a book A Licence to Rock and Pop: An Inventory of attitude, a critical self-help manual for the wary and weary amongst us, tired of saturation and fadvertising overkill, perplexed by the perpetual pantomime of formulaic mosaics this book is a necessary panacea to all your ailments.

The ad/music video from my childhood that stays with me…

Jim> Rothmans Cigarette Advert 

There was a printed advert in the 70’s for Rothmans Cigarettes. In the ad the cigarette packet is in full view, sat on what appears to be the controls of a cockpit of an aircraft. The male hand, with Rolex watch round the wrist, is dressed in pilot’s uniform with the sleeve markings of a senior officer. 

This is a captain in charge of an aircraft, and he is smoking a Rothmans during flight (during take off even). This must have been one of the first ‘aspirational’ images id ever set eye on. Even at a young age I’d calculated out that the figure in this image was better than me, more sophisticated and in a profession, I could only dream of. Perhaps if I smoke Rothmans cigarettes, I could become more like him.

David Bowie had already taught me to smoke at school, but if Captain Rothmans had got there first, he would have converted me. Either way this advert, often seen in Sunday Magazine Supplements, confirmed that smoking was ‘correct’ and the practice of the “real man”.

The ad/music video/game/web platform that made me want to get into the industry…

Jim> This is not an Ad / Video / Game or Web Platform – it is a visit to an art gallery as a 17-year-old graphics student   

Fur Cup and Saucer – Meret Oppenheim

I had limped through school leaving without much, just a one-grade CSE in photography. It was 1978, Punk was caving into the more industry led New Wave. In Stockport, with the world at my feet on a zero budget I had enrolled on a Graphic Design course at the local tech college because it mentioned something about photography. This is where I met more than a couple of like-minded souls, people who would help shape my outlook, who occupied the same world as me. The course was ok, he people on it were magnificent.

The local education authority, to their credit, been able to fund train tickets for students to go on a day trip to the Dada and Surrealism Exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in ‘that’ London. An early start on Friday the 3rd of March 1978, a three-hour train ride and we were in the presence of all the Da Da big hitters; the Duchamp urinal / the bike wheel attached to the stool / the bottle rack and works by Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Joan Miro and more excitedly, The Fur Cup and Saucer by Meret Oppenheim, lit like the crown jewels in a glass case. I was a character without the complex, pretentious and over thinking theory that was always attached to fine art and to this 17-year-old the cup and saucer was deeply intriguing and so simple all at the same time, it was so dumb it was beautiful, it was also a big laugh. A lot like many great ads. 

I had been recently told by pseudo intellectuals in the New Musical Express or Sounds (or was it real intellectuals on Granada TV) that Punk Rock was Day One / Ground Zero and nothing close to its antagonism and rebellion had come before, but the cup and saucer was made in 1936?, it confused me and made me laugh at the same time, it was just a fur cup and saucer (and spoon) sending out a simple signal to a teenager from South Manchester. It was punk rock.

Let’s face it, with over three million unemployed and one CSE in photography I was hardly going to be a highflyer, no future for me, but the surrealists had the right idea and like them I would do what I wanted now, without explanation, and the people would just have to accept it. 

It says on the internet that: Meret Oppenheim’s fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon ‘challenges our sense of normalcy by combining domestic objects with wild elements and represents a collision between polite society and our raw, inner selves’.

Polite society and our raw inner self is a pretty good description of a Cheshire teenager in 1978.

Later that night after running riot round soho for a couple of hours the 20 odd tech students would make it back by intercity though Stockport across Manchester to Salford University where we would watch Blondie (from NYC) play live. We felt cool, cultured, it was good day.

The music was loud, the people looked good – and someone in the audience threw a cucumber wrapped in a condom onto the stage, it was 1978. 

The creative work that I keep revisiting…

Jim> Massive Attack Unfinished Sympathy ft Shara Nelson – directed by Baillie Walsh 

The opening scene is with two ball bearings in a guy’s hand and a dog with sunglasses. 

This short film says so much without doing much at all. No ‘action’ takes place, just a walk down an unknown street and a cameo appearance from the Massive Attack team.

At a time when pop music promos were blatant adverts featuring band member who appear to be wearing their record advance with no particular style or direction Massive Attack’s Unfinished Sympathy promo carries a style and attitude unseen in any other music promo.

Nothing is ever fixed or confirmed in this short film, it could be Mexico or some lost South America suburb, it could be a David Lynch set.

Filmed during the magic hour in warm half-light It appears to be shot in one take as vocalist and M A collaborator Shara Nelson strides with purpose. 

The pace of her journey in perfect synchronicity with the song’s rhythm, yet the sound and the visual are uncomfortably at odds with one another.

If music is about attitude that this film has it in skip loads, unfinished sympathy is exactly what it comes across, yet there’s a tread mill / hamsters wheel quality about the walk that the viewer feels without knowing it. 

She may be free but there a sense of being trapped that sits perfectly with the track. The only direction Shara Nelson is walk is forward, and she just walks on and on. 

This is a film without end or conclusion, a small slice of time in the life of someone trying to break away.

I can watch this promo over and over again and every time I find something new in it. It’s a masterpiece.  

My first professional project…

Jim> Minutes: Multimedia Fanzine 

My self and oldest friend Gordon King had left Stockport College by now with a little knowledge in graphic design and all too aware of how impactful a record sleave could communicate an idea. I’m someone who can’t play a musical instrument but I had to be as close to the musical action as possible so a fanzine would be the answer.

So, I’m working at a printers in Cheadle Cheshire and Gordon is at screen printing in Northampton over the phone one evening it was decides we would create a fanzine called Minutes.

Fanzines were traditionally printed on a banding machine or photocopied and held together with one staple, that late '70s format had been well covered and is now found in the pages of cultural history, but this was the very beginning of the 1980s, there was a shift with the new decade so we decided to make Minutes like a ‘Jackdaw’ folder, it would be a collection of lose pieces of paper and found artifacts made available to us, and with our executive access to various print formats we could create a business like folder fit for a Factory Records Board Meeting, after all ‘ready-mades were for everyone’

Issue one was housed in Gordons Unknow Pleasures / Peter Saville cover inspired sleeve complete with thermographic black on black lettering – it was a far cry from London’s Sniffing Glue or Sheffield’s Kill Your Pet Puppy. 

It was the eighties now and we saw it coming.

We would review gigs and records ourselves and encouraged mates and family members to write short features for us, we would stay at work late and taking advantage of the facilities, once we had enough material, we met one weekend in Middle England and collate the whole thing together.

It was easy to shift because it looked so beautiful. Rough Trade took a few copies and asked for more, the local record stores took some. We took them to gigs and tried to avoid ever giving them away, we made lots of new friends and soon it was a sell out. 

We only ever made two issues and the second instalment would be more even more abstract: A grey envelope with a rubber stamp on it, like a dossier from a spy movie.  Amongst the single sheet reviews was a piece of sandpaper and a small piece of wood – simply entitled ‘Wood Action’ so you could sand a smooth surface on a piece of timber whilst reading about The Pop Group and A Certain Ration. 

The piece of work that made me so angry that I vowed to never make anything like *that*…

Jim> I have a happy talent of blanking out anything that annoys and upsets me. This ‘gift’ of mine means I get to get on with the next thing without being tainted by the inferior that has gone before it. It’s a very useful tool when you are trying your best to be productive.

Yes, I know that there are many things that get on my nerves and irritate me, songs, adverts, pieces of work that act as benchmarks to repel me, a bit like a lighthouse warning the ship to stay away from the rocks. But let’s not dwell on the plentiful crap, Let’s not waste our precious time.

The piece of work that still makes me jealous…

Jim> Metal Box – Public Image Ltd.

I grew up in that age of the album and more importantly the album cover. 

Noel Gallagher recently and rightly said that bringing album artwork home was bringing fine art into your humble home, while the wealthy put art on their walls the rest of us put art on our floors and into to our record collections.

After the Beatles Sgt Pepper’s artists like David Bowie / Pink Floyd / Led Zeppelin and Alice Cooper acted upon this idea of the working man’s art with great investment and expense making their sleeves special, its wasn’t about putting a press shot of the artist on the front now, it was more than that and we, the pop buying public, soaked it all up. 

So, what does Jonny Rotten aka Lydon do now he’s left the notorious Sex Pistols? How does he keep his audience tuned in and on side? 

Public Image Ltd’s Metal Box must be the great response to those record sleeves. 

Throughout history new artwork has always been a response to another’s previous response and so on and album cover artwork could be the same. 

Metal Box’ both the title of the album and the description of its cover packaging was the perfect post punk gesture, reminding us it was just a mass-produced product like everything else, and it even looked like a unused dustbin.

Pop artist Richard Hamilton’s anti – designed White Album was a reaction to the previously released glorious Sgt Peppers. We had seen sleeve designs from ‘real’ and ‘actual artists’ like Andy Warhol before with Sticky Fingers by the Stones, but Metal Box is the album Marcel Duchamp (the overlord of appropriation) would have created had he been invited, and it outran all that went before it.  

PiL would go on to release a product respectively named across the formats as Album, Cassette, CD etc. this was another great deign feat but no one including themselves have gone beyond Metal Box and I am sickened with jealousy every day that I never came up with an idea as good as that one.

The creative project that changed my career…

Jim> There is no one central project that I can recall radically shaping my career.

I’ve not always chased the big money projects and jobs, and this may go back to the first question I answered where pleasing myself was always the priority and more important that an illustrious career in the media.

I’m sure there is something out there I worked on that shifted perspective, but it doesn’t come to mind right now. My work has rolled forward changing subtly over the years, there was no single ‘bolt out of the blue’.

The work that I’m proudest of…

Jim> The Death of a President – Channel 4 Picture Campaign 

Cause Trouble, Make Change.

These were the kind of top-line sloganizing rhetoric you would expect to hear when you work in the marketing department at Channel 4 Television. 

I’m always suspicions of these kinds of manifestos, its best to look at the source that they are coming from rather than the slogan itself, that will tell you more about the motive.

As you can imagine at a mainstream UK broadcaster, causing trouble is more, a notion banded around in meetings, rather than an actual action. 

However, working with a docu-drama about the imagined assassination of US President George Bush (the younger, who was in office at the time) there was an opportunity to go big.

We had been sent a raft of images taken by extras on set when they witnessed the fictional shooting of the president (a lookalike) in a carpark under a hotel in Chicago. Often with television drama money is liberally spent on press photography usually taken by professionals, but there was an image that looked so messy and real that we had to run it, it even echoed the shooting of Jack Ruby. 

We found and downloaded a face pic of the real George Bush on the White House Website and mac’d it onto the single image, forgot to run it pass the legal department and it was shared with the media one Friday morning. 

By lunchtime it was everywhere, and by 3pm on the front of the Evening Standard (the Derry Street Express group were having kittens with excitement) and then the phone started to ring. The poor strung out old press guy didn’t get any sleep. By the following morning it was across nearly every front page in the UK and would cross the Atlantic to the New York Times and a whole host of USA publications. There was even a rumour (and I hope this is true) that our image, on front of a US Newspaper, made it into the Oval Office and was met with a one-word response … ‘DISGUSTING’.

As the reaction to the picture gained momentum, we were adamant that we would release only the one image, despite the appetite for more images and more info about the film. This all played into our favour and if the Channel and the Production company wanted publicity, then they got it. 

This was team work of course and I cannot take the credit for the whole campaign, but less is more as they say and from one slightly out of focus 35mm black and white image came a riot of press interest and when the film finally made it to the TV screens, the image ended up splashed across a huge panoramic billboard on Hammersmith Flyover.

I was involved in this, and it makes me cringe…

Jim> Earl Brutus – Album Track:Karl Brutus 

When making the Earl Brutus album ‘Your Majesty… We are Here’ we carved out a situation where we could record happily at our own pace without interruption. Being left alone was almost written into the contract we signed.

When a record label throw tens of thousands of pounds at a newly signed band they are wanting to keep an eye on progress and their investment to ensure a suitably delivered product. Fair enough, but more from experience the other guys in the band than me, there was need to be isolated, to avoid being A and R’d at all cost.

Our album was released in the mid '90s and I’m very very proud of it, apart from one track called Karl Brutus (a great title no problem there). 

Things were going well and the record was taking shape nicely but it was suggested from a (unnamed) label leader that we needed something perhaps more in sync with the times to ensure better sales. The trouble was that those times were what we now refer to as ‘Brit Pop’ which was a dim musical fad that celebrated locally sourced cultural British bullshit. It was very ‘pro UK’ as if music never existed in other parts of the world with songs about stalking schoolgirls on local bus rides, roast beef for lunch on Sunday, fake Greyhound racing, meeting students in supermarkets, and how hard it was emotionally and personally to be a rockstar now that you’ve a hit record. 

Organically (not deliberately) Earl Brutus were never part of that ‘scene ‘and without being aware at the time, we had somehow thrown ourselves clear of it, we have even being touted, via hindsight, as to have helped dismantle the though whole thing. All of this is nonsense.

So when the A and R comes to the studio on a Sunday evening to encourage us to add some cockney ‘oomph’ into the album, being nice guys, we ended up doing the pub singalong that would have sat perfectly on one of the more mediocre Brit Pop outings and the track got named Karl Brutus.

That track is a piece of shit on an otherwise great piece of work. It’s a shame because the reast of that album so complete. That was compromise I guess, and compromise is the devil talking.

And the lesson learnt from this? - Follow your instincts and never fashion-conscious A and R men,

I should add that when I got to organise the running order on the 20 years later box set reissue and vinyl release, luck would have it and the album’s running time was too long for the long vinyl record format and one track had to go. 

Footnote:

David Bowie, who we know is most celebrated for his experimental approach to popular music, once said that he was most disappointed with the results when he made the mistake of ‘double thinking his audience’ and that’s when he made the worst records of his near perfect career. 

Now I’m not saying our band has the kind of historical clout that Bowie has, but Karl Brutus by Earl Brutus is the ‘Let’s Dance’ and ‘Tonight’ albums all rolled into one song and best deleted from pop history.

The recent project I was involved in that excited me the most…

Jim> A Licence to Rock and Pop – An Inventory of Attitude – By James Fry (Slim volume) 

It took a while but last year I got my first book professional published.

A Licence to Rock and Pop is a manual on how to be in a band. The reader follows ‘useful’ information chapter by chapter, taking note of the directions and suggestions. It’s almost like a board game, very visual, sometimes with image only chapters, and help on ‘How to Take Drugs’, ‘How to Drink Alcohol’, and Ego and Stance. All the good things are bad things.

It never discusses music, only the attitude attached to popular music over the last 50 years. 

It’s all about learning how to behave badly though history. It holds the mirror up to the modern-day music industry without pointing the finger at a singular artist, but I’m sure we all have one in mind that needs ‘teaching a lesson’.

At the end you’re invited to fill out a questionnaire to apply for a licence to Rock and Pop.

In many ways the book is the natural conclusion to the subjects dealt with in this interview It comes from the heart of a worldly music fan and photography obsessed old bloke. 

It could be a cry for help, deeply personal in many ways and without being a traditional biography, very biographic.

Heavily influenced by Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage and Ways of Seeing (both books worth exploring readers) The book resonates brilliantly with the modern 21 century approach to pop stardom and the culture of ‘approval’ and it’s an essential read for those who aspire to be pop stars and those who find the whole ‘X Factor’ ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ hilariously depressing.

To conclude I’m incredibly proud of the result and getting it published, and like many of my creative adventures, it took a while, but we got there. 

More so, it has inspired me to publish the near complete Jodrell Atomic – a photographic study and love letter to the Lovelle Space Telescope in Cheshire. 

Available later this year.