John Cooper Clarke Directory

A selection of images from the John Cooper Clarke Directory, featuring Barney Bubbles’ wonderfully designed graphic visualisations of the bard’s poetry.

This book is a meeting of two incredible minds of which the outcome is a post-punk graphic design marvel. Essentially a collection of John Cooper Clarke’s poetry from the late 1970s including well known numbers like I Married A Monster From Outer Space, Post War Glamour Girls, Psycle Sluts and I Don’t Want To Be Nice, all in a paperback ‘directory’ designed and illustrated by Barney Bubbles.

In between the pages of the deliberately defaced, tongue in cheek directory we see JCC poems interspersed with bold and playful Barney Bubbles images. As is often the case with Barney Bubbles the imagery is visually very amusing. The designs are evocative of JCC’s particular and unique brand of quickfire Mancunian poetic commentary on everyday life.

Some of the pages feature the bold images created by Barney Bubbles on their own and often the artist takes an image of the idiosyncratically styled JCC in fairly monotonous environs and injects his own anarchic and jocular design twist superimposing these onto the most boring of everyday household objects imaginable, a phone book.

Basically, the book’s a visual treat from start to finish. The selections we’ve chosen here should give an indication of the unique style the pair conceived with this 1979 publication. It’s rare and normally sells for anywhere up to £100.00 on Amazon. Pricey but rather nicey. You can pick up JCC’s records for a fraction of that and you should. If you like the look of the graphic design shown in the book, Reasons To Be Cheerful: The Life And Work of Barney Bubbles by Paul Gorman is the definitive publication and comes highly recommended.

You can see more amazing art and design and read about Barney Bubbles himself at the astoundingly good reasonstobecheerful.com and, the John Cooper Clarke official website is well worth a look too.