Crack

When Crack walks into the Jacknife studio our heroes surround us.

Joe Strummer and Brody Dalle adorn the wall and a model of Sid Vicious protected by glass stares menacingly back at us. A huge paint splattered screen-printing press sits in the corner and the whole room smells of wooden floorboards and paint. The space is productive, worn in and ruggedly beautiful.

Tucked away in a room above The Croft on Cheltenham Road, the Jacknife studio is a veritable Aladdin’s cave of musical homage. Creators of limited edition gig posters with a thematic and artistic edge that sets them apart from the poster reel of WH Smith, Jacknife make prints for bands, for venues and for the public.

Loosely based on classic American gig posters from the 50’s, the style is distinctive, powerful and representative of some of the most innovative bands and performers of our time. In a perfect marriage of art and music, Jacknife’s work is also a step above the standardised gig artwork. Is there is a better way to commemorate a fantastic gig than with a limited edition piece of artwork that captures the artist in that particular moment?

Founder member Chris Hopewell guides Crack through Jacknife’s story, through inspiration to emancipation, to artwork inspired by Damon Albarn’s gran. He leaves no stone unturned when discussing what is a great artistic success story for Bristol.

So Chris, tell us the beginnings of Jacknife?

“Before I started Jacknife we were doing music videos for years and years for a company called Collision and in 2005 we went to SXSW. We went to this thing called Flatstock, which is a big gig poster convention. Everyone who is anyone in that field goes along and puts their stuff up. I went there with my business partner from Collision called Ben and we saw all these really crazy prints and posters. I knew of their existence before, having collected rock artwork, but to see them all in the flesh and to have a little bit of money to buy some of them was great.

“So we then came back and bought a press for £200 on Ebay. We’ve had it since then and it’s pretty fucked now really. It’s this old French thing from the 60’s, but we’ve sort of modified it and taken bits off it and really messed around with it, so it’s not strictly performing as we’d like any more. We also bought a drying rack for a tenner. We initially had a studio over on Cumberland Road in Bedminster. It was a great space, an old sail hanger. It has since been pulled down for more harbour-side living, because we clearly don’t have enough of that already (laughs). We taught ourselves how to create prints there.

“My brother Bear, who was working for us as a studio manager, went off and did a course at Spike Island (art studios) in shooting screens. Using Spike Island’s facilities to teach us how to shoot screens and then applying it to our own studio taught us exactly how to properly screen print.”

When you came back from The US, were you quite single minded about where you wanted to take Jacknife?

“Back then I was directing edits on music videos. It was very computer, visual-based stuff. After you do that for a few years you find your spine becoming more curved, you put on more weight and it’s just not a good place to be really. I wanted to do something physical and doing screen-printing is a very physical thing. It involves physically mixing colour. The lost art of taking paint colours and mixing them. What I still find the most fascinating aspect of the process is getting two different colour paints and putting them in jar, mixing them and creating a new colour. It isn’t digital and doesn’t involve paying someone £200 to grade colour. You can sit there and make it happen and that’s the beauty of it. It’s a tactile thing, you can choose the paper, and you can pick it up and feel the weight and the texture. Everyone who is passionate about this loves the tactile nature of prints. The printing has to be right.”



Was there always a willingness to combine being hands-on and pro-active with a love of music?

“Like a lot of people, I’ve been intensely into music all my life. That’s why I started doing the music videos. Before that I did graphic design in the late 80’s and 90’s. I used to put together album covers and posters for some very underground punk bands. Very low-key, half-paid stuff, but it was more out of an interest of doing it because I loved that kind
of music. My brother Bear and I helped put on a lot of gigs, so we’d do two or three posters a week. We designed them and got commissions to do album covers, so we’ve been doing it since way back then. I keep meaning to put some of those old posters up on our site, but I can’t find an A3 scanner.”

How was the first Jacknife poster developed and who was the lucky artist or band?

“We were doing a video at the time for a band called The Young Knives. I rather nervously asked whether I could do a poster for them. Now for a band it’s all very well doing their video, but doing an art poster for them is another leap of faith. Just because you might be a good film director doesn’t necessarily mean you are going to effectively churn out good representative artwork. But they said yes, so the first poster we did was based on a scene from the music video we did that incorporated these three chairs. The video really informed the poster.”

How have you developed the distinct Jacknife style?

“Since day one my aesthetic stuff has almost had a feel of the 50’s and the 80’s to it. By this I mean the use of women and how they are displayed as strong, frontal objects. I don’t like to do women as victims or sexual objects. The thing I like to do is make them powerful, as they were portrayed in the 50’s and 80’s. Like they were before Loaded magazine, where the whole female race was put back 50 years. ”

Just looking around your studio, we can see Alice Glass and Brody Dalle. Are these the kind of women you are talking about?

“My favourite kind of music is female led rock groups. I think the women you get in those sort of bands are so much cooler than their male equivalent. Quite simply because they’ve had to work so much harder to get there.”

Is it a case of girls find them fascinating because they are unlike the majority of females and intelligent guys find them fascinating because they aren’t in that Loaded mould?

“People like Brody Dalle and Alice Glass are brilliant role models for young women because they don’t trade on their sexuality. I wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of them.”

In terms of the distribution of prints, where do they eventually end up?

“The way we do it is weird, because initially no money changes hands. If we see a band we like is touring, we approach them and say “can we do a run of limited edition posters?” We then tell them it won’t cost them anything. Say we print 100, or 300 tops for a big band like Queens Of The Stone Age or Blur. The way it works is we give the band and the venue 30 per-cent of the run to sell on the night. We keep the other two-thirds and sell them online.”

It’s great you keep the posters at an affordable price online.

“Well I just walk down Stokes Croft and think ‘God almighty! £400 for that!’ So much art is overpriced. Being based in Stokes Croft, it’s important you do things affordably. You’ve got be part of that affordable art movement. We aren’t printing one or two like some other screen print artists, so that’s why they’ve got to charge a little bit more. We do a run of 200 sometimes, so we’ll do them for £20 and sometimes on the night you can get them for a tenner. Some of them are now worth a hell of a lot more than that mind. If we start running out of that particular print we’ll put the price up”.

Is it ever hard to get bands to say yes?

“It’s really hard to get permission to do this. Most band’s management are tight with their band’s name and image. So to try and get hold of a band you like a lot is often tricky. Seven times out of ten they’ll say no. What we often have to do is physically show them and they’ll be like, “oh I get it, you do prints like they do in America”. The problem is over here a lot of bands confuse you with the people who sell the posters outside the Brixton Academy, which is not what we do. I’ve bought some great posters from those guys, but that’s not our operation - we do art prints.

“Another big difference between those posters and ours, is we decide the image. We ask permission to use the band’s name, but we design everything else from the logo to the images. It ends up being a take on how I see that band at that time, with the music they are playing at that particular moment. The easiest thing in the world would be to produce their album artwork or their current web design. The trick is to be informed by the music and then do something that sums the band up.”

Have you got a specific example of a band you’ve applied that process too?

“The Queens Of The Stone Age ones are particularly popular. They are based on an idea the band had in a music video that was based on a Russ Mayer style Supervixens, Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! woman. Being a big fan of that kind of look anyway, I thought I’d do a set of posters based on a version of these strong, punchy, feisty, female characters, and the band loved it. So that tied in with what they were doing with their imagery at the time and their video. You get a combined push.

“These days if I were to do something for QOTSA, it would be a completely different look. I’ve got so many different styles in my work anyway because you have to meet the style of that band. It’s no good doing half naked women for a band like Blur or Graham Coxon. With Graham Coxon I tried to do something more folky. One of my loves is old-fashioned book covers and earthy colours, so I based one on a 1920’s book cover that Graham showed me. He said: “Do this, but put a ghost of me carrying a guitar in it.”

So do you often have interaction with the artists directly, either before or after the creative process?

“QOTSA were very appreciative. They are one of the bands with the most gig posters ever made for them. So were Eagles Of Death Metal. It’s a case of once you’ve got your foot through the door with one camp, it’s reasonably easy to get them to do something else with you. The band has got to trust you to do it, as sometimes it’s their tour merchandise you are producing for them. It’s part of their business when they are touring. It’s an art meets commerce thing. They’ll always want something cool, original and exciting, but at the same time they’ve still got to sell the fucking things at the gig and pay for petrol to get to the next gig.

“Well…probably not in QOTSA’s case.”

“I’ve also had some good interaction with Graham Coxon. I did loads of videos for him, and I’ve also all his tour visuals. We did one film for each track on his Spinning Top album. I also did a Blur poster for their re-union at Glasto. Graham had told me about a tea-towel that had inspired their song This is a Low. The song has the shipping forecast in it and Damon was inspired to write it because his old dear had a map of England with the shipping forecast printed on it. So we did a poster that inspired that song. It was very popular.”

It’s great how selective you are with the artists you choose to do posters for.

“You have to be. We get offered to do a lot, but because it takes a week, sometimes two weeks to design each poster, it’s a lot of effort. We want to do it for good musicians and artists, but essentially we are just doing a heightened form of throwaway gig poster. This whole thing started way back in The States because someone had banned fly postering. As a result people did these really nice, colourful screen-printed posters for bands because the shops would put them up and keep them up and all the cafes would love to have them in the window. They were more loathed to put up an A4, grubby photocopied flyer.”

If you could do a poster for anyone, who would it be?

“At the moment I’d love to do one for Them Crooked Vultures. Also Kyuss getting back together is something very interesting and something I’ve got to get on. I was very happy to get Crystal Castles. I’d also like to get La Roux on one because she’s brilliant and would look great on a poster. It all depends on what mood I’m in. I’m in a rock mood at the moment.”

What do you have in the pipeline, in the coming weeks?

“The next one we are doing is Godspeed You Black Emperor! It’s going to be great. I’m a big fan. We are also trying to get in contact to do another Black Rebel Motorcycle Club one. We actually printed one for them live at a gig. That’s another thing we do. At the QOTSA Bristol gig, we had the final screen put on at the actual show, which is quite a funny thing. I don’t know anyone else who does that. It’s a happening in its own right.”

So do you print at festivals too?

“Yeah, we’ve done Glastonbury, End of the Road, Lamer Tree. We’d like to do more.”

Has Jacknife it been a profitable exercise?

“It pays for our 'swanky' studio in Stokes Croft, but not a great deal else!!


http://www.jacknifeposters.com

Jacknife posters are all hand silk-screened and limited edition, prices start at £15 and orders are dispatched within 24hrs.

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