Cup Café

We're really happy to be a part of this event, for such a good cause...

It's FREE, and simply takes place to entertain people whilst they sit in the sun and enjoy our yummy food!

We'll have the brilliant Julie E. Gordon (ex-Happy Mondays) singing for us, for an hour or so from 12.30pm onwards...

Find her at:
http://www.my...space.com/julieegordon

(donations to refugee street homeless campaigns welcome)



This FutureSonic EVNT is being curated by Single Cell Collective, making a series of urban musical interventions taking place around Manchester city centre. Take a trip through public / private spaces, experiencing unique performances and collaborations from Manchester-based and refugee community artists.

The project is supported by Refugee Action and documented by People's Voice Media, the event will raise awareness of destitute, street homeless refugees in Manchester.

So pop in for some lunch and enjoy!!Read More

Switchopen is the Illustration and design company run by Nick Rhodes. Nick has been involved within the rock poster scene since 2000, designing and illustrating posters for many bands in the UK and United States.

Nick has made hand screen printed limited edition posters for bands including Queens of the Stone age, The ...Decemberists, Elbow and Ian Brown to name but a few.

He began by illustrating rock posters for his friends band, progressing in to screen-printing when he purchased and set up his own screen print shop with in Manchester UK. Nick illustrates and hand prints all of his poster work, delivering unique hand drawn and detailed imagery within each of his Rock posters. He has shown his artwork nationally and internationally.

Switchopen is a fully functioning art studio, housing a range of print machines (screen/lino/digital), all primed ready for action to handle a full spectrum of design projects. If you are interested in commissioning Switchopen to design and produce artwork, please do contact Nick at http://www.switchopen.com


Gigposters (A British Perspective):

The Rock Poster (or Gigposter to use the American terminology) can, in the modern world, be regarded as Art with a capital "A". It is a movement populated by risk-takers producing exciting work on canvas, plastic, velvet, metal, and wood. Silk-screened, litho printed, woodblock printed, spattered, photocopied and collaged. One group of resourceful printers even used a steamroller to execute a print of enormous dimensions on their studio floor. Many of these methods echo the rebellious nature of the very bands their posters seek to announce; the visual equivalence of rock-star swagger, spitting in the eye of the mainstream.

This particular art form began as a generic advertising poster, using a set design (usually based on circus or carnival graphics) with a large blank space into which the individual details of the performance were then printed. Every design was basically the same, irrelevant of the style of the music being promoted. Crucially they were not seen as "product" but purely as advertising media, used to promote ticket or record sales of the artists concerned. It was only much later (from 1965 onwards) that the denizens of the Counterculture took hold of the format and made it their own. American graphic artists in particular decided that the music poster was an ideal forum to promote the underground acts they admired whilst also enabling them to experiment with image and typography. By producing fantastic psychedelic graphics in Day-Glo inks they also inadvertently became famous themselves within those Counterculture circles. Posters suddenly became collectable, not only as memorabilia connected to the memory of an event (the gig), but for their inherent artistic quality.

Whilst being a predominantly American art form, the Gigposter also became popular in Britain, particularly during the late 1960's and early 1970's. However, the British preoccupation in the area of Rock Art seemed to gravitate more towards the LP cover rather than the Gigposter, with design groups such as Hipgnosis and individual artists like Peter Blake creating iconic album cover images that transcended the genre to become part of the mainstream visual language.

Today, with the advent of CD jewel cases the surface area of the album cover has diminished radically, leaving the graphic artist very little to work with. Now with the advent of music downloads, the canvas has all but disappeared altogether. However, the album cover's demise has ushered new life into the Gigposter. Music fans have always craved a visual representation of their beloved band, whether it is a ballpoint image scribbled on the cover of a school book, or a heavy metal fan painstakingly embroidering the band's logo onto the back of a denim jacket. With this gradual extinction of the album cover the Gigposter is rapidly gaining momentum and the attention of music fans as the favored item of choice to visually represent their band. Unlike the tee-shirt, which is often a corporate product, usually carrying the generic CD cover art or band logo, the best Gigposters seek to display through their imagery the very soul of the band and to interpret the subtle autumnal moods that underpin the music. In short, the Gigposter gets inside the heads of the musicians and creates tangible imagery that visualizes their music. The success or otherwise of these posters lies with the fact that very often the visual artist is actually a fan of the band whose poster he or she is designing. The artist understands and appreciates the music and, crucially, has the skill to interpret this feeling in a visual medium. This adds an extra dimension or frisson to the work, as opposed say to the commercial in-house design teams who will often handle all the artwork for a particular label, but who may not have an intrinsic "feel" for the band or the music they are designing for. They are simply working towards a brief set by the management. By contrast the Gigposter artist may often actively contact a favorite band to ask if they can design a poster specifically for them. There is a bond created within that aesthetic that cannot be faked and which adds to the overall integrity of the work.

In years to come the Gigposter can only increase in value but not merely in a fiscal sense, though the system of screen-printing limited edition runs will obviously ensure added value in future years. However the function of the Gigposter as a historical document of a cultural event that happened at a particular time, in a particular place makes it an integral part of our universal creative identity. It becomes an object of beauty that age and the passage of time can only make richer. These posters will transcend the label of mere advertising or printed ephemera and, arcane as they may seem, Gigposters will become a wonderful glinting thread in the vast tapestry of the arts.

Martin Greaves (dinosaurmuseum.com) August 2008

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