Always Now: 'Ambient Gravitas' from Peter Saville
A Herb-That-Didn't-Happen™ by Sam Valenti IV
“Yes, the typography is a constant tilt at perfection; the placing of objects within a frame is supernatural and that sense of colour... But you need to talk to Peter to understand why Renaissance Popes would have employed him and never counted the cost. He is an analyst of culture and his own life that has no peer.‘
- Anthony H. Wilson, co-founder, Factory Records, for Creative Review, 2003
Mail Peter Saville Studio <x@y.com>
Thu, Feb 5, 12:24 PM
Dear Sam,
I’m writing upon behalf of Peter. Apologies for the delay we’re very busy.
Over several years working with Peter the only thing I have heard playing during the week is ancient choral music, Peter refers to it as ‘ambient gravitas’.
I suggest you select from any of the following enclosed in the PDF.
Warmest regards, Tom.
Indeed, when I am down or despondent, I’m just as likely to reach for a song as I am the audio of a Peter Saville interview, of which there are plenty. All circling the same general theories, but each contains a little turn of phrase or unique plummage.
I saw a young couple yesterday, and one of them was wearing a Closer tee. For as reproduced and meme’d as the work of Peter Saville is, it remains as indelible, acid-free, and totemic as the moment it was born.
This is the story of a Herb that didn’t happen (see my KLF, James Lavelle, and Insane Clown Posse ones). I attempted, on and off, for a couple of years to reach Peter, but I sort of knew it wouldn’t happen in full; yet one has to try. So we don’t have a true handmade playlist, but at least we now know what echoes through the hallowed work chambers. We can breathe the same air.
Saville’s gift to design and to art as a whole is the tangible proof of the word “zeitgeist,” like that Jennings photo of lighting. He has said that finding that word filled him with a kind of relief, that his concerns were not isolated to himself, and that it was indeed a field of study, something of consequence.
If taste is no longer about knowing the canon (see my death of canon piece, or Shawn Reynaldo’s better-written one), and ideally not about what you own, it is about a sensitivity or way you move through the world, and how you harness that instinct. For instance, a DJ’s taste is not just in the songs owned or chosen, but knowing when and how to employ them, or in more HBS-friendly terms, c/o Clay Christensen, taste is knowing what is the “job to be done.” A joie de vivre coupled with rigor is the differentiator, which is why Peter Saville is the lodestar of all things taste for me.
For the uninitiated, Peter Andrew Saville (Website “under consideration” and probably always will be) CBE RDI (b. 1955) came to fame as co-founder of Factory Records, the vaunted Manchester-based record label that ran from 1978-1992, best known for the music of Joy Division, and their subsequent iteration New Order. But for fans of Factory, there is the rest of the iceberg that we think of most, the lore, the less commercially successful acts (The Durutti Column must be on 30-40 Herb playlists at least), and maybe just its general attitude and its daring approach to identity, a lot of which is attributed to Mr. Saville.
“I’ve always been trying to show some sense of nowness about a thing I’m having to create or communicate about,” he told the fabulous Adam Wray (whose interview with me closes the Ghostly book), who has logged many hours of conversation and his interviews, including Peter Saville Wrote the Source Code, amongst the best Saville studies.
It’s sort of fitting not to get a playlist from Saville; it feels a bit pedestrian. I don’t like the idea of him fussing over anything too much, or, as Adam said when I told him what I got, “Can I actually imagine Peter listening to music?” I can’t, to be honest.
And that’s the appeal of Saville’s oeuvre, it just sort of is, and neither a single image (though it can seem like it) or idea encapsulates it all. The best Saville record sleeves and designs are a form of spiritual rightness. Work that is both tortured and labored, but impossibly aloof, too.
Yes, it's both the regional pride and stoic sincerity of Factory and its equal whateverness that are its real draw, that tension of amateurism and calculation that came via an amalgamation of young people, many with strident egos, moving with complete freedom. Saville has called Factory an “autonomous collective,” acting in concert with little reverence for the rules and a commitment to pleasure, both graphically and sonically. A lot of the reverence heaped on Factory is fairly aimed at Peter Saville and the cast of visual artists who comprised the Factory stable. Even though Saville isn’t part of every Factory moment, his involvement, including his collaborators or predecessors or scions carry his voice, such as photographer Trevor Key, designers 8vo (Octavo), and Ben Kelly, chosen to design The Haçienda.
Even the idea of a “release” was brought into question by Factory. While most labels assign a number to each new musical product, Factory’s catalog encompasses the odds and ends that defined what a record label could be. It included their afforementioned nightclub The Haçienda (FAC 51), related lawsuits (FAC 61), and even co-founder Tony Wilson’s grave (FAC 501).
While not his most famous work, perhaps the purest hit of Saville’s mind is the sleeve for New Order’s 1983’s Power, Corruption & Lies, a sleeve that sits in the collection of the MoMA. The cover is someone else’s painting in actuality, A Basket of Roses by Henri Fantin-Latour (1980), owed to a trip to the museum, and a purchased postcard, juxtaposed with a chromatic alphabet. It is a labirynth of codes, but is also, just right.
My own obsession with record sleeves and graphic design (which I didn’t know was a term) started with New Order’s Substance (1987), their version of a greatest hits or singles comp, which I saw in my sister’s cassette collection. The choice of a severe font from Giambattista Bodoni (1740–1813), in contrast to the electronic rock of the band, just made sense, a gift Saville gave us all.
I didn’t know it, but I was already knee deep in Saville by the time my pop culture radar was switched on. My modest record collection included 7” singles I played on a brown/orange Fisher-Price turntable, songs that I must have seen on MTV and got my parents to buy when we went to record shops, as I would do with my dad on Saturdays. The cover of Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” is a Trevor Key snapped image, a literal sledgehammer, but blurred in motion to look like a Franz Kline painting.. The cobalt blue of the name logotype and its twin fonts merged, felt casually superior to the Big Country single that sat next to it, just a bunch of guys cheesing. Type + Image + Color is a lethal cocktail in the right hands. The canonical Saville sleeve of course Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, which only grows in stature.
The sleeves and art of Joy Division and New Order (bands just inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year, if relevant to you, the reader, not to me), in Saville’s hands, were an art historical survey in their own right. Focusing less on a coherent style than a steely modernism or knowing essence, their visual catalog spans riffs on Italian Futurism (Movement), French Realism (Power, Corruption & Lies), contemporary advertising (Republic), and even the machines they made music on (“Blue Monday”). They are objects of their own ambition, notoriously a bit divorced from the music or band’s wishes even (from a PS Reddit AMA: “It was one of the rare moments that [Joy Divison] came to me with something visually beautiful”) and often lacking the band’s or record’s name. At the time, this could have been seen as commercial suicide, but instead served as a lesson in the “wink” or a knowing bond built between fan and band, an initiation, now a code which all modern branding rests on.
And by being an art history unto himself, Saville has given the rest of us license to learn (and co-opt) as well. Like Saville’s college years, Ghostly’s salad days in school were a lot of Will Calcutt (Herb 69), and I talked about design and fonts. Calcutt was my footpath into this world (and my intro to Michael Cina) and helped me understand how fonts and grid systems were the ballast of all things we loved.
Saville’s gift to us is synthesis, notice I didn’t say “fusion” as it’s nothing trendy. How the past is the future. The current obsession is with “archive” for fashion and all substackers, I think it’s what Saville has been doing all these years, showing us what’s next from what has already been.
Understanding why Swiss typographer Jan Tschichold ( Michael Cina’s fave Jan font: Sabon) was relevant to late ‘70s Manchester is something AI may have done, but unlikely, these are wayward thoughts. With Saville, the concern for authorship, or the trace of the “artist’s hand,” is erased. What we are left with is the power of images to convey the inexpressible. The nowness is the goal for any communicator.
Saville sums it up best: “I ask the designer if, at a younger age, he could foresee any of his career, to be the art director behind such an influential group of records. He reflects: “I knew exactly what this was about, this was curation, this was wishful thinking. You never know how it is going to reverberate and in some ways that has been surprising and disappointing… But I always knew what I was doing.”
Bonus beats:
Spoke with Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick for The Trend Report™ over here.
Michael Cina’s Insights talk for the Walker is live, can’t wait to watch 5 times.
My Saville love letter from Cranbrook Art Museum last fall, plus Techno
I always found "The Peter Saville Show Soundtrack" interesting...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tUdaWCfxDQ
I've really enjoyed reading your perspective (well, I should actually say "essay") on Saville! Lots of material to delve into, thank you. It feels very fitting that Saville didn't compile the playlist, somehow the ancient choral music via proxy adds to the aura of it all 😄