Sage Francis 3.0: an always-evolving logo

Artist, record label boss and rapper Sage Francis has just unveiled his new logo, over 20 years since I first fell in love with his records, 18 years since I did the biggest art project of my life on his work, 16 years since I did a piece of art that wasn’t meant to be a logo but became one, 17 years since I did his first proper ‘new logo’, and ten years since I designed him another ‘new logo’. Like the artist himself, this is a logo — and a relationship — that doesn't stay still!

We never sat down to do a logo, to brainstorm or sign an NDA or moodboard or A/B test or anything else. It’s been a fully organic journey. The first one was actually a piece specially created for the 2007 Manhattan outing of our big Sage-inspired show, If A Girl Writes Off The World (a pre-Adobe Dreamweaver-built site will open up. I built it myself and it’s so poignantly 2007). It was picked up and put onto some of the hoodies in Sage’s Strange Famous merch range — best-sellers at that. Detailed and writhing, it was made with a very fine Nikko-G nib and black ink. The original is actually very small, and framed in our hallway.

The second was kind of accidental as it was made for the cover of Sage’s 2007 album Human The Death Dance. It just kind of…started to get used on things, posters, ads, posts and merch. In the way that a logo does, I suppose. Made with an inkpen and nib, it featured sad faces and a minimal slope, just designed to peer over the shoulder of the man himself, next to a watermark-like Death. With hindsight, it was flimsy and odd, but then again…unlike a lot of my formal client commisssions, I hadn’t ‘sat down to design a logo’.

The album cover. Which was almost…

…this one instead.

The one that came after that was also for an album, 2014’s Copper Gone. It formed part of a single piece of ink-on-paper art but once again lived a life of its own, and served as Sage’s identity for the ten years prior the current one. I almost can’t believe myself the huge spans of time I’m casually throwing around here, by the way — but those are the dates, and this is the longevity of it all.

Again if I’d known at the time that this would be deployed in the way it was, there are things I’d have changed — but would it have improved anything? Not sure. Really not sure, but at some point someone filled it in and made it solid — which wasn’t a cool move, and around that time I began thinking, I really need to do that properly, or scrap it and do the whole thing again.

Eventually I did. I can’t remember whether I just did it and sent it to Sage with a note saying ‘this really needed doing’, or whether he asked — it doesn’t matter — but the outcome is this one. This time I *did* sit down to ‘make a logo’ from the roots put down by the Copper Gone iteration, but clean and clear. I faffed and tweaked and moved vector points and smoothed out bezier curves then undid it all, and repeat, eventually creating so many versions I think we actually really should have done some A/B testing. But there it is.

There are still things I’d change, even now, and it may or may not serve for another ten years. But I like the organic and slightly clumsy way all of these were done. They sort of ‘happened’, which is very different from the art-directed, purposeful, accountable way I do my other work.

The final. I think. Not sure. I like it. Sage likes it. But do I like one of the other versions more? We can always use one of those…can’t we…I think. We fly in the face of your Logo Rules, sir!

When Sage posted it to the fans, most people just loved it and started slapping money on the counter for the T shirt. Someone said ‘Francis’ reads as a completely different word. Someone else said having seen it they’re now expecting a country album (which I applauded).

I still look at it and see a curve I would change, bits I’d move, and I stare at it till I’m logo-blind. But honestly, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Thanks Sagey for the wholesomely organic way we do things, every time.

(If you want to read more, there’s a bunch of historic blogs here).

P.S.; this one was a wild card, and Did Not Make It. Nor shall it ever…I think…

Kaleidoscope

Last month the DJ Food album 'Kaleidoscope' had its 20 year anniversary.

It's obviously a strange time right now in which things like birthdays and anniversaries, anything with associated memories or emotional significance, arrive with additional gravitas and tend to trigger a period of reflection and pondering. We've been on 'lockdown' for such a short time relatively speaking, but we're already pining for suspended associations and swerving off down nostalgic paths of reminiscence. This particular record's anniversary has had us reflecting for a few weeks!

DJ Food is really called Kevin Foakes (but see below) and has been a chum for about a quarter of a century. It feels completely bizarre to type that, having been a bunch of cocky, sleep-deprived twenty-somethings when we first met, with the concept of middle-age not even a speck on the horizon of expectation, but here we are.

'Kaleidoscope' the album was released in 2000 and was the first DJ Food album produced by PC and Strictly Kev, two producers who'd been part of a larger squad known as 'DJ Food' for a few years, around a core of Matt Black and Jonathan More, themselves otherwise known as Coldcut. So Kevin Foakes is Strictly Kev - come on, keep up - everyone's got a DJ name haven't they? (Well we should, even if we don't DJ) - and it was buying and playing his records on the new and exciting Ninja Tune label from the early 90s that brought him into our line of sight (he designed the label's iconic logo).

In the early to mid 90s Leigh and I were fast and furious, setting the pace for future life, playing, buying, performing and reviewing records with a voracious appetite. With no 'online' or streaming - just tapes, CDs and vinyl - music was sourced through record shops, gigs, trips to London, word of mouth, sharing and swapping, making tapes for each other, radio (both legit and otherwise) and through hassling record companies for their new releases. We were just beginning to play regularly on a pirate radio station in 1997, and 'acquired' much of our material by telling record companies just that, who in turn were eager to get their releases heard by the people who were bored with the mainstream and would be the hands that spun the records on the turntables of clubs and festivals. If you wrote an honest review and faxed it back to the label, your feedback helped shape what was released and in what form (this remix or that one?) and the deal worked handsomely in both directions.

      

We met Kev in 1995 or 6. We were fans, and I'd sent a keen and wordy fax from my Grandma's vacant bungalow where we were living. I'd sent it to what I thought was his Openmind fax number - that being the design and art direction side of his operation - by phoning directory enquiries for the number. We knew roughly where he/Ninja were based, so when a London number came back I didn't question it. I think it was a children's television company who politely rang me back to say 'wrong number, but thanks for the enthusiasm' - so I tried again, I think via Ninja direct.

Either way, we got through and swapped a few faxes (the phone phaux pas breaking what little ice there might have been), talking about music and art and life until at some point, Kev pointed out I didn't have to keep faxing, we could just have a phone chat. So we did!

And that was the beginning of a friendship that went on longer than any of us could even be bothered to think about at that time. Leigh and I went to gigs, we visited, drank tea, we swapped little pressies; we made him post-gig cakes, he gave us records and coveted guest list spots. Nevertheless, when April 2000 rolled around, the annoying millennium guff finally out of the way, and we received an advance CD copy of 'Kaleidoscope' with a hand-written note, we were chuffed to bits.

It was a barking mad but brilliant record made of cue balls, jazz, riffs, big meaty breaks, velvety Ken Nordine voiceovers, the near-goth sulk of 'The Crow' and some Debussy. You could dance your bollocks off to it (let's say in Hoxton Square's so-cool-it-got-annoying Blue Note, long since closed) or noodle away to it in an armchair with headphones,  pontificating about the samples and nodding. Or, in my case particularly, you could get a shitload of work done to it, such was its pace and absorbing texture. It never, ever feels old, or tired; we're wary of nostalgia, and are reluctant reminiscers, so we never like to ruin a good record by loading it with too much memory or colouring it with one of those emotional time-stamps from which it can never progress. Thankfully, though, this record never succumbed to that; as well as being very much of its time, 'Kaleidoscope' was always well ahead of its time, so it's still as fresh and silly and ornery as the day we first played that CD.

What 'Kaleidoscope' always was was a 'trip' - in both senses of the word. Composed of what feel like two distinct halves, the album is nonetheless a journey, rollocking through tracks which flow into one another despite being very different from each other (hmm, I sound like an apprentice music reviewer...) You can dip into it repeatedly, if you just, for example, fancy the pick-me-up of 'The Riff', or the soothing goth-tinged murk of 'Nevermore', a swooping fantastical thing of whispers which erupts into a drum frenzy of trumpets and cymbal crashes.

One of the noticeable features of the DJ Food albums that Kev had more of an influence on - those he worked on with PC or, later, solo - is that sense of a voyage, with stops along the way, rather than a collection of separate tracks. They're more like epics - 'The Search Engine' is something of a magnum opus - than the early DJ Food albums which were essentially a box of DJ tools which you could remove one at a time and fit to your DJ set! We adored them though, because nothing like that really existed before; they spoke to our love of beats, scratching and hip-hop, and also ANYTHING coming out of Ninja at that time was exciting and novel. Picture these albums arriving at about the same time as Portishead, also new and vivid, and you can begin to visualise the scene. (I also thought the knife and fork in the Food logo were supremely clever.)

What Kev's always done is something we feel we've always done too: projects that he WANTS to do, which may or may not work, and are certainly not driven or shaped by commercial outcomes or monetary gain. 

If it's interesting, creative, hasn't been done before and represents a bit of a challenge - and we think we people will enjoy it - we'll give it a go. Our working lives have been peppered with projects that wouldn't make any commercial sense - in that they cost us more to do than they will ever return - because we want to do them, and we think we can do them, and because we're only on the planet once. We've been inspired by Kev for many years; who memorably told us "I look forward to Mondays, I can do exactly what I want every day of the week".

Take his 4-tonearm turntable project for example. When he told us what he was plotting to do last year, we were delighted at this gleeful release of the (not so inner) nerd, being an investigation into using four tonearms on a single turntable. It's more sophisticated than that of course, but I'm writing as a turntable outsider with almost no technical knowledge. He's also got the confidence to recruit his heroes into his work - weaving his writing, archiving and design prowess into live projects based on his love of Frankie Goes To Hollywood and all thing ZTT, for example, and bringing in "The" Matt Johnson to work with him on his own cover of The The's GIANT, a boyhood favourite, on 'The Search Engine'. Bold moves, you might say, but it shows you really can work with your heroes when you're offering something creatively interesting, relevant and authentic.

Now sharing all of the outcomes of his new turntable experiments with locked grooves and effects on Bandcamp under his new label Infinite Illectrik, you can hear the present and future sound of DJ Food.

 

Kev and his music have remained in our lives ever since we first made contact, through over two decades of creativity, house moves, a wedding, new albums, kids, life and evolving careers. Funny, kind, prolific and a total realist (not to mention hardcore archivist and mighty handy with the pencils and a Mac) he was the first person we thought of to feature in our 'Stupid Enough' documentary - about how real people carve out creative careers for themselves - and we liked his 'Search Engine' album and ensuing body of visual work with Henry Flint so much that we put on an exhibition of it in our little gallery space. We hope we'll creatively cross paths again in our lifetimes, we just have no idea yet what form that might take, if it does.

So I suppose having said all of that 'Kaleidoscope' is loaded with emotions and memories, just not the sort that hobble you with backwards glances in the middle of doing something, or leave you thinking 'those were the days'. Those WERE some days, and then there've been all these other days too, since, full of more music, and friendship, and laughing inappropriately at things in the small hours.

It's awkward to write about your friend when you're also still a fan of them, but what a wonderful thing to be feeling awkward about.

~ † ~

'Kaleidoscope' can be heard on Apple Music or Spotify

can be bought from Ninja Tune

or read about in more detail on Kev's massive and incredibly thorough blog

DJ Food's visual work can be explored here

and he has a busy Mixcloud collection here, which is added to weekly.