Gallery – Fred Deakin
Fred Deakin is probably best known as one half of electronic outfit Lemon Jelly with Nick Franglen. He’s also a Creative Director and founder of design company Airside who have worked for everyone from Virgin Trains to the pop star Mika (see www.airside.co.uk). It was not always this way. “I once had a job shovelling bits of metal from under a car-crushing machine in Amsterdam,” admits Fred, “I was bumming around and I got stuck there needing some money.” More relevantly, Deakin’s creative career began when he started running clubs and designing flyers for them in Edinburgh. He then studied at St Martins College and ended up teaching there for a bit. Closing in on the music industry, he worked with Ian Swift at Swifty Typografix, the oufit who were heavily involved in all the Mo’Wax Records art. Around this time Lemon Jelly and Airside kicked into action, the former grabbing a couple of gold albums as well as nominations for a Brit and a Mercury prize along the way. Deakin currently has the triple CD eclectomaniac mix CD ‘The Triptych’ out on Family records (as reviewed in the last issue of Beatmag http://www.beatmag.net/april07/reviews/albums.php )
Lost Horizons
Fred Deakin: “This is the unedited version of the landscape from the album ‘Lost Horizons’, the full monty. It was built in 3D in Maya and the inner shots from the album sleeve use different camera angles. The whole idea is that the countryside in the daytime is an amazing place to be while the city is dull and boring, but then at night it’s the other way round. So it’s about contrast, about the ying and the yang.”
KY
FD: “I like to think what I do is an update on the psychedelic look. Electronic music is about repeating loops, about patterns, waves of stuff increasing in size and this is an attempt to represent those ideas in a graphic way. It’s on the front cover of a book called ‘The Greatest Album Sleeves Of All Time’ which I was very proud of.”
Spacewalk
FD: “Another abstract sleeve evolving ideas a bit further but in a slightly different way. The original pre-XL 10”s are now worth three figures and I’ve had people come up to me and ask me for spare copies. Even the ‘Soft Rock’ 7” in denim with a condom in the pocket is three figures. It’s always nice when your stuff ends up on EBay – if I had more of them I could put them towards a pension plan. This one was after we signed with XL and it carries the ideas forward from the original EPs but on a larger scale. Having no type anywhere on the sleeve is our golden rule. Abstract art is the idea.”
Triptych
FD: “This is the art from the new mix CD. The mix was a labour of love. I’ve made a lot of mixes over the years, both for myself and to promote Lemon Jelly, and I was trying to make the ultimate Fred mix. It took me about a year to try and get the jigsaw to fit together. My whole premise was that it’s all good music and to try to join the dots between the different genres, to be as eclectic as I could without losing the flow. The art tries to moves things forward too, to bring three different cutaways together.”
Mask
FD: “How I first got into graphic design was doing flyers and visuals for club nights I put on. The original one that this is from is called Impotent Fury, also the name of the record label that put out Lemon Jelly originally. The thinking behind it? Basically I wanted to do some masks and this is the best one!”
