The designer who gave first-wave industrial its visual language. Here for two years of sleeves at Fetish Records, not for the magazine career that made his name elsewhere.
Neville Brody was born in Southgate, north London, on 23 April 1957, and trained at Hornsey College of Art and the London College of Printing. He is, to most of the world, the art director who remade magazine design at The Face in the 1980s, and later a commercial typographer of global reach. I keep none of that. It records the two years, 1980 to 1982, when Brody was art director of Fetish Records and gave the early industrial record sleeve a graphic language it had not previously had.
The route in was not a commission. By his own account Brody was drawn to the industrial music of the moment, and started designing for 23 Skidoo because their singer was living below him in a Covent Garden squat. That detail matters to the entry: he was inside the scene the records came from, not a studio hired to dress them. Fetish was a small London independent whose roster ran through the first wave, Throbbing Gristle, Clock DVA, 23 Skidoo, Cabaret Voltaire-adjacent solo work by Stephen Mallinder, and Z'ev, all of them already in this archive. Brody designed across the catalogue: sleeves, the compilation The Last Testament, and a great many badges, posters and T-shirts.
The work itself was hand-made in a way the later digital career was not. In the pre-computer studio everything was pasted together from cut paper, film overlays, photo-mechanical prints, painted and carved and cast elements, with type set by hand by a professional typesetter. The Thirst sleeve for Clock DVA (1981) is the most cited of them, a deliberately cryptic design Brody later said was about human ritual and human slaughter; Seven Songs for 23 Skidoo and Pow-Wow for Mallinder belong to the same compact, symbolic, hand-built register. The single most reproduced image is from a little later and a different label: the Micro-Phonies cover he art-directed for Cabaret Voltaire on Some Bizzare in 1984, a bandaged figure spouting liquid set against his characteristic sans-serif lettering.
Brody also designed the booklet for The Final Academy, the 1982 London gathering around William Burroughs and Brion Gysin that drew the same audience as the records. That places him at the graphic centre of the scene's literary wing as well as its musical one, the two arms of the early-1980s industrial milieu sharing a single designer.
Within my Photography-and-design entry, Brody is the sleeve designer: the figure whose graphic language wrapped the records, distinct from the artist-internal photography of Peter Christopherson (the image as part of the work itself) and the scene-documentary photography of Sheila Rock (the image as record of the people). His hand-lettering on the Fetish sleeves fed directly into the typeface work, Industrial, Arcadia, Insignia, that occupied the rest of his career and into Fontworks and the FontShop system. That later type design, like The Face and Arena and the FUSE project he ran with Jon Wozencroft, is acknowledged here in a line and documented elsewhere by others. What this archive keeps is the two-year window in which a designer who happened to live in the right squat gave a small London label, and through it a whole emerging form, its first coherent way of looking.
VAGO · c. the Anthropocene