Evening News (Edinburgh)
July 9, 2010, Friday
'I JUST like doing certain things and painting and making music are two of them," a bored-looking John Squire once told a television interviewer in his Stone Roses heyday, in between fiddling with his shoelaces. "There's no contest between them."
It doesn't seem like 20 years since his paint splattered album covers and psychedelia-tinged guitars defined a generation, but two decades on those famous riffs that saw him lauded as one of the greatest British guitarists of all time have been silenced. Painting, it seems, has won.John Squire today unveils his first Edinburgh exhibition, Nefertiti, at The Henderson Gallery on Thistle Street Lane, but Roses fans looking for shades of Jackson Pollock or hoping he'll belt out an impromptu rendition of Waterfall will be disappointed.
"The work is inspired by the music of Miles Davis," he explains. "It wasn't a plan of mine, it just sort of evolved from the work I did for Liberty fabrics and Penguin books.
"Liberty make fabrics for clothes and they asked me to do a couple of designs for them. I was working very graphically at the time for the Penguin book covers and I had a desire to do some stuff in lino print - where you take a sheet of lino and cut designs into it for print making. I was listening to a lot of Miles Davis albums at the time such as Nefertiti and ESP, and a lot of these shapes just occurred to me from listening to the music.
"It was the kind of stuff I used to do at school and it seemed like a good way forward for my latest art works. My mum's still got stuff that I did from before school, so I must have been creating some kind of art from an early age. I see it with my own kids. As soon as they're able to grip a pencil or a crayon they're trying to express themselves visually. It's a shame most kids grow out of that. I don't think I ever have - and I hope I never do."
In a sense Squire has come full circle from his childhood drawings and pre-Roses days as prop-maker with renowned Manchester-based animation house Cosgrove Hall, producers of Wind In The Willows and Dangermouse.
"There's a story going round that I was an animator that I need to clarify," says Squire. "I was the worst animator in the building. I was employed as a prop-maker, making little pots and pans, joints of beef and miniature onions, all on commission. I would sit in my bedroom listening to The Clash and making all of the s*** for kids' television, but it was great experience.
"They took me on full time, which was great. The studio was full of all these old hippies, and I created the first Stone Roses covers in the studio at work. They eventually gave me a shot at animating but I was awful. All of my characters looked like they needed a visit to the chiropracter once I'd got my hands on them."
Clearly Squire's poor grasp of the precision art of stop-frame animation was never going to challenge Nick Park, but he soon branched out into a more expressive form art. The first single cover he created at Cosgrove Hall was So Young/Tell Me, the heavily Clash inspired first single featuring a smashed up radio, but he would soon become known for the paint-splattered Jackson Pollock pastiches that would adorn the Roses greatest work.
"The Pollocks were basically just copies," explains Squire. "I knew we were never going to get the rights to use actual Pollocks on the sleeves but I knew this was the look and the sound I wanted for the Roses.
"A few punk albums used that drip paint effect on their covers. I seem to remember a single by Slaughter Joe and a few Clash posters.
"I was also listening to a lot of Jesus And Mary Chain at the time and wanted to emulate some of their sounds and also express it visually and the splatter paints seemed the best way to do it."
Many will be aghast that Squire has hung up his axe in favour of a paint brush but he's no stranger to confounding expectations.
When fans expected the Roses' Second Coming to come packed with more pop-tinged melodies he dropped an album full of Led Zeppelin riffs, dark lyrics and even darker sleeve to boot.
"The dark Second Coming sleeve was unintentional," admits Squire, before coming up with an even more confounding excuse for an album that was five years in the making. "I painted over the collage and intended to wash some of the paint off but I didn't have time."
Then, just as The Roses seemed to find their stride again, he dropped the bombshell that he was leaving the band to go into the studio with a busker and a couple of session musicians to create the first Seahorses album.
"I don't want to be in some sham of a band for one album before splitting," Squire was quoted as saying a little over a year before the band split after one album.
After the Seahorses he embarked on a fairly low-key solo career which yielded two albums, but by his second album, Marshall's House, featuring songs wholly inspired by American realist painter Edward Hopper, he found his heart being pulled towards his art.
"I did a show in London in 2004 featuring a lot of the old Roses stuff but a lot of that work isn't very big - probably only a few feet wide - so I started to really apply myself to create larger works. After Marshall's House I started to realise that maybe that's where my heart lay."
The only guitars in the new exhibition can be found in the canvas in the form of cryptic looking numbers which are actually inspired by printed guitar tablature of Miles Davis tracks.
"I don't read music so my only way into songs is through guitar tab. I transcribed Davis' trumpet for guitar and used the tab in the paintings." says Squire.
"I'm not much of an art historian either really. Most of my stuff is self-inspired. I think it's the kind of work that rewards really close study. I love a textured surface - something you can actually feel - as I think the analogue is becoming more and more important in a digital world."
Sage words from the man who created some of the last great sleeve covers of the LP generation, before they were eclipsed by the CD - compact in every form including the art - before being all but wiped out altogether by the iPod.
Squire may have created his last album cover but his greatest paintings may be yet to come.
Nefertiti: New Works By John Squire, Henderson Gallery, tomorrow - 19 August, 11am-6pm, www.edinburgh.artfestival.com ***
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