#NOISE002: How I framed Jilted John ... and messed up his mice!
On creating the comic book-inspired look of the Jilted John releases ... the album artwork cock-up that no-one has spotted in 40-odd years ... and how I twisted Martin Hannett's melon!
“I was so upset that I cried all the way to the chip shop …”
I suppose my part in the Jilted John story, like so many Manchester music tales, starts with Rob Gretton.
Throughout our teens, my schoolmate Rob and I shared a couple of passions: music and Manchester City football club. We were committed mods, all “french crewcuts,” Levi’s Sta-Prest trousers and Italian brogues, and our music of choice was soul, with a little bit of bluebeat … which it what Jamaican dance music was called before the terms ska and reggae were adopted … thrown in. By our early twenties, we were both restless, bored with the day jobs we found ourselves in: Rob in an insurance agency, me in the art and copywriting department of GUS, the mail order catalogue giant. I sang, played guitar a bit and could knock out a few chords on a piano, and I was alway messing around writing songs and trying to get bands off the ground. Rob didn’t display any actual musical talent, other than bellowing out chants on the Kippax Street terrace at City’s home games. But when punk blew the doors off the music business in 1976, he was seized by a determination to be a part of the revolution … and he dragged me along with him.
He attached himself to local band Slaughter and The Dogs, one of the first groups outside of London to embrace punk. He’d accompany them to gigs, helping to hump their gear in and out of venues, chipping in for gas money, and he volunteered to run the group’s fan club. It was Rob who told them they needed a logo … and he knew just the man to design it.
He also got me to design the band’s first poster and gig flyers. When they needed cash to finance their first single, Rob put up £200. And of course, I was now the obvious choice to design the sleeve. Slaughter and The Dogs’ debut single, “Cranked Up Really High,” clad in a Steve McGarry design, was released on the newly-formed Rabid Records in June, 1977.
That was the start of my association with Rabid, and its satellite label, Absurd. Of the 17 sleeves in my portfolio, 11 were Rabid or Absurd releases, including records by John Cooper Clarke, The Nosebleeds … and three by Jilted John.
Based in shop premises on Cotton Lane in Withington, Manchester, Rabid was run by the same people who did all the music biz flyposting. The catalogue numbers of the label’s releases were prefaced with the letters TOSH, a nod to the label head, Tosh Ryan. It was there, in early 1978, that I shook hands with a gangly teen who was introduced to me as Jilted John.
I distinctly remember my cheery “Alright, John? How’s it going?” greeting and his polite “Not bad” reply. The only reason I recall the exchange so clearly is that it was weeks, perhaps even months later, before I learned that he was a drama student from Yorkshire and his name was actually Graham Fellows. To this day, I’m still not sure whether it was the case of an alter ego that must not be revealed … sort of like Clark Kent or Peter Parker … or whether the assembled Rabid crew just couldn't be arsed correcting me. Probably the latter.
Anyway, that was my one and only meeting with the artist formerly known as Graham. I think they played me the tracks that day, but I can’t swear to it. I was supplied with an armful of glossy pics from a recent photoshoot, told the record’s titles and dispatched to design a sleeve. The A-side would be “Going Steady” and the B-side was “Jilted John.”
It was the third sleeve I’d been commissioned to design for Rabid. As usual, the budget was miniscule, so it was going to be a one-color print. If memory serves, I chose two suitable photos from the selection I’d been given and, as luck would have it, they were already the perfect size. That meant I just had to trim them with a scalpel and paste them in place. In those pre-computer days, there were only two ways to get type - you either had the text printed by an outside typesetting house, which cost time and money, or you used some Letraset, which were sheets of dry rub-down transfer lettering. Using Letraset from the library I had liberated from the studio at my old job – I’d gone freelance a few months earlier - I laid down the text and created a rudimentary logo, tilting the “L” in the word JILTED and replacing the “O” in JOHNwith a quick cartoon of a broken heart. I chose a maroon color for the printing and attached a swatch to the artboard. Cat No. TOSH 105 was done and dusted. Easy peasy.
But then something unexpected happened. Deejay John Peel, who had become the the most influential tastemaker in punk, played the “B’ side of the single on his BBC show, opining that he thought the track could be a hit if released on a major label. Sure enough, the giant EMI International took the bait, and the record was quickly re-released under license, with the A-side and B-side reversed. Peel’s instincts were correct … with the nation singing along to its “Gordon is a moron” refrain, the single roared onto the charts. Boosted by a string of appearances on the BBC’s flagship “Top of The Pops” TV shows, it climbed all the way to No. 4!
Now there was a mad rush to cash in on the song’s success. EMI demanded an album, so a batch of songs were hastily written and recorded, with Martin Hannett, Rabid’s in-house producer, once more at the helm, operating under the pseudonym Martin Zero.
Two of those tracks were chosen as the follow-up single, and yours truly was drafted in again to design the sleeve for “True Love,” backed with “I Was a Prepubescent.” This time, I went with an illustration on the front and a cartoon logo on the back.
I was in the Rabid offices, as was Martin, when the first box of singles arrived. He took one look at the back of the sleeve and howled in disbelief, spluttering that I’d made my name as big as his in the credits … and listed myself first!
I hadn’t given it a second thought but now he’d pointed it out, I just thought it was funny. I’m fairly certain he wasn’t as amused as I was. However, within a short space of time, he would cement his legend with his visionary production work for Joy Division, whereas I would find myself doing sleeve design for local cabaret artist, drag queen Foo Foo Lamarr … so I think Martin probably had the last laugh.
For the album sleeve, Rabid wanted a comic strip that mirrored the look of the girl’s romance comics that populated British newsstands in those days. I think the Rabid lads were somewhat dubious that I had enough experience in comics to do the job justice, but I’d had a little bit of experience doing illustrations for one such publication, “Romeo,” and so was able to convince them to give me the commission. Which was a big deal for me, as now we were working with an EMI budget and it represented a much improved payday for me.
I’m not sure who came up with the script … it was probably John/Graham himself … but I pencilled and inked the comic, including designing a True Love Stories masthead, on CS10 artboard. I wanted to get a flat color effect to mimic an actual comic, so the colors were achieved by using transparent Pantone adhesive films that were peeled from their backing sheets, applied to the art and trimmed to the correct area with a scalpel.
The brief was also to design a mice and ladders game as an insert. In the 40-odd years since the album came out, I don’t think anyone else has ever spotted that I actually made a glaring mistake with the numbers. If you look closely, you’ll see that in the square that should be numbered 23, I inadvertently numbered it as 21!
When the album came out, there were full page ads in the music press. It would be another three years before I broke into newspapers in my own right and my career in illustration and comic strips took off, so this was a big deal for me at the time.
As quickly as it exploded, the Jilted John project bit the dust and that was the end of that chapter … although the following year, Rabid had me design the sleeve for “Fit For Nothing,’ a spin-off single by Bernard Kelly, the actor who portrayed Gordon the Moron in the “Jilted John” promos.
The next I saw of Graham Fellows was when he turned up on everyone’s favorite soap opera, "Coronation Street,” playing Gail Tilsley’s lovelorn suitor. He went on to enjoy success on TV and radio in the U.K., particularly with yet another comedic alter ego, John Shuttleworth … but as I’d moved to the States by then, little of that was on my radar.
Rob Gretton went on to manage Joy Division and NewOrder, was a partner in Factory Records and was co-founder ofThe Haçienda nightclub. His own label, “Rob’s Records, was the launching pad for Sub Sub, the band that later resurfaced as Doves.
For my part, I look back on the sleeve design work I did in that period with mixed emotions. Some of the ideas are okay, some a bit iffy, some too corny. The work is raw and unrefined … but that’s what punk was all about, really, so I guess it accurately reflects the spirit of those times. Some of it has aged quite well. Open any coffee table book on punk iconography and you’ll probably find my Slaughter and The Dogs “Do It Dog Style” sleeve … and the imagery and lettering I created for the band is still their signature look almost 50 years later. The sleeve I created for Joy Division went on display at MOMA in New York, one of the world’s most important contemporary art museums … so I must have done a few things right.
I recently came across an interview in which Tosh Ryan said that “one-hit wonder” Jilted John sold 500,000 records and generated the best part of £750,000 for Rabid’s coffers!
Damn! I knew I should have charged more!
If you are at all familiar with my career, you’ll probably know that I work in a number of different areas. It struck me that people who might enjoy reading about my music-related comics or my working with the likes of Joy Division and Jilted John … or indeed, killing off George McCrae … may have absolutely no interest in the soccer stuff that I’ve been doing since the early 1980s, or my experiences in cartoons and animation.
To that end, I’ve broken down my Substack into some separate sections and different newsletters – essentially Football Friday with my PLAYING FOR A DRAWnewsletter, Music Monday with my ART OF THE NOISE newsletter and … erm … a Waffling Wednesday with STEVE McGARRY COMICS. They are all FREE to read right now, so I hope you will enjoy at least one, if not all three! And then there are two separate daily TRIVQUIZ feeds to choose from!
