Stefan Sagmeister's the man for Rolling Stones covers
May 04, 2009 12:00am
new.com.au
HeraldSun
MICK Jagger knew he had the perfect man to design the next Rolling Stones album. Stefan Sagmeister had the band covered, as seen in his design for Sticky Fingers.
The year was 1997 and Stefan Sagmeister's impressive track record included poster and cover art for Lou Reed and David "Talking Heads" Byrne.
But when the award-winning graphic designer met Jagger and the band in London to discuss concepts for Bridges to Babylon, he found there was a completely new brief.
"I had to come up with an idea for that new brief in time for another meeting that same day," he says.
Jagger encouraged Sagmeister to visit the British Museum and check out the Babylonian collection. Inspired by the sculptures, he devised a rampant Assyrian lion on its hind legs and parlayed this memorable image into Rolling Stone posters, stage designs and tour merchandise.
"It's quite a machine," he says of the Stones, "with Mick Jagger as the CEO."
Sagmeister, visiting Melbourne for agIdeas international design week, is bigger than the sum of his music-packaging parts.
His eponymous New York-based company takes pride in designing "all things printed" -- posters, postcards and perfume packages, books, billboards and annual reports.
And if London's renowned Design Museum is right, Sagmeister Inc. has the ability to "come up with potent, original, stunningly appropriate ideas" almost every time.
"That is our strong suit," the 47-year-old designer says. "If clients come with a concept which they visualise already, we are normally not the right designers for them."
Sagmeister grew up in the Austrian Alps, studied graphic design in Vienna and established a studio in New York in 1993 (which is his base when he's not living in Bali).
Some of his early "hand-made" images were amusing -- bare bums, wagging tongues, a headless chook. Others alarmed viewers. In 1999, he slashed his own torso with text and photographed the result for a design conference graphic.
Three years earlier, Sagmeister "tattooed" Lou Reed's face with lyrics for an album poster.
"We always meet with the band," he says. "We always talk about the history of songs: who wrote them, why they wrote them, why they think it's necessary to make another album. Often, we get unfinished songs and listen to those songs over and over while designing."
Does he have a favourite record cover?
Sagmeister nominates Sticky Fingers, the 1971 Rolling Stones album designed by pop artist Andy Warhol. Teasing and subversive, "that album has so many associations with it", he says.
"Jagger and I talked about Sticky Fingers at our (London) meeting and as we are talking, it turns out (drummer) Charlie Watts has no idea what the cover looks like.
"So Jagger tells him, 'You know, the one that Andy did. The one with the zipper'. And then I think Charlie got a clue.
"He was not playing a game or anything. Charlie seems to be uninterested in things that don't have anything to do directly with the music."
Sagmeister won a Grammy award for designing a 2003 Talking Heads box set called Once in a Lifetime.
Now, when music can easily be downloaded, he thinks the "high time" of art-directed CD covers is over.
"I am personally not nostalgic about it," he says. "There are so many other things to do."
Like designing furniture, teaching, writing books, and "designing something that induces happiness from the point of view of the designer and the consumer".
Sagmeister is instinctively democratic. He wants good design to reach as wide an audience as possible and this is a key message as he fronts forums at agIdeas.
"Designing things that lift people's lives . . . that's what was in my mind when I wanted to become a designer. Still is."
Stefan Sagmeister is the creative virtuoso behind the Rolling Stones design for Bridges to Babylon.
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