The story behind… With The Beatles album cover

Our black Zip-up Hoodie dedicated to The Beatles is based upon the cover of With The Beatles, the second album of the Fab Four, published in 1964. The music of the album was very similar to the music of Please Please Me; The Beatles were still evolutioning as a band. But the story behind this cover is quite interesting…

The picture cover of their debut LP, Please Please Me (1963) featured a photo of four happy young folks, neatly dressed in suits. For their second LP, The Beatles wanted to try something else. They had not intervened over that first cover but, for their new record, they preferred to show a more serious, mature look. They loved the black and white photos that Astrid Kirchnerr took them when they were English teddy rockers lost in Hamburg, wearing leather jackets and using Elvis’ hairstyle. So they spoke with Robert Freeman, the photographer of the band from 1963 to 1966, gave him a couple of those Hamburg photos, and, on 22 August 1963, they went to shoot a photo session in the Palace Court Hotel, in the city of Bournemouth, England. As Paul McCartney remembers, “Freeman arranged us in a hotel corridor: it was very un-studio-like. The corridor was very dark, and there was a window at the end, and by using this heavy source of natural light coming from the right, he got that very moody picture which most people think he must have worked at forever and ever. But it was only an hour. He sat down, took a couple of rolls, and that was it.”
The final photo was nice, but not “commercial” enough. In fact, the company tried to pull the cover because The Beatles were not smiling, and it was only after George Martin intervened that the photo was accepted. We can say that this was their first important artistic decision; none of them would have dreamed at that time that only 3 three later they would spend thousands of pounds in the cover of Sgt. Pepper and become unique “owners” of their music and image.

Syd: last, but not least…

In our last post we didn’t mention what happened with Pink Floyd after Syd Barrett. Of course, you know they made a lot of records and gained massive aclaim with such gems as The Dark Side Of The Moon (1973) and The Wall (1979). Little by little, they developed a new sound, far away from The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn (1967), Floyd’s only LP with Barrett as the band leader. However, his influence was still important, at least in a subtle way. Many lyrics from different Floyd albums seem to link with Syd and his absence. The most famous is Wish You Were Here (1975). An unrecongnizable Barrett visited the band while they were recording it; that was the last time they saw him. From all the lyrics that seem to refer to Barrett, I chose the last part of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”, a very nice tribute that Roger Waters dedicated to his friend, probably trying to find an answer to the reasons of his emotional and mental collapse:

 

You reached for the secret too soon, 

You cried for the moon. 

Shine on you crazy diamond. 

Threatened by shadows at night, 

And exposed in the light. 

Shine on you crazy diamond. 

Well you wore out your welcome 

With random precision, 

Rode on the steel breeze. 

Come on you raver, you seer of visions, 

Come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner, and shine!

Shine on, you crazy Syd

Have you seen our new releases? Hope you like them! This post is dedicated to the artist who inspired to one of them: Syd Barrett. If you like classic rock, you must know his story. He is a icon of the Swingin’ Sixties, a pioneer of psychedelic rock with a sad ending, but his figure remains as a true symbol of an era.

Syd Barrett T-shirt @ Waterloo

Barrett was the leader and founder of the first Pink Floyd. This was some years before David Gilmour joined the band and Roger Waters took control of the ship. Syd wrote most of their songs and was a very particular lyricist. While most of his contemporary composers chose to write about love, and some of them were starting to talk about revolution (influenced by Bob Dylan), Barrett made his own way in search of bizarre stories. His lyrics were surrealistic, humorous and unique. Take for example the second verse of Floyd’s second single, “See Emily Play”: “Soon after dark, Emily cries. Gazing through trees in sorrow, hardly a sound ‘til tomorrow”. He also loved to give to his songs with the most incredible names: “Interstellar Overdrive”, “Astronomy Domine”, “Lucifer Sam”, all included in The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, Floyd’s debut LP.

Syd was also one of the most “English” rockers of all time, Like Ray Davies, his “Englishness” was very noticeable in his songwriting and in his singing. That’s why he was adored by many British musicians, like Paul Weller, who once said: “Syd was a unique songwriter. I loved his guitar style and the sound he got. He opened up possibilities.”

In addition to this, Syd’s musical approach was unschakled and free-form. Indeed, English rock music’s entire notion of extemporising on blues modes and propelling them via lenghty improvisation into the outer reaches of the tonal stratosphere was begins with Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd. His odd guitar playing was the key for the sound of the band. He used his Danelectro with total freedom, interested in the textures and effects. He was painter and he brought an artist’s visual approach to his solos. “Syd set the tone for what people think of as pshychedelic guitar playing,” stated Joe Boyd, producer of the band’s first single, “Arnold Layne” (1967), the story of a very particular man who likes to go for a ramble every night and steal women’s clothes.

LSD inspired many of his work and opened up his imagination, but also affected his fragile personality. He was forced to leave Floyd due to his mental state while they were recording their second album, A Saurceful Of Secrets (1968). Schizophrenic, his sensibilities would be at odds forever, but made two amazing solo records, The Madcap Laughs and Barrett (both released in 1970), tried to occasionally play again live, and finally dissappeared from public life to remain at his house in Cambridge, still devoted to his painting, until his death, in 2006.

Although his musical discography is brief, his legacy is vital in rock and roll history and has inspired many artists. “Syd’s work as a sonic architect with Floyd is extremely inspiring to me and has something to do with where I’m going. The spirit of play there is where I think its at. His genius and his pure, childlike spirit make him shine as bright as anyone could,” said John Frusciante, one of his fans. Shine on you crazy diamond!

 

Note: some lines from this post were extracted from the great article “Seer. Painter. Piper. Prisoner…” by Rob Chapman, published on Mojo magazine #154.

The Story behind the T-shirt: The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (Part 2)

Ever since I began to design the stamps for IloveWaterloo T-shirts, I have created a big list of “essential” artists to dedicate a T-shirt. Bob Dylan always had a priviledged position in that list.

I always loved the cover photo of The Freewheelin’ album. When I finally decided to make a T-shirt of Good Ol’ Bob, this was the first image that came to my mind.

To adapt this very famous image, I decided to re-create it my way, and I thought of make a drawing with pencils, watercolors and finepens. I had never used this technique in any of Waterloo’s T-shirts, but this was a character that deserved this kind of challenge. One of things that I most admire from Dylan is his capacity for surprise. That’s why the idea of making a T-shirt with a watercolor drawing seemed to fit perfectly in this case, because it was going to be very different from the others.

To begin with, I printed the image cover in a big size. I put the record on, sticked the printed image in the window of my house and made a trace of the shapes and buildings as a guide. I made the most of a pretty sunny morning to draw with daylight. I finished the strokes with pencil and then I started working with the watercolors.

It was not easy to paint with watercolors, especially for me, because I have never learned how to use them; I always improvised. In musical terms, it could be said that the first take was the best one. I painted and I left the drawing to dry near the window.

By the afternoon, the drawing was dry and I was pretty satisfied with it. I re-marked with a black finepen the pencil strokes to make them stronger.

Then I had to decide what to do with the texts of the cover. I want them to be in the drawing howsoever it may take. I tried to add them with Illustrator, using pre-existing tipographic fonts that were similar to the ones in the album cover. However, the coexistence between computer words and a watercolor drawing was not good, so I decided to adapt the texts too. I drawed the title and I found it pretty good, although I didn’t thought too much about it, I liked it to be something spontaneous.


For the song titles I tested some alternatives without any successful result. So the following day I showed to an old friend from work all what I’ve done so far. She picked the drawing and the album cover and began writing the song titles in a sheet of paper. I liked her writing style and the way it combined with the album title made by myself. That’s how this piece was finalised, after being scanned and has some color adjustments done with Photoshop. This was my graphic tribute to the great Bob Dylan.

The Story behind the T-shirt: The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (Part 1)

One of our T-shirts is dedicated to the great genius of Bob Dylan and one of his masterpieces, The Freewheelin’, his second album, which was also his big breakthrough, with songs like “Masters Of War” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and, of course, “Blowin’ In The Wind”. The album cover is one of the best in rock history and our T-shirt stamp is an adaptation of the cover, a drawing painted with watercolors and finepens. But… what’s the story behind the album cover?

To begin with, the cover picture -taken by CBS staff photographer Don Hunstein- presents a young Dylan (he was only 22) walking through a corridor of parked cars and tallish buildings laced with fire escapes along with her girlfriend of those days, Suze Rotolo. The photo was taken in Greenwich Village, in the corner of Jones Street and West 4th Street, just a few steps from the apartment they shared. They are both walking to the camera; Bob looks shy and nervous, and gazes at his shoes, while Suze, attractive and thoughtful looking, smiles and looks to the camera. They look like a happy couple; they were, in fact, deeply in love around those days, and it is said that some of the love songs Dylan wrote for this album (“Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”, “Down The Highway”) were inspired by this relationship. However, they have met some months ago (when Bob was 20 and Suze 17), and they would separate soon; this photo was taken after Suze’s six-month trip to Italy. Bob was affected by her sudden absence and, when she returned, things would never be the same: he would soon leave her and fall into Joan Baez’s arms. Nevertheless, this photo captures the instant moment of a man who was about to become a legend, and is one of rock`s best album covers.

The circumstances behind the shoot are described by Rotolo in a book that was recently published: A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties. The cover of the book is, not surprisingly, this famous photo too.

Coming soon: the next post, Part 2, will feature a detailed description of how our Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan T-shirt was created.

The Royal Tenenbaums (soon available!)

Before watching The Royal Tenenbaums, I listened to the film soundtrack. I didn’t know who was the director of the movie, and I was surprised that he chose "She smiled sweetly", a very rare Rolling Stones song (from 1967 record Between The Buttons), for that movie.
Some time later, I came up with The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. In fact, I watched it after a friend of mine recommended it to me because it had a weird character called Pelé, who played David Bowie songs in Portuguese. So before watching any of Wes Anderson’s movies, I had already got some kind of connection with the humour that this very particular director uses in his movies.

The Tenenbaum’s are a dysfunctional family. As in other Anderson’s movies, the father is a self-centered and selfish person, and so is the mother, but in a more absent-minded and intellectual style. The selfishness of the paternal figure is more concrete, generally based in a particular interest in some personal objective, like taking revenge from a striped shark, or enjoying the comfort of a good economic situation. While on Life Aquatic we have Pelé, on The Tenenbaums we have Pagoda, a brilliant character, of unknown nationality. He is the Sam Gamyi of Royal Tenenbaum, with the difference that he could get upset so much with his boss that he could even stab him with his little penknife. Pagoda is my favourite character of the movie.The three sons deserve, each, a special paragraph:

Margot Tenenbaum is depressive, argumentative, cold, heavy-smoker, and also she has a finger missing. In her intimate relationship’s mental archive there is a very nice kiss with a girl.

Richie Tenenbaum has been all his life in love with Margot, her step sister. He was a great tennis player whose career came to an end in the final match of a prestigious tournament, after he saw her sister, in the middle of the crowd, accompanied by her brand-new husband, Raleigh St Clair, (performed by Bill Murray, one’s of W.A. favourite actors).

Chas Tenenbaum is a “numbers’ man”, with the skills to be in charge of the account books of the family since he was very young. Obsessed with order and tidiness, he has two children and dresses them exactly like himself. He takes excessive care of both after her mother’s death.
I have always found the movie poster always very interesting. It is a classic family portrait with the characteristic esthetics of W.A.Every picture has a selection of the chromatic palette, which is tightly observed in the costumes, the setting and the plot lines that comes in, explaining certain things. He always uses the same typography.

Here’s my explanation of the creative process of the T-shirt, in four steps:

STEP 1

In the first design, I wanted to play with the gym outfit that Chas and his sons wear. That’s why I drawed the collar of the gym jacket over the collar of the T-shirt, and the zip all the way down. On the back side I wrote the name, as it usually appears on sport clothes. Besides, it was a good way to include the name of the movie.
On the front side, where club badges usually are placed, I combined the name of the movie, a “dalmatian mouse”, like the ones Chas raises, and the candelabras, which are very present in the graphic aspects of the movie.
In the second design, I included for the first time the image of the family,that will later evolve even more.

STEP 2

In the second design, I got into the relationship between Richie and Margot Tenenbaum, one of the most eccentric moments of the film. The T-shirt is called Strange Love, like the Depeche Mode song. In both options, the characters are facing each other. Richie has his post-tennis player look, when he still had long hair and beard and used a hairband and glasses. Margot uses her typical coat and hairstyle.

STEP 3

Green color takes the stage. In one option, I included the film logo, the mouse and the candelabras over a striped background, which refers to the typical wallpaper of the Tenenbaum’s old house. Pink is a very strong color in the official poster of the film.
In the second option, I wanted to play with the figures of the characters, like in Sgt. Pepper’s booklet, in which every character is pointed with a number, and then you have a list of names to know who’s who. I always compared the poster with the cover of that magical record, and I wanted to reflect it in this T-shirt.

ENDING

I came up with the final image of the T-shirt when I realized that the characters are the strongest aspect of the movie. I chose to show the family portrait through my own eyes. Even more absurd, and without the need of showing their real faces, but insinuate them. Something important to make this T-shirt is that the characters are very different, not only physically but also in terms of personality. I “dared" to include Pagoda, that is not present in the original picture. I liked the idea of closing the image with the dalmatian mouse, the name of the movie and, in the end, tha names of each character.

Mods: time goes by, and the kids are still alright

After taking a look on our T-shirt collection, you may have realised that we feel close to the Mod movement.Is it possible to be a mod in the 21st Century? We consider “Modism” not only a trend or a music style, but an attitude. And that’s how we approach to it.

Of course we know the origins and the ritual. It all began in England in the early 60s (although you could argue there were previous urban tribes that would later evolve into Mods). Young white English guys who started listening to black American music (blues, soul, jazz, gospel) and would soon create a new rock sound that expressed the anger and the ambition of a new era.

The Who, The Small Faces, The Creation and many other bands would become the avant garde of the mods, their megaphone. The great Pete Townshend was seen as the leader by these young numbers that felt so identified with his fierce guitar-playing and his songwriting, so personal. “I Can’t Explain”, “My Generation”, “The Kids Are Alright” and many other Who songs became hymns for the mods. Clearly, this was something different from beat bands (like The Beatles) or white rhythm and blues groups (like The Stones).
"Modism, Mod living, is an aphorism for clean living under difficult circumstances," said Who publicist Peter Meaden. And that’s why the music of these groups was so important. It expressed the feeling and the way of life of a new generation that invaded every street of English cities and would remain as one of the symbols of the swingin’ London.

Mods felt identified with them, and also with a number of things that became a ritual (as you can see on the classic movie Quadrophenia):

• a red, white and blue logo (taken from the Royal Army Force airplanes)
• an argot (“number”, “face”, etc)
• clothes (clean and new suits, parkas, three-button Fred Perry polo T-shirts, Levi’s trousers)
• neat haircuts
• scooters with dozens of rear mirrors (Lambrettas or any other Italian brand)
• Rickenbacker guitars
• Pills
• Weekends at Brighton (including violent fights against the Police and the Rockers, the other big urban tribe that rivalised with Mods)

Besides this stuff (and we believe some if it is really forgettable, specially the riots in Brighton beaches), in I love Waterloo we prefer to think of “Modism” as an attitude, as we previously stated. In fact, if it is still alive, it is because many others felt the same, like Paul Weller, The Jam and all the Mod-rock revival movement during the Punk Rock years. Or like Damon Albarn in the 90s Britpop era (Does anyone can deny that a masterpiece like Parklife is a Mod record?).

We love Mod-rock (as we are also musicians and it is a big influence for us), but we also feel identified with this urgency, this desire, this need of satisfaction. It is like a “forever young” soul that pushes us forward in our work and our daily life.

New Retro bags collection

We released 4 retro bags designs for boys and girls. Each of them with different color options. The names are based in one of the bands that influenced our life: The Who (you can also check our Who T-shirt design). Three of them are MacBook (or similar) ready. Check them out!

Our intention is to continue adding more options, but don't worry because T-Shirts are our main love.

Please tell us if there's anything you want to find at Waterloo, for example: belts, wallets, bracelets, etc.

2 New Designs!

John and Yoko, Woodstock were finally released!
Hope you like them, what do you think? Please tell us.
They are available for boys and girls in jersey cotton with different color options.