Lovely gig last week and fun to share it with my friend Annette.
Nova, a very innovative magazine, was first published in 1965.
Let me set the scene last Tuesday night:
A small gallery in Clerkenwell, Smoking Gun artwork on the walls, comfortable bench seating for 100 people, two art directors, David Hillman and Harri Peccinotti sitting together facing host James Brown.
Brown, a media consultant, made his name by creating Loaded, the first lads magazine.
Hillman has the little clicker that controls the images we will see projected onto a screen.
When the lights are dimmed there is no image there, just some text.
A key quote from Henry David Thoreau, the American author of Walden: “It’s not what you look at that matters. It’s what you see.”
Hillman said that Nova had 60 pages of editorial but only 16 pages of colour and fashion took most of the colour pages. His fashion editor was Molly Parkin.
“Some of the subjects we dealt with couldn’t be photographed,” he said.
These included the Queen in her dressing gown, Twiggy shaving her armpits, erectile dysfunction and homosexual law reform. After Nova broke such taboos, rival magazines did softer coverage of the same topics.
At the time an obvious question arose: What’s the difference between an artist and an illustrator?
A graphic designer, Alan Fletcher, had the answer: “An artist solves his own problems. An illustrator solves other people’s.”
There were 126 issues between 1965 and 1975 and only four of the covers were not photographs. The design of the magazine was as radical as its subject matter and their daring artwork was created by top illustrators like Alan Aldridge, Peter Blake and Barry Fantoni.
Sometimes they used photographs of wild plasticine models by Roger Law: “Roger came from The Observer and he’d been in the USA, on campus during the anti-Vietnam protests. He made an animated film of Lyndon B shitting and he was deported for that.”
Law caricatured Lord Longford when his lordship was researching the sex industry in Soho, and later found worldwide fame with Spitting Image.
One of Nova’s best-remembered covers was an illustration of Prince Charles by Barry Fantoni with the headline: Cambridge Class of ’67: The Boy Most Likely To Succeed.
At IPC, the owners and senior management were deeply conservative. Their biggest titles included Woman’s Own, which sold four million copies a week, and the royal family was seen as sacred and untouchable.
Perhaps surprisingly, IPC allowed Nova to be published as an experiment to find out if the intelligent woman really existed.
The magazine was sometimes commended at the annual awards of the Design & Art Directors and they were surprised when one of their drawings got an award for Best Photograph.
“One year we won two golds and four silvers,” said Hillman, who thought his employers would be pleased. He was expecting a pat on the back and, sure enough, the next morning he was called upstairs.
But his boss dismissed him with one harsh sentence: “Just to make it clear, we don’t publish this magazine so you can win glory.”
Photographers never turned down Nova because after their spreads appeared they often got an ad campaign.As Hillman noted, “We influenced an industry.”
Their gifted editor was Dennis Hackett and Hillman said, “Hackett would give you an incredible headline. Or read it and do a good one. Sometimes the headline would dictate the way the article was written.”
James Brown made an astute intervention when he asked, “Was there any magazine you wanted to be better than?”
Hillman immediately said, “Esquire. Paris Match. Spin.”
Spin was a German magazine.
Other things Hillman said included :
“Trouble with short stories, you can’t cut.”
“After Ken Tynan said ‘fuck’ on BBC television, it became an acceptable word on arts programmes.”
“When Jean-Paul Goude did Grace Jones, she became the painting!”
Pechinotti wasn’t joking when he said, “If you get a rotten photograph, chop into it and use it as a double-page spread.”
Obviously, risky subjects need cheeky images but where do you draw the line?
Hillman admitted it was always a tense moment when the dummy went to the lawyers.
“When they say ‘He will sue!’ you don’t publish.”
In 1975 they invited female readers who wanted to meet bachelor Prime Minister Ted Heath to fill in a dating form and mail it to their office.
Hillman said, “Two applicants were serious. One said, ‘I’d love to do that, I think he needs knocking into shape’. She wanted to marry him at Caxton Hall.”
Nova did a pisstake tabloid cover like a Daily Mirror front page: TED TO WED. The magazine was printed, flown in from Italy, and stored in a warehouse as usual, prior to distribution.
Unfortunately, the chairman of IPC was a mate of Heath’s. So all the magazines were soaked in acidic water and then thrown into the furnace at Battersea Power Station.
And Nova was shut down.
Annette and I were both buzzing as we walked back the Barbican tube station.
She said, “I was shocked when he asked for one last question. I could have sat there all night!”
The cultural events I’ve attended recently have been in giant buildings like Tate Modern, the British Museum, and the Wellcome Trust, so it was wonderful to be in an intimate venue and go on such an informative journey with a hip audience of grown-ups.
Sometimes small really is beautiful.