Power, Corruption and Lies

In the early 17^th century, cotton fabrics from India known as “chints” were imported into Europe and very quickly became popular for use in clothing and home furnishings. Unlike the inferior block printed linens produced in Europe at the time, these were printed in bright colours which remained fixed to the cloth when washed. Their popularity in Europe led to the commissioning of European style designs, and industrial techniques developed in Britain and Ireland in the 18^th and 19^th centuries led to British printers becoming the leading manufacturers of what was now known as chintz, most commonly featuring repeating floral designs.

At the beginning of this process, India, largely under Mughal rule, had traded with the fledgling East India Company, an English shareholder owned company, as well as other similar European companies which would trade with Asian countries and import goods into Europe. Over time, however, the East India Company militarised and increasingly took direct control of what would become British India, with this power eventually transferred to the British Crown under Queen Victoria in 1858. At the same time, as demand for these and other cotton fabrics grew, manufacture in Britain became increasingly industrialised, with production concentrated among the mills emerging in the Lancashire area at the beginning of the industrial revolution. Fuelled by the supply of raw cotton from plantations using the forced labour of enslaved workers in the Caribbean and North America, output intensified to the extent that Manchester gained the nickname ‘Cottonopolis.’

As the 19^th century progressed, the use of Jacquard machines in cotton mills become more and more widespread, where a pattern to be woven would be encoded in a series of punched cards which the loom would automatically follow. A system that inspired Charles Babbage to create his Analytical Engine which, combined with the ideas of his mathematician contemporaries Ada Lovelace and George Boole, would eventually influence early computing, with the first computers being similarly programmed with binary punch cards.

In 1854, Ignace Henri Jean Fantin-Latour had two still life paintings of flowers accepted by the Royal Academy in London. This, along with the support of Ruth and Edwin Edwards, led to a commercial success in England that saw Fantin-Latour paint still lifes, mainly of flowers and fruit, almost exclusively for the English market, right up until his death 50 years later. These were works Fantin-Latour himself didn’t take very seriously, they were made to support him and his family financially, while at home in Paris he focused on allegorical paintings, portraits and lithographs.

In Victorian Britain though, flowers, and floral motifs, in art and home furnishings were incredibly popular. There was something of a craze for Floriography, where every flower was encoded with its own covert meaning, combining to form a ‘language of flowers’ which could be used to convey secret messages. Usually the sender’s romantic feelings towards the recipient, which couldn’t be openly expressed in repressive Victorian society. Florals became ubiquitous, and through mass production, chintz, and similarly patterned fabrics, became more available while diminishing in quality, perceived less as a luxury and increasingly as a cliché. As early as 1851 author Mary Ann Evans (better known under her pen name, George Eliot) was deriding a fabric as ‘chintzy’, a term which would come to suggest cheap, bourgeoise, garish or twee.

Born in Salford and raised in Hale, a leafy suburban village in Greater Manchester, Peter Saville remembers a childhood home with Victorian oil paintings on the wall and a chintz covered living room. Modernity first appeared to him via record sleeves, particularly those of Roxy Music, and pop art, including the work of Richard Hamilton who had taught Roxy’s Bryan Ferry at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne before the band was formed. His interest in these led Saville to study graphic design at Manchester Polytechnic, where he discovered Herbert Spencer’s Pioneers of Modern Typography via fellow student and former schoolmate Malcolm Garrett, and within it the work of Jan Tschichold, most identifiable in the UK for his Penguin Composition Rules which standardised the typesetting, layout and graphics of Penguin Books and its subsidiaries in the late 1940s.

When Garrett began to establish himself designing artwork and record sleeves for emerging Manchester punk band Buzzcocks, Saville, perhaps sensing he was falling behind, approached local television personality and empresario Tony Wilson with the vague idea that he could be useful to Wilson as a graphic designer. The result was that in May 1978 Saville was commissioned to design the poster for a new punk inspired club night Wilson was organizing with Alan Erasmus, the Factory. Later that year, the night became a record label, Factory Records, with Saville a partner and art director. In that capacity Saville quickly built a profile for himself as a designer of record sleeves, his reputation cemented early on by his work with Factory artists like Joy Division, most notably their 1979 album Unknown Pleasures, to the extent that by 1980 he was designing the sleeve for the album Flesh + Blood by Roxy Music themselves.

In 1972, the year Roxy Music released their first album, Italian company Eko launched the first programmable drum machine, the ComputeRhythm, which, like a Jacquard loom, used punch cards to store and control its patterns. This was soon followed by microprocessor based machines, like the Roland CR-78, and in 1980 the first drum machines to use digital samples rather than synthesized sounds appeared, the Linn LM-1 Drum Computer and the Oberheim DMX.

Also in 1980, after the trauma of losing their singer and frontman Ian Curtis, the surviving members of Joy Division; Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, and Stephen Morris, had decided to continue the band but with a new name, New Order, and realised their ambition of playing in America, where almost immediately after arriving, all their gear was stolen. They soldiered on though, and through 1981 released a previously unrecorded Joy Division song ‘Ceremony’ as a single, then ‘Procession’ and an album, Movement, in a recognisably similar style with Joy Division producer Martin Hannett. However, while they were in the US, music promoter Ruth Polsky had introduced them to the nightlife of New York where they were reinvigorated by the exuberant melting pot of the club scene, where DJs would mix synthpop, experimental electronics, funk, disco, new wave, and early hip hop alongside visual art, performance, and video, for an audience of varying ethnicities, sexual orientations, and class backgrounds.

Sumner had reluctantly emerged as the main vocalist but wasn’t always comfortable playing and singing at the same time, so as they replaced their gear, and having already added Gillian Gilbert to the line up between sessions for that first single, they began to incorporate more technology into their set up. Experimenting as they went, a new way of working emerged, firstly blending drums and synthesiser to create an arpeggiated effect on ‘Everything’s Gone Green’ (the B side of ‘Procession’) and then in early 1982, producing themselves and no longer working with Hannett, using a home built sequencer as the foundation for the next single ‘Temptation.’ Over the course of the year they added new equipment and developed more new songs, they also went clubbing and would hear a lot of Hi-NRG and Italo disco.

In October 1982, New Order entered Britannia Row studios in London to begin recording ten new songs towards their second album which, like ‘Temptation,’ they would self produce, with the assistance of engineer Michael Johnson. Basic sequenced parts had been plotted out in advance at the band’s rehearsal room in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, but the songs were mostly still in somewhat embryonic form, having been developed as they played shows, with Sumner improvising lyrics.

Playing live was fundamental to the songwriting process and involved experimenting and being creative, so at a New Order gig unpredictability was just a part of the experience, even if their reputation for inconsistency frustrated audiences. Playing an encore for example, although expected of a headlining band, was anathema to their spirit of spontaneity, authenticity and general bloody-mindedness. However, the new technology they were now using potentially made it possible to programme an entire song from start to finish, rather than just incorporate different parts or basic rhythms. So the idea had formed that they would do just that, create a song that would be played by the machines on their own, performing the encore autonomously while the band relaxed backstage. It would also be an opportunity to use all of the new technology on one track, as well as to emulate some of the music they had been hearing in clubs like the Fun House and the Paradise Garage in New York or Heaven in London.

The result, ‘Blue Monday,’ taking its title from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Breakfast of Champions, would ultimately develop into a song with vocals and become the centrepiece of the sessions at Britannia Row, taking up a fair amount of the studio time. It was apparent early on though that, at over 7 minutes, it would be too long to fit comfortably among the other tracks on the album, since the audio quality of a side of a 12” record starts to become compromised if its duration gets beyond around 15-20 minutes. So it would be released as a stand-alone single, an idea enthusiastically championed by the band’s manager, Rob Gretton.

Although mostly worked out in advance, the programming, for the tracks that required it, was done manually and meant counting every individual note over a whole musical sequence, where a single mistake would mean it wouldn’t work and the programming would have to start again from scratch. Plus, much of the gear they had accumulated in this time could be temperamental, the new DMX drum machine had some memory issues, the Prophet 5 synthesiser had been supplied with the wrong manual and various equipment malfunctions during recording meant frequent trips to the nearby Synthesiser Service Centre. So in the studio Gillian Gilbert, who was responsible for the programming of ‘Blue Monday,’ had to take a note of each individual step in the sequence by writing it out by hand in an improvised form of notation, across multiple sheets of A4 paper taped together, which Gilbert likened to a knitting pattern and Stephen Morris compared to the Bayeux Tapestry.

Free from any external control, with Martin Hannett not involved and Factory Records content to let them get on with it, the album itself, eventually titled Power, Corruption and Lies from the blurb on the back of a paperback copy of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, would cover a lot of musical ground and sound more confident than its predecessor, Movement. Bookended by the upbeat ‘Age of Consent’ and the wistful ‘Leave Me Alone,’ both built around live drums and guitars, most of the rest of the album combines the dynamics of a live band with the influence of electronic music and the adventure of experimenting with new technology. One recurring influence is Kraftwerk, ‘Your Silent Face’, for example was initially titled ‘the Kraftwerky One’ or ‘KW1’ because of its use of a similar delay effect to their ‘Europe Endless,’ but equally influential was music that was itself inspired by Kraftwerk, from David Bowie’s Low to Afrika Bambaataa’s ‘Planet Rock.’

In fact, in a way Kraftwerk even made a direct appearance, on both ‘Blue Monday’ and ‘5 8 6,’ in the form of a short sample of a choral sound from their track ‘Uranium.’ The E-mu Emulator was the most cutting edge, and expensive, piece of kit New Order had acquired, one of the earliest digital samplers, and sampling was still something of a novelty. So when at one point Peter Saville, chaperoned by Rob Gretton, visited the band in their rehearsal room as they prepared to go to the studio, instead of him hearing much of the music they were making, Gretton had Stephen Morris entertain Saville by demonstrating the Emulator and the various sounds it could make. Saville, however, was more curious about the floppy disks that the samples were stored on and asked if he could take one away with him.

As the 1970s had given way to the 1980s and the Postmodern Condition was on its way to becoming postmodernism, ideas like deconstruction, deconstructivism and institutional critique were coming to prominence in architecture, design and the arts. There was an understanding that no work of art or culture had a single unambiguous meaning, existing ideas could be juxtaposed or recontextualized to suggest new interpretations, and a trend developed towards revealing the hidden inner workings of language and objects. Perhaps to better understand their effect on society, to criticize complacency around what was accepted, or maybe, to simply appreciate the craft of making and the beauty of basic elements and materials.

Through the 1970s artists like Gordon Matta-Clark or Michael Asher would make physical interventions instead of creating objects. Asher removing the interior walls of a gallery, revealing the office and storage spaces, or rearranging the usually unnoticed infrastructure so it became the primary focus of an exhibition. Matta-Clark drawing attention to the continual processes of change in the urban environment, by cutting a large geometric shape out of a building’s wall or even physically removing its whole façade. Also in the 1970s, Structural Impressionism in architecture deliberately made visible the functional elements of a building. For example, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which opened in 1977 on the former site of one of Matta-Clark’s interventions and was designed by Richard Rogers, Su Rogers, Renzo Piano and Gianfranco Franchini. All of its functional systems were on the outside of the building, making up its visible façade, and were colour coded: blue for air flows, yellow for electricity, green for water circuits and red for pedestrian flows.

In Milan, the Memphis Group had formed at the end of 1980, with the explicit aim of breaking conventional rules around furniture and product design, playfully blending pop culture and historical references, fusing high culture with kitsch, using unconventional materials and colour juxtapositions. While the following year in London, fashion boutique Crolla opened on Dover Street, where Scott Crolla and Georgina Godley combined sophisticated design with chintz and floral patterns, plus lavish fabrics and styles from a variety of eras, which appealed to the postmodern dandies of the New Romantic movement.

Also in London, legendary graphic designer Barney Bubbles had, anticipating Saville, directly quoted imagery from the early 20^th century avant garde, in his sleeve for ‘Your Generation’ by Generation X in 1977, for example, and had also played with conventions, juxtapositions and manufacturing processes. His design for Elvis Costello’s 1978 album This Year’s Model has Costello standing behind the camera as if in the act of taking the cover photo himself, and was deliberately printed off centre so that the printer’s CMYK colour registration marks were visible in a column down the right hand edge of the front of the sleeve. Rik Comello, a designer at Studio Dumbar, would also incorporate a motif resembling printer’s registration marks in his design for the God and the Gods exhibition poster and catalogue at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum in 1981, where this identification of modern industrial printing sits on top of a Rembrandt painting like a bar code.

By 1982 Peter Saville had become fascinated by computers, despite not having used one, and was interested in how information might be transferred, encoded and represented on a screen. The floppy disk was one example of what might be involved in putting this into practice, but Saville was thinking visually, and about the ways in which he had taken design elements from the past and recontextualised them to create something new, like the work of typographer Berthold Wolpe for the ‘Ceremony’ sleeve, or Italian futurist Fortunato Depero for the cover of Movement. How would visual languages of the past be transposed into the future, and how would the repository of great works of art and culture continue to exist alongside the products of the coming digital computer age. Thinking about this in terms of an archive, like that of a gallery or museum, then the information would appear in the form of an index with its own language of abbreviations, classifications or symbols, something like the Dewey decimal system used by libraries. Since it would appear on a computer screen, then this language would also be a visual one, and as an experiment Saville decided to try formulating his own.

The one work in progress he had heard when visiting New Order’s rehearsal space was ‘Blue Monday,’ the track to be played entirely by sequencers and machines. The song, and the way it was produced, was therefore directly connected to the floppy disk Stephen Morris had given him, so after learning that it would be released as a single, the idea quickly formed that the disk would be the ideal model for the sleeve. In a sense ‘Blue Monday’ already was stored on a floppy disk, much like the information this new classification system might be used to access.

If Saville’s idea of this new language was going to be incorporated into a record sleeve design, then it would need to be reproduced on a printed page with analogue equipment. He also wanted it to be functional and embody the principle of the idea, rather than it be an obvious or superficial representation of a digital screen. At this point the only available information to be communicated was the name of the band, the titles of both the album and single, plus their catalogue numbers, so perhaps the code should reference the letters of the alphabet. Immediately at his disposal were some graph paper and coloured pencils, and he began figuring out how the alphabet could be represented with colours. 26 colours would be impractical for printing purposes, plus it also had to represent numbers, so it would be necessary to begin with a shorter sequence and then find a simple way of extending it. Through trial and error, he arrived at an initial sequence of nine colours, thinking that this could represent the digits 1-9 as well as the first nine letters, with zero as white, and using the squares of the graph paper repeated the sequence but with two squares, colour one combined with each of the nine, then the same with colour two, until the whole alphabet was represented by either a single colour or a two colour combination. Then he used it to write out some of the words, settling on a format that would place the text in a column reading from top to bottom.

When informed that the title of the album would be Power, Corruption and Lies, Saville had immediately thought of the BBC tv show the Borgias which had recently been broadcast, dramatising political machinations around the papacy during the Italian Renaissance. Niccolò Machiavelli had drawn on the life of Cesare Borgia in his 16^th century work The Prince, so Saville’s first instinct was that a portrait of a Machiavellian figure like Borgia would be an appropriate image for the cover and he made a tour of some London galleries and museums to try and source one, accompanied by Martha Ladley, whose own painting featured on a New Order compilation EP released in the US around that time. However, after actually finding a few that fit the brief, this idea now seemed a bit literal, so Saville decided he needed a rethink. The day had ended at the National Gallery where Saville had picked up a few postcards, one of which was of Henri Fantin-Latour’s 1890 painting Basket of Roses, which reminded him of his mother’s living room. When Ladley asked him if he was thinking of using the image for the New Order sleeve, he looked at it again and realised that this might actually be the new inspiration he was looking for. His friends at Crolla had been repurposing chintzy floral prints, partly as a postmodern gesture against prevailing notions of good taste and partly as a signifier of aspirational luxury, this painting had a similar aesthetic. The image was apparently innocuous, yet seductive and charming, in the Victorian language of flowers, roses could be used to signify many apparently contrasting ideas, love, jealousy, innocence, mourning, devotion, betrayal.

The problem now was how to get a copy to reproduce on a record sleeve, the National Gallery didn’t have a transparency of it and the painting was on loan to the gallery at Norwich Castle, who wouldn’t give permission to photograph it as this was against the regulations of the loan. Eventually Tony Wilson used his position as a television journalist to get in touch with the director of the National Gallery, Sir Michael Levey, to make the request directly. When asked who actually owned the painting, Levey conceded to Wilson that the people of Great Britain did, and permission was duly given for Saville to go to Norwich with photographer Trevor Key.

The sleeves for both single and album were developed in tandem, working with Brett Wickens, and both featured Saville’s code instead of text, other than the mandatory credit for the National Gallery the only readable information was on the labels of the vinyl. ‘Blue Monday’ replicated the form of a floppy disk but outsized, like a Claes Oldenburg sculpture, to fit the size of a 12” single, with the distinctive holes cut out using the die-cut technique Saville and Ben Kelly had employed in 1980 for Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s first album. Part of the die cut motif was repeated on the rear of the Power, Corruption and Lies sleeve. Unfortunately the retail price for a single is much lower than that of an album, and reportedly the first pressings of ‘Blue Monday’ sold at a loss, so it was soon reissued in a compromised form, first with a black inner sleeve instead of the original silver, then with embossed shapes instead of cut outs, and finally in a version without any representation of the cut out shapes at all.

The key to the code is contained in the circle on the reverse of the Power, Corruption and Lies LP sleeve, the outer ring of the circle represents the letters and numbers, the inner ring represents the colours used in reproducing the painting on the front, and the triangular shapes in the centre are the basic printing colours CMYK, or cyan, magenta, yellow and key (black), plus white and grey.

To read the encoded text on the album, hold the inner sleeve with the opening at the top, so the coloured squares run down the edge, and read the words as vertical from top to bottom. Viewing the side with the gap containing the painting’s credit, the top right corner should be a square of two colours, green on the left and orange on the right, representing N, the next one down should be all blue, representing E, and so on so it reads ‘NEW ORDER POWER’. Flip the sleeve with the opening still at the top and the squares run down the left, the top square contains a silver octagon, representing a space, the next one down is a solid lilac purple, representing C, so it reads ‘CORRUPTION AND LIES’. The same applies to the ‘Blue Monday’ sleeve. With the small cut out semicircles at the bottom and the opening on the right, the top right square is pink, representing F, and reads top to bottom ‘FAC73 BLUE MONDAY AND,’ then flip it over so the squares run down the left, the top is a space and the first coloured square down is yellow on the left and white on the right representing T and reads ‘THE BEACH NEW ORDER.’

Power, Corruption and Lies was released on 3 May 1983 and although the music was critically well received, the design was a source of confusion or frustration which generated some discussion over the following months. Paul Du Noyer’s review in the New Musical Express of 7 May 1983 mentions that the album has no information on the sleeve to identify it and informs readers that what to look for in the record shop is “a smugly elegant package, of some beauty but little utility, with a painting of flowers on one side and a technical design on the other.” On 21 May 1983, there’s a letter to Sounds signed ‘an Angry Young Man, Bucks,’ complaining that Dave McCullough’s five star review in that paper was meaningless since he also gave five stars to the new Kajagoogoo album, but congratulates him on getting most of the song titles right “which is quite a feat considering Factory gives no clue away on the packing.” There’s also a letter in Melody Maker of 28 May, signed ‘Cocteau and the Preacher,’ berating Mark Brennan for his “pathetic” review and for getting side one and side two mixed up, as well as misquoting some lyrics. Then, in the NME of 11 June, there is a letter from someone called ‘Tone’, pointing out that Du Noyer was incorrect to say that the album doesn’t say what it is: “work out the code on the back of the cover” writes Tone, “and there it is, clear as day. The LP is called ‘SEIL DNA NOITPURROC REWOP’.”

On 25 June, ‘Gurch’ from Middlesex also writes to the NME to ask if anyone has worked out how the code represents numbers, “it seems that digits 1-9 are the same as the letters A-I. Surely this causes confusion between the numbers 10 to 19 and letters J-S as well as between 20 to 26 and T-Z?” Gurch also asks if anyone knows the origin of the code and the significance of the other colours inside the code ring. Gurch receives an answer on 23 July 1983, from ‘Madame Soliel and Jean Le Voyant,’ who write to the NME claiming to be two mediums who have received the answer from the spirit of 19^th century philologist Jean- François Champollion, famous for his role in deciphering the Rosetta Stone. They then present a fairly comprehensive explanation of the code which they say is quoted directly from Champollion, and they hope is satisfactory “in regard to the letter from Mr Gurch.” However, Champollion’s spirit also points out that “Mr Peter Saville has made a mistake,” where the word ‘corruption’ has actually been written ‘CORRUPTIRN.’

The error was quickly rectified in subsequent pressings, but it can be seen in the image reproduced in Matthew Robertson’s Factory Records, the Complete Graphic Album published by Thames and Hudson in 2006, and it made a brief reappearance on the reissues of the album by London Records and Rhino from 2009.