Arts and Literature

One of the most successful poster artists around is Manchester’s Nick Rhodes, who has designed posters for everyone from local musicians like Elbow, Ian Brown and the Inspiral Carpets to international names like Soulsavers, Babyshambles and Ray Davies.

Nick says his poster art comes from his own love of the more traditional flyers and seeing other artists’ work.

Some of Nick's source materials

"I used to design flyers for a friend’s band and it just progressed from there. I used to go to the Richard Goodall Gallery for countless weekends, looking at the posters and getting inspired, and then when I got my own screen-printing gear, it started from there."

Losing control

The screen-printed music poster has been a big thing in America for some time, but it’s only recently started to be taken seriously here in Britain, though Nick says music fans here are being quick to catch up with their US cousins.

"In the last year, it’s exploding. This summer, we became the first people to take our posters to a festival [End of the Road in Dorset] and people went mad for them."

The hand-drawn sketches

The posters come about through a combination of commissions from the bands involved and Nick’s own requests to do art for certain musicians. He says that the bands love the posters because "it’s something they don’t have control over."

"Everything else is controlled by the management and the record companies, and this is a chance to release a bit of control and see what happens."

That lack of control means that Nick gets to choose what the image on the poster will be. His decision is based on how he feels about the band’s music.

Another dimension

Like all good artists, Nick isn’t sitting on his success and is pushing himself towards a long held ambition; to create the world’s first three dimensional screen print. It’s an idea he’s had for almost as long as he’s been creating posters.

"It was four years ago when it first came to me. I got inspired by a poster artist called Emek, who was pushing boundaries with posters and bringing in a fine art element. I come from a fine art background so I wanted to push it with my own work and challenge myself.

"It’s quite a difficult thing to do. On paper it works, but when you come to actually doing it, you realise how much is going into it. I worked out that it’s 900 prints and 750 cuts.

The process of printing the 3-D poster

"Not just that, but I couldn’t even send it out to be machine cut. With screen-printing, there’s always things that are slightly off, so it’s all been done hands-on.

"But the idea is that these posters go on the wall, they’re not throw-away. There’s a lot of work goes in to them and they’re to be enjoyed like art."

Nick’s posters are things of beauty, as much art as anything that hangs in Manchester Art Gallery, and given how obsessed with music we are in this city, he could become the city’s next big artist.

And even if he doesn’t, there’ll always be plenty of punters lining up for an extra special reminder of their favourite shows.

Nick Rhodes is one of several artists taking part in a show at Urbis on Saturday 20 and Sunday 21 October.