Twos Talks with Jim Fitzpatrick

When Jim Fitzpatrick was 16, he met Che Guevara in a small pub on the west coast of Ireland years before creating one of the most reproduced political images in history. From the iconic Che poster to Thin Lizzy album covers and Celtic inspired artworks, his career has shaped generations of visual culture across politics, music, and design.

In this Twos Talks interview, Jim Fitzpatrick shares the story of meeting Che Guevara in person, the process behind creating the famous poster, the hidden signature inside the artwork, and his journey through psychedelic art, political graphics, album cover design, and Irish mythology.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Jim Fitzpatrick. Born in Dublin, Ireland, Jim Fitzpatrick is one of the most influential Irish artists of all time. Fitzpatrick is best known for designing one of the most famous poster designs in graphic design history, the iconic two-tone portrait of Shekowara in 1968. The poster quickly became a global symbol of revolution. Over the course of his career, Fitzpatrick has worked across multiple creative fields, designing album covers for the legendary Irish rock band Tin Lizzie. His iconic designs for Shekowara and Tin Lizzy's Black Cross album later became Irish National Stamps. Fitzpatrick also created countless Celtic artworks that blend traditional Irish imagery with modern visual language. Through political graphics, music, mythology, and illustration, Fitzpatrick continues to leave a lasting impact on both Irish art and global visual culture. This is two stocks with Jim Fitzpatrick. First of all, I would like to thank you to give us this honor and pleasure to have you here on the podcast. Welcome.

SPEAKER_01 1:21

Thank you very much indeed. You're very welcome.

SPEAKER_00 1:24

Well, the amazing thing about your career is that fairly in the beginning, you designed one of the most influential posters and revolutionary posters of all time. And I know you've told this story a lot of times, but because of its impact later on in your life, I want to hear briefly about your encounter with Chora himself in Ireland.

SPEAKER_01 1:46

Right. Well, I was what 16? I was with a friend of mine who still lives up the hill. I live in a place called Haute, which is notable for a huge mountain. I did a black and white kind of uh psychedelic one first, and that set me on the path because that was done before Shay died.

SPEAKER_00 2:06

The amazing, like crazily beautiful thing about this story of you meeting him is that in his mind, he wouldn't guess that this young man that I met in a bar in Ireland after my death, he's gonna make a memorable most memorable image about my life after my death years later. So that's really like such a beautiful, maybe like butterfly effect, divine intervention.

SPEAKER_01 2:34

It's just amazing. I mean, you've no idea how remote the area and the place is where I met him. It is the edge of the Atlantic, next stop America. It's wild. It's huge cliffs and massive waves. You know what I mean? So on a Sunday morning, I was after going to Mass, and my job was to open the bar at about half eleven. And at about twelve or later, I'm not sure now, uh, but around that time, three people walked into the bar. The bar was like something out of a western saloon. It had a double door because of the wind, right? Oh, okay. So it had a big door, and you opened that, and then it had a swing door, and in walk Clintishedwood and two of his mates. I recognized him immediately, and I'll tell you why. We knew who Shea Guevara was in our class and in our school, and Fidel Castro, because the monks, the friars were telling us these were great people, they'd overthrow a brutal dictator, right? So we were all. What we do? Freedom. Look at these guys. And uh we just admired them and absorbed them, but there was something slightly special about the Cuban Revolution for us at the time. It was the first time, even the uh priests who taught us said it was the first time that any country in Latin America had been actually freed. What they meant was from American imperialism, not just a local dictator, you know. So all these things fed into the narrative in my head. So when I met Sheikar, I knew exactly who he was, and he was amazed I knew who he was. He came over, he they you know, they looked around, I pointed out a circular red kind of couch that you know could see to about four or five people. So the three of went there, shake him over to the bar, and the first thing I said to him was, What brings you here? I said, I know who you are, you know, you're the you're the I said you're the Cuban revolutionary. And that's what started the conversation, because he says, No, no, I'm Argentinian, right? And later he said, I'm Irish. He didn't say Argentinian Irish. He said, I'm Irish, so I was getting very confused. Shea told me that his everything he learned about Ireland, he learned on his grandmother's knee. Now that's fascinating, that's very Irish, because that grandmother was three generations or two generations at least removed from Ireland. And he told me he was from Galway and Cork, two counties in Ireland. He had landed at Shannon Airport in an aeroflot flight, he had come ashore and found us everywhere was closed, right? The place was fog bound, there were no more flights coming in or out. According to one of my neighbors here, he stayed in her mother's guest house. I've never published this, by the way. This is brand new, right? Because her mother ran a guest house in County Clare, but never paid tax, never said it was a guest house. Right? So when I was told this a couple of years ago, I was asked not to tell anybody in case they'd all get the tax bill. From 1961, for Christ's sake. They were fault bound, and the taxi driver said, Come on, I know somewhere because say he wanted to enjoy himself. When he's in Ireland, he liked to go to a pub, right? He wasn't a big drinker, you know. Even when I served him, he asked me what to what to drink, and I suggested an Irish whiskey, and he asked me what would go with it, and I said ginger ale or water, but I said water's better. Because Irish whiskey is quite strong if you're not used to it. I didn't want to, you know, go coughing itself to death, you know, by putting whiskey on to lighten it and get used to it. But he only had one, you know. And what annoyed me was that he didn't give me a tip. I'd worked hard. I gave him a history of the Irish Revolution. And that was it. That was the conversation. It lasted about ten minutes, less than that, even.

SPEAKER_00 6:31

But this Shea design, uh, what I wanted to talk with you about is that when you put it next to this other, let's say, revolutionary influential posters throughout history, this design again stands out because of your brave choice of having this minimal approach to the design of it. Like only using black, white, red, and a tiny bit of yellow. What was your uh process of coming to this design? I wanted to know about the process of getting to that. And the hidden logo.

SPEAKER_01 7:00

The hidden logo. Yeah. Oh wow. Okay. Which has saved my life. I did the first shape poster in 1967. Originally in April of 1967, I was working for a magazine. I was an art director in advertising, but I worked freelance. So as an art director for a magazine called Scene. And they ran out of money. And I had posters that I wanted to advertise. I started I did one called Love, and they said they'd give me a full-page ad in return for an illustration, right? So I started a series called A Voice in Our Time. I won't go into all the detail. It's on my website. I think I discussed it in one of my blogs. I did Ian Paisley, uh notorious loyalist preacher. Uh I did uh Lyndon Baines Johnson, Vietnam War cartoon, anti-Vietnam War cartoon, with Harold Wilson, the British Prime Minister, as his poodle. And the third, I did three, let me see, I'm missing one. But the fourth one was to be uh Shea Guevara, and above him I'd written uh something about uh dying and the sound of machine guns. It's a very famous quote. It's I couldn't tell you it off the top of my head, but it was kind of heavy and violent. In other words, get a stand up and fight was the message. And the publisher was an Englishman who didn't like this at all, and he said, We're not having that in the magazine. A year later they wrote a piece saying how they they felt like the guy who turned down the Beatles because the poster, the the black and white one was already famous before the red and black one, you know. So I used that image, Bryce, that was to commemorate Shea going to Bolivia. He was still alive, and in November he was murdered of 1967. He was murdered. I did a great deal of research, and I wrote an article in a radical Irish magazine called Hibernia that exposed everything about that murder. The good thing is that I felt as a kid, right, by then I was about twenty, so strongly about this person I had met, right, who I knew as a fighter, so fighters die. But the way he was killed and as a prisoner of war that really angered me. And the way the fact that he disappeared him, and I said to myself, he's not disappearing. Simple as that. I thought, you know, I'm gonna make a graphic and I'm gonna put it everywhere, and it was gonna be the black and white one. And what happened was I was approached in 1967 when they saw the black and red poster, sorry, the black and white poster by an exhibition in London called Viva Shea. I have the documentation still, it's on my blog actually, you see it. It's all black and it's all what's new Xeroxes, it's all muddy Xeroxes. No. And on that note was a silhouette of Shea, horrible scribbly version. I remember thinking, geez, I recognized them immediately, even in a scribbly black and white version. Right? And they wanted uh me to join them in the exhibition and show them the originals of the black and white shade, which I did, and then I did an original painting for it, all of which vanished, never got them back. But the originals for the red and black shade, the famous one, which we're now coming to, came from that exhibition, right? I wanted to give them a poster for that exhibition, for Beaver Shade, and I wanted to be in your face. I always found the the black and white one uh beautiful and psychedelic, but I hadn't got a good photograph. I was working from a blow-up photograph with Ben Day dots on it, right? Yeah. So I did a red and black poster for this exhibition in May 1968 in London, right? I sent over uh now I was working in advertising, so I was able to make copies on paper negatives. So I made a copy on a paper negative, I did it all in the artwork and sent it over for them to the printer, you know. I still have the artwork, thank God. I kept the actual original artwork, but it's only like a what is it, A3? A three size. Yeah, it's not big, you know. I did an original. Have I got it there? Called alright. Let's see if I can find it. Oh, that would be amazing. Don't be deceived. I call this the original, right? Okay, and it is the original, but it's a bigger version. Oh wow. Because do you know what happened? Everybody, this pay this work got very famous very quickly.

SPEAKER_00 11:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:53

And my friends, you know, we had a lot of parties in those days. We were well off, we were working on advertising and loads of money, and we'd have great parties, and everybody wanted to see the Shea Original. And I would bring out the Shea Original, and I could see they were disappointed because they were small. So I did a big one, same year. Oh, okay. I thought, I want something for myself, yeah. Right, and that's why I did that, you know, because the shea to me belongs to everybody, you know? Yeah. So that one is mine. That's all.

SPEAKER_00 12:25

Until in one April that you made millions from sending it to Budweiser.

SPEAKER_01 12:30

Oh, yeah, that was that was April Fool. I won't do that again. For April Fool's Day, did that day that morning I put up a post out of mischief of myself with the Shay, you know, pink, big canvas, and I said, I'm delighted to inform you that Budweiser are buying the Shea and all the rights to it, right? And then some other Irish guy who I've never met did it got the picture of me and photoshopped the Budweiser chain around my neck, right? And the Budweiser sign and Shay's hat. And everybody went ballistic. How could I sell him out? How could I do this? And I'm going like a fucking April Fool's day. And then everybody got it. Thank God. But people took it really seriously. I was getting threats. Well, first of all, I have never once, not once, licensed that image to anybody and never will. Right? I have drawn up legal documents that gives all rights to my image in perpetuity to the Cuban people to be administered by the Guevara family. I don't want to leave it to the Communist Party, I don't want to leave it to any individual or any individuals, even no matter how trustworthy they are, because governments change. I just want to leave it to the the Cuban people. And any money to be earned off that let them. I don't care if everybody in Cuba is selling it off a stand. I don't care if people like in I was in Florence and there's Shay everywhere. You know what I mean? I don't care. To me, that's part of what I wanted. I wanted that image out there. And it's out there, and I don't care if out of a hundred people, only one knows who it is and wears it for the right reason. The fact is, I set out when Shay was murdered, and I said it very publicly, that he is not going to disappear.

SPEAKER_00 14:34

I wanted to ask you about your album arts, especially those you made for Tin Lizzie, from the famous Black Rose to the beautifully crafted Johnny Fox. How did you come up with the main idea?

SPEAKER_01 14:45

When I was working with Philip Lyon, it was synergy where two people can lock horns. We had, even though he's black, he was educated in the same Catholic environment that I was educated. So we had a commonality of experience. When I would talk to him about a poem, he would know what poem it was because we learned the same poem. Do you know what I mean? So I'll give you an example. My most iconic design for Tin Lizzie, and probably my most iconic album design, is Black Rose, right? Philip and myself were very close, so we could kind of not read each other's minds, but we could drop a line and we could connect. And when I had the Black Rose drawing done, right, and in those days there was no email, no nothing. You posted things over or you got a courier. Even on the Black Rose album, I worked right through the night on that one because the blue, I kept having to spray layers of blue. My daughter used to, she still jokes that I came out the next morning for breakfast and my nose was running blue. Even though I had a mask, even though I had a mask on, I was hairbrushing. And to build up that layer took hours, you know, and then you have to dry it with a hair dryer in between. And you notice the courier coming at 10 o'clock in the morning. You know what I mean? To get the play the nose nine o'clock in the morning to get the 10 o'clock flight. And I can remember everything so clearly about that. But here's this here's what happened. I did the full colour painting, oh, everything done, and I just had to do the blue background and all that. And I sent a uh photograph over to Philip by courier, and I said he loved it, and I said, but it's not right. It just it just it it has nothing beyond a beautiful painting of a rose, black maybe, which is difficult enough to do. And I said, it needs something, and we were talking, and Black Rose, the title comes from an Irish word uh for black rose called Dark Rosaline. Dark Rosaline means the dark rose, and the dark rose in Irish is Rochine Dove. And Roshin Dove, that was a poem called Dark Rosaline, written by a Jesuit, James Clarence Mangan, and it was an allegory about Ireland trying to liberate itself with the help of Spain. Back then, Spain used to try and help us, you know, and then Napoleon tried, everybody tried. Then uh anyway, Black Rose, and we were talking away, and I I suddenly got this vision. I thought, Jesus Christ. I was doing portraits of some of the 1916 revolutionary leaders, and one of them, they were all teachers and poets, one of them was a poet called J uh Joseph Mary Plunkett. I actually worked on advertising with his grandson, that's how I was so able to click. And I said to Philip that poem we learned in school by Joseph Mary Plunkett, and Philip said, Oh, I see his blood upon the rose. And I went, that's it. It's a Rosicrucian poem, right? About Christ and blood dripping on the rose and rebirth, right? And that's what that's what gave me the idea that made to me made a huge difference that rose. It suddenly became something emblematic and totemic, so much so that it's now on an Irish stamp, would you believe? The stamp of Tim Lizzie's black rose, and beside it, I can show it to you if you want.

SPEAKER_00 18:26

Hey everyone, Sajot here. First of all, thank you for listening to the podcast. I wanted to quickly let you know about our merch drops. Right now I'm wearing one of our designs, which I really like, which is about when designers end up doing everything from design to copy to video and even social media. Our merch store is full of cool designs, specially made for graphic designers to wear. So make sure you check out our merch store. Also, our website is uh to the studio.com is live. Our website now has the complete archive of 2studio videos, two stocks episodes, and exclusive interviews and articles only available on 2thestudio.com. So make sure you check out our new website. And finally, if you want to support us and you like what we are making and you want to actually help us to be able to create more content like this, you can join To the Studio on our Patreon account. You can also get discounts on our merge by joining our Patreon account. Now back to the episode.

SPEAKER_01 19:18

Yeah, hold on a second. It's right beside me. Oh, you know Shre is on an Irish stamp, by the way, do you? Yes, yes, I've seen that one as well. I have I have that too of you. And though you can use all this stuff, so don't worry, I own the right. There's black roach. They even embossed and glazed the plant on the rose. Which I think is deadly, isn't it? That's interesting. There's another one here that's absolutely beautiful. Yeah, this one I love as well. It's more elaborate cover, you know.

SPEAKER_00 19:53

Yes, yes, beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 19:56

There we go. So I've been honored by my own country with stamps. And I'll tell you very quickly about the Shea Stamp. When I discovered uh about the Shea Stamp, I was told by Steve Avril, who did all the he did all U2 covers, you know, Boy and all those covers. Steve was a good mate of mine. He did all U2's covers. I'm good friends with Bono and uh Larry lives on the road just five doors away from here. Larry Mullen, the drummer, you know? Steve was commissioned by the post office, the Irish post office, to do the stamps. But when you're doing stamps, I don't know if they say them anywhere else, it's a state secret. Right? Because it's a state body and they don't want people knowing what stamps are coming out, but they do announce them beforehand. And we were sworn to secrecy because uh the people who are trying to get the Shea stamp produced knew we were up against some serious criticism. Right? There's very right-wing elements in every country. We have them here too. We knew there was going to be opposition, so the government minister responsible, who is a Labour minister, Alex, Alex White, uh gave the go-ahead for the post office to produce a stamp of Sheikh Vara, right? And when Steve was telling me that, I said, Are they serious? I said, if anybody finds out the fucking sky will fall in, you know. As it did, I've been I mean, I'm threatened all the time over it. Nothing new about that. But I just thought, wow, that would be the most extraordinary thing that's ever happened in my life. Right? The She Guevara stamp, Sage Guevara on an Irish stamp, can you imagine? Oh god, there we go. This will tell you everything. And this is my own design, that's Shay C. Oh wow, right? And on the bottom it says, I can't read it, but I could I know it. His father, Ernesto Guevara Lynch, said, In my son's veins runs the blood of the Irish rebels, right? And it's on there. On the page. Isn't that amazing? Yeah. Isn't that amazing? In my son's veins flowed the blood of the Irish rebels, Ernesto Guevara Lidge, father of Shay. Wow. Now, here's the interesting thing. A little bit of history. Sorry, there's one of the stamp sheets as well. I mean, they're just beautiful. I love all this stuff. Oh, wow. It looks really beautiful. Isn't it incredible, you know? And it's so beautifully printed, too. I don't know if it was Saturday I got a phone call from Irish Television or T Irish Television about the stamp. And I said, I can't talk about it, I'm sorry. And they said, Jim, there's cues around the block at the post office. They're buying it. I went, it's not out till Monday. And they said, no, no, no. It's been released. And I said, Oh, how did that happen? There were cues around the block and it's sold out. The first time in Irish history, a stamp was sold out by the Monday. And Irish Television came out and interviewed me, right? And we're talking about it. And then they drove off. And about 20 minutes later, I got a phone call saying, They want you on the six o'clock news. It's like that's the biggest news thing in Ireland. Like, even though even my cat watches that, you know. It is just universal. Everybody watched the news in Ireland. And there it was. And they said, Will you talk to them? And of course I would. So I spoke to a very famous reporter called Brian Dobson and told him the story. And that's how it's just rocked. They had to, for the first time, they've had to reprint the entire first run because they have a huge collector base of philatelists, people who collect stamps, and they'll all they had all ordered these. They'd ordered like 200 sheets, even stuff like that. So it had they had they their contract had to be, you know, held up. And I don't know about uh the history of stamps, but it's very unusual for a stamp that isn't a common denominator stamp, you know, common stamp, for a specialist stamp to be ever reissued for any reason. So it made a number of interesting new records stamp. Anyway, the Sin Lizzie stamp. Philip was obviously not alive to see that. He would have loved to have seen himself on an Irish stamp as well. Irish stamp, yes.

SPEAKER_00 24:18

Uh what is the, by the way, what is the hidden logo in the cha poster that you mentioned?

SPEAKER_01 24:22

Oh, yes, indeed. When I was doing the uh original illustrations for Scene Magazine, I was I was working in advertising, so we'd access to an awful lot of magazines, including The New Yorker, and there was a cartoonist called Hirschfeld, brilliant cartoonist. And he always, I read this in an article in New Yorker, his daughter's name was Nina. So in every drawing of Hirschfeld, there's the word Nina. And of course, an idiot like me, when like New Yorker came in and I looked opened the cartoon, I would literally look at it for hours to try and find that hidden logo. Right? And that gave me the idea when I was doing the chaise and when I was doing other work too, you know, to just well, and I wasn't allowed to use my name in advertising. If you do advertising artists, you're not allowed to put your name on it. I decided that I would put a logo on these images, right? And I put in a couple of different elements that I only I could say where did you get that from? Do you know what I mean? Yes. So any forger claiming, as people have claimed, but they did it, they can't say where they did this from or where they got that from. So I can tell you about the hidden logo because it's no longer a secret. I was out, I think, in 2004 or 2006 by Michael Casey, who wrote a book called Shady Afterlife. He's an Irish Argentinian journalist who works for New York, sorry, for the Wall Street Journal, very famous journalist. And I told him that I'd hidden different elements in it, and he was smart enough to hunt them down and eventually figure it out. And in the bottom right hand corner, right, looking at the poster, bottom right hand corner, actually can oh, hold on, we can see it on this thing. Oh wow, yes. There it is. See the F. It's an F and an I. Oh yes, half of an eye for Fitzpatrick, right? Wow. And it looks like it's tuning. And what's wonderful about that is that Andy Warhol's assistant, Jared Malanga, was making up a poster of Shea for Andy Warhol, and this is history. Decreated a thing called the Warhol Shea. You can Google it's nine images of the Shea in multicolors. It's beautiful. The best ripoff I've ever seen. And it was always called the Warhol Shea, but he left my nine logos on the nine images. So it has since been reattributed to me. So I own a Warhol. Yeah. I still haven't decided what to do with it. Because I want to have some fun with that. You know what I mean? I want to be able to use that in a strong way, not in a funny way. And that hidden logo stayed hidden until Michael Casey discovered it and published it in his book, with my permission, you know? So there's still a couple of little things that nobody else knows about, but that's the key one. Any designer, any artist should always build something in that they can prove that they did it. Because you don't know how important something's going to be in the future, you know. So that was the smartest move I ever made in my life. And it was just I mean, I've gone through my sketches, I did an awful lot of sketches, and I have some sketches where I've done bizarre versions of my F to try and blend it in more. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. I've tried to put in F-I-T-Z even like Nina. But no, that the F and that just worked, you know, because it was a part of his tunic there anyway, you know.

SPEAKER_00 27:51

Do you have your top five most favorite or for you influential designer or artist throughout your career?

SPEAKER_01 28:01

Oh, that's a tricky one. Where would I start? Let me just go back to the beginning. Yeah. Uh I think the biggest influence on me at that time, by a mile, was the poster revolution in America. Right? And that's when, and I've got I got to know them all later. I hung out with Mouse and uh Kelly and all these. I didn't meet Rick Griffin, but we spoke on the phone and he gave me a present. Rick Griffin was the founder of psychedelic art. Mouse uh still alive, thank God. I hung out with him in uh Petaluma. He brought me to his studio with my then girlfriend and uh Bob C. The man, who did all the great photographs of the period of uh the Grateful Dead and Jim Morrison and Janice Joplin and all the gang. So I was hanging out with history and they knew my work, but didn't nobody knew I did the Shea. They all knew my Celtic work. Because I used to go to conventions in America. I was a permanent guest at San Diego Comic Con. I met Jack Kirby, hung out, and he invited me to dinner with his wife Roz. And uh I was meeting all my heroes, but you didn't go to America saying about She Guevara, but at the time it wasn't even a subject, anyway. You know what I mean? The poster had risen, made its imprint, and then scattered into thousand different dimensions and little pieces that was everywhere and nowhere at the same time. And I think it was only 2004 that I began to be acknowledged seriously as the designer of the Shea image. I knew I did it. I give you I'll give you a good example of how famous it became. In 2004, I was flown to Los Angeles to Riverside uh studios. That's why I thought you were in Riverside here. Riverside is a city in Los Angeles, out in the beyond the desert, and it's where the UCLA Department of Photography is. And they were having a Cor de Shea exhibition in 2004, and I got a phone call, and it was from the organizer, Trisha Ziff. This will tell you how small Ireland is. And Trisha Ziff rang me up and said, I'm the curator of an exhibition that's going to travel the world, and it's on Shea Guevara, and I've only just discovered that you're the artist who supposedly, uh supposedly, created the Shea Guevara poster, the famous red and black one. And I said, That's correct. And she said, Oh, really? And I said, Yeah, I'm the guy. And she said, uh, would you be would you fly over to LA if they paid by air flight? Would you fly over to LA and attend the opening of the exhibition? And I said, Of course I would, you know. She told me how she discovered I did a Shea. She said, Herself and Jonathan Green, who's the head of photograph or the head of the whole riverside, the UCLA outfit, herself and Jonathan Green had the show booklet with the Shea on the cover, Corda Shea, and they were in a pub just having a drink after work after sorting out this exhibition. And the barman said, Well, Shea Guevara, right? He was an Irish barman. And they said, Yeah, we're having an exhibition of Shea Guevara. And he said, Oh, an Irish lad did the Shea. Do you know that? The red and black Shea. And they went, An Irishman, yeah. So a guy called Jim Fitzpatrick. And they said, Never heard of him. So she rang the Irish Embassy. We have an embassy in uh Washington and in Los Angeles. She rang the Irish Embassy in Los Angeles and said, I'd like to speak about an Irish artist called Jim Fitzpatrick. And the receptionist, the girl on the switchboard, said, Oh, the guy who did the Shake of Far. That's how I was kind of outed as the creator. Yeah. But what is spectacular about that exhibition is the red and black one wasn't in it. Oh, really? Yeah. It was spectacular omission. They had I did other versions of Shea. They even had my silver one on the wall. Do you know what I mean? I did a silver psychedelic one after the red and black one, you know? Back to influential designers. So my huge, the huge influences on me at that time were absolutely Mouse, Kelly, Moscoso, and Kell Mouse, Kelly, Moscoso, and Rick Griffith. Amazing. They had an enormous effect on me. Then, if you looked across the water to England, there was an Australian artist called Martin Sharp.

SPEAKER_00 32:32

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 32:32

Who nobody's heard of, who was a genius. He worked for a magazine called Oz, and I used to get every copy. I still have every copy of it. There were just so many influences coming in. Now, in advertising, I was looking at Milton Blazer, Seymour Schwast, and Poshpin Studios. They were like, wow, they were like gods to me. And her blue Ballin, you know. So the whole I was brought up admiring always the Jewish diaspora, you know, and here they were, and they were geniuses. And I met Seymour Schwast, he was a lovely guy. They were really good characters, you know. That's why I hate all this anti-Semitism and all this, you know. I don't say anti-Israeli because I'm anti-Israeli, but not against the people. The people against the assholes, for want of a better word, because that's what they are. They're horrible assholes. And you know, all my influence, like Lenny Bruce, the comedian, all the great intellectuals, the people, Bonnie Greer is a a black uh American writer who said that the civil rights movement wasn't just black people, it was the Jews and the Irish drove it, you know. And you saw Bobby Kennedy marching out of Martin Luther King's funeral, for God's sake. Can you imagine the effect that had on people back then? That was like holy Christ, amazing, you know?

SPEAKER_00 33:51

Yes. I don't want to take a lot of your time. Uh with actually like to explain. It's going to be football on soon. Yeah. Thanks again for coming to the show. Uh it's been an honor. It's been a pleasure to have you here. And I would love to share your where do you think our audience should find you? On your website, on your social media?

SPEAKER_01 34:15

On my website. Instagram is the quickest way. In the link in the bio, then they can go to my website and everything. The website has I'm still writing blogs at the moment. Blogs, just trying to talk about all the work I've done over the years and put it into some kind of context. It's brilliant because my son runs the whole show and he loves all this stuff. You know, he's he's not a he's a filmmaker and an artist himself, but he runs my website. But all is good. I'm lucky at my age to be still working. I'm lucky at my age to be alive.

SPEAKER_00 34:44

And we are lucky to go through and see your amazing designs throughout the years, throughout the from revolutionary variants, from the Celtic ones to the album arts, to all of it.

SPEAKER_01 34:57

I think it's the work if I was to analyze myself of some kind of quadruple schizophrenic or something. It's like it's like all these artists are inside of me trying to get out. And once I'd done one particular thing, I think, hmm, I think I can do something different. It's just the monkey mind, I think, you know. That's amazing. But one thing I love is art and I love design, I love advertising work, I love even printed ephemera, the the rubbish you pick up off the streets. There's always somebody somewhere has tried to make an imprint, and I love finding that, you know. Yes, great to talk to you.