“I like it if a film has good tunes and I would do my best to do good tunes for it. I’m not so keen on it the other way around though, images being put to tunes, tunes make their own strange images that can’t be topped by someone’s visual interpretation of it … I think … sort of … but then sometimes I think something else.” - Tim Smith
Well … I’m very very sorry Tim Smith (out of the pop band called Cardiacs) but I can’t help it:
“Wireless” (inspired by the Cardiacs song of the same name), acrylic and collage on canvas board, 2008. Made as a late (four months late, nearly) Christmas present for a friend.
It’s a difficult question, isn’t it – the question of pieces of art inspired by, or illustrating, songs? The result can quite often be gobsmackingly awful. And yes, someone else’s interpretation of a song is never going to be right because it’s never going to be exactly the same as your own interpretation of it – a bit like when you’ve read a novel and pictured all the characters and scenes in your head, and then somebody goes and adapts it into a film or dramatises it for the BBC and puts Keira Knightley or someone in it and you feel cross and say, “That’s not what [insert name of character here] looks like.”
Beatles songs are the biggest culprits, I guess. Lots of people have produced illustrations of Beatles songs. Usually very, very literal ones. A girl (not wearing a badge with “HELLO, MY NAME IS LUCY” written on it, but she might just as well be) … in the sky … with diamonds! Yes, very clever.
I know, I’m a fine one to talk, the above picture is a fairly literal interpretation of the lyrics of “Wireless”, but I couldn’t help it: that’s what I see in my head when I listen to the song. I incorporated the actual lyrics in the picture as well because I like paintings with text in them (e.g. Joan Miró’s painting-poems, Tom Phillips’s “A Humument” or his “Curriculum Vitae” paintings, old Chinese paintings with accompanying poems).
The urge to make art inspired by songs that I like is a fairly recurrent thing with me. I did it before with this one:
(inspired by Clearlake’s “It’s Getting Light Outside”), which I don’t think was quite as successful as the “Wireless” one … although the colours are quite pretty. (I don’t know how the face on the right-hand side of the picture got there, it wasn’t intentional, it just appeared spontaneously. It was just the way the ink ran.) I did a whole series of paintings and collages a few years ago based on Underworld’s “Push Upstairs”. I also had an idea a long while ago to make a piece of art inspired by the Bluetones’ “Last of the Great Navigators”, which I might still do – the idea’s still there in my head, it hasn’t gone anywhere.
When all’s said and done it’s a form of pop art, isn’t it? And there’s not much wrong with that. A good painting is a good painting and a bad one is a bad one, whether it’s inspired by a stroll through the Provence lavender fields or a Girls Aloud song. Yes?
