Blog: The Gig Poster Renaissance

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One of the nice things about the rise of FACEBOOK as a device for Event Publicising is that it seems to have helped revive the idea of GIG POSTERS.

When i was a young lad just starting out on The Road Of ROCK gig posters used to be VITAL - apart from the listings flyers that pubs used to do, a decent poster was your MAIN way of telling people the gig was happening. Aah, the delightful Saturday afternoon spent wandering round the gig pubs, music, record and CHIP shops of Old Leicester Town, saying "Is it OK to put a poster up?" And OH the Saturday night/Sunday mornings spent creeping around Dark Streets with a bucket of wallpaper paster and DREAD in the heart lest THE COPS caught us.

It all feels a long long time ago, and once the INTERWEB took over as the main way of keeping in contact posters went into decline. Why bother spending a whole afternoon cutting out headline letters from the local paper (before computers THAT is how we used to get decent looking lettering!) and pritt-sticking them above an Amusing Photograph before photocopying a batch of them (using a DODGY Photcopy Card which gave HUNDREDS of free copies in the Polytechnic library) before schlepping them round town, when you could just send an EMAIL to hundreds of people who would probably be interested?

However, in recent years gig posters have become popular again, though mostly used as illustrations for Facebook Events and also PLUGS on web forums. It's quite QUAINT that, in my experience, these still stick the the A4 proportions of the traditional gig posters, when they could be ANY size really, but it's been lovely to see them back in use again.

I've been thinking about this over the past few days as I've been up to my neck in posters recent and ancient for MY gigs. I've recently done posters for tonight's Totally Acoustic and also for the Dinosaur Planet launch, and thought it might be nice to find some way of including them on the GIGS page. Then I thought it might ALSO be a good idea to include OLD posters, so RE-JIGGED the code for the gig pages then went on an ODYSSEY OF DISCOVERY, looking for old images.

It was GRATE fun - there's loads of them out there on Flickr, Facebook and, especially, on Last.fm, and it was lovely to be reminded of all the exciting and VARIED ways people have tried to represent me, The Validators, and the various OPERA what we have done. There's a wide variety of them up for last year and http://www.mjhibbett.co.uk/gigs/listgigs.php?year=2010>the year before's shows, and if you look back through the gigs from history you'll find them all the way back to 2005, with a little spattering in 1993 and 1995. These really old ones come from the collection of Mr CM Lawson, to whom I am EXTREMELY grateful. When I moved to London I - STUPIDLY - decided i didn't NEED my huge collection of old gig posters, so chucked them all away, so it was BRILLIANT last year when he put his own collection up... on Facebook!

posted 12/1/2012 by MJ Hibbett

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