Songbird! Vaughan Oliver
Ever hear the one about the flattened scrotum of 4AD's celebrated designer?
Wandsworth, London. Richard King’s excellent new book on independent labels, How Soon Is Now?, contains many a revelation about the massive quantities of drugs that staff at the labels used to take, but none stand out as much as this one about 4AD’s celebrated graphic designer, Vaughan Oliver. “There was a band called Spirea X,” says Oliver in the book. “We had a glass roof over the studio that dropped two floors and halfway through a presentation, I said, ‘Keep them talking.’ All the stuff [design work] was out on the desk and on the way upstairs I dropped everything. I was totally naked and slid down the roof with my whole scrotum flattened out and the band look up in horror. I suppose that was a couple of Es later. We worked on the stuff and we were certainly productive on it.”
