Over the last two decades London-based
art director Tom Hingston has worked with
The Rolling Stones, Nick Cave, U2, The
Chemical Brothers and Young Fathers, as well
as collaborating with David Bowie on his last
three music videos. Perhaps his best-known
work, though, are the covers created for
Massive Attack with band member and artist
Robert Del Naja and the photographer
Nick Knight, including 1998’s Mezzanine (part
of MoMA’s permanent collection) and 100th
Window, from 2003.
To celebrate his studio’s 20th anniversary,
Hingston has joined forces with Paul Smith
to create ‘Process’, an exhibition to open in
Smith’s lagship store on London’s Albemarle
Street in May. It will include 15 of Hingston’s
album covers, reworked as lenticulars.
Del Naja, Nick Cave and The Chemical
Brothers have also worked with Hingston and
Smith to create a superior range of band
merchandise. A Nick Cave bomber jacket
features embroidered mermaids based on the
artwork for his Lovely Creatures album; The
Chemical Brothers’ knitwear features zig-zags
from the Born in the Echoes sleeve; and
Del Naja is part-printing, part-painting his
own artwork onto leather jackets.
Del Naja, better known as 3D, established
a reputation as a graiti artist in Bristol
before helping found Massive Attack, and his
artwork has featured on all their sleeves. He
has also designed all the Massive Attack live
shows, in collaboration with Icarus Wilson
and UVA. To help celebrate Hingston’s
anniversary we sat the pair down to talk
beetles, biker jackets and the future of the
rock artefact in the digital age.
So when did you two meet?
TH: I guess a year before Mezzanine was
released, in 1997. Robert had worked with a
biger design studio and there was an impetus
on his part to explore a more one-on-one
relationship, something more collaborative.
Given your background in graiti art,
Robert, it was never going to be a case of
outsourcing the band’s artwork – did
working with Tom make that easier?
RDN: Yeah, having lots of ideas and concepts
and sketches is very diferent from having
the ability to make them into something that
has a format and that you can print from.
I had always used symbols in my painting,
and when we collaborated very early on with
Judy Blame and Michael Walsh, we talked
a lot about symbology. And that’s how we
ended up with the lame and the industrial
symbols associated with Massive Attack.
With Tom, we really talked about how you »
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