Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey

2016

As is noted at the start of each of these twin pieces, “Wyndham Lewis” is essentially a paragraph-by-paragraph copy of “Mark E. Smith” (written 14 years earlier), with various bits about and by Smith substituted with Lewis equivalents, mostly drawn from his 1937 autobiography Blasting and Bombardiering. This conceit was intended to highlight the considerable parallels between these two outspoken figures working in the trenches of British counterculture at opposite ends of the twentieth century. They were later republished together in the book Excavate! The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall, which I also somehow ended up designing.

Lead image: Airbursh portraits by Chris Evans, 2006.

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