Craig Schuftan knows a whole lot about a whole lot. He presents the Culture Club on Triple J, wrote two books on pop culture and music history (The Culture Club and Hey! Nietzsche, Leave Them Kids Alone) and is a guest curator of 'The 80s Are Back' exhibition at the Powerhouse Museum. He'll be speaking at Semi Permanent this Friday, in a departure from the personal 'creative journey'–style presentation, on the subject of design in history. We strongly recommend being front and centre for his session. Here is an appetite-whetting glimpse of what you can expect. Concrete Playground: Can you give us a preview of what you'll be discussing at Semi Permanent? Craig: The talk has come out of several things but most importantly work that I've been doing recently at the Powerhouse Museum on an exhibition called 'The 80s Are Back', which is looking at popular culture in the 80s. The job that I had within that show was to curate a section about the 80s revival, which I was coming at primarily from the direction of music. I work at a radio station and for ten years people have been listening to new releases or looking at album art going, "Oh, that's so 80s". My job was to tell the story of why that happened and represent that in visual form, which meant I got much more interested in design and visual culture around music than I had been before. Concrete Playground: Why do you think musicians and artists look to history for inspiration? Craig: I guess there are a few reasons. One of them is that artists tend to be fairly nostalgic people and I think it's because most artists have a romantic strain. I've been spending a bit of time reading about the Romantics and looking at their history over the last couple of years and one of the things you see in all Romantics from William Wordsworth to Rivers Cuomo of Weezer is a certain way of looking at childhood. When you're a romantic, childhood was the last time that the world made sense. You find that as an artist you're an outsider in society and what everybody else calls normal life is very confusing because you have this very idealistic perception of how everyday life should be, which comes out in your writing and your work. Because of that there's a tendency to look back on childhood as a time where you're still allowed to dream, and allowed to imagine and express yourself in ways that you're simply not when you're an adult. You hear that everywhere. I've always thought that one of the best examples is 'Sweet Child o' Mine' [by Guns N' Roses]; that song in particular brings me to the next reason why I think artists are interested in childhood because often for them it has kind of a moral weight. It's this thing where you look to childhood as a way of indicting the real world for its failure to live up to your dreams. In that sense it's not just about your childhood, it's about what's wrong with the world generally. Concrete Playground: How strong is the relationship between music and design? Craig: It's very strong. I read an interview with Tim from Stereolab years ago where he said that Stereolab always had really striking packaging. He took great care with the albums and he designed them because he knew that would determine to a large extent not just whether people bought the thing but how they continued to hear it after they've bought it. He put it in this really nice way: if you make your album cover orange people will always hear it as orange, which I think is really true. I guess the other thing is, an important part of pop music is the figures that populate it: the heroes of pop. Particularly in our childhood, they're examples of the way our lives could be. Antony from Antony and the Johnsons has talked about this, about the influence of Boy George not just in his work but also in his life growing up. Watching Boy George videos he got a sense that there was a totally different way to live. He knew he felt different from everybody else and it wasn't until he saw this guy on TV that he thought, "Right, that's it, I'm something like that!" And with Boy George being a star of the 80s when stars thought a lot about design and fashion and the way they presented themselves, the design of his wardrobe, albums and videos was of key importance. Concrete Playground: Do you think this trend was particular to the 80s? Craig: I think it goes in waves in the history of pop music. There's sort of a seesawing thing, which we saw more recently as well in the 90s, largely thanks to Nirvana and the bands that came after Nirvana. There was a real suspicion regarding promotion and packaging and visual styling. It doesn't mean those bands didn't have a visual style but it was certainly played down. That was the message that we got from Nirvana and Pearl Jam and bands like that — they refused that stuff because they disliked the way rock in the 80s had become corporatised and groomed. So it was really important for bands, particularly in the early 90s to present themselves as not having packaging and not being styled. I think that the effect of that right through the 90s is staggering. On the other hand you can see reactions against it from Britpop bands like Blur and Pulp, who were nowhere near as flamboyant as the 80s bands but they did dress up a bit and that was a reaction against the no-packaging, no-style thing that grunge had created. But the real change happened around 2001 after the release of the Strokes' album and the things that came after that like Interpol and the Killers. There was a real thaw in the idea that if you had flashy videos and you had glamorous clothes or wore make-up then you couldn't possibly be sincere. All of those bands explicitly refute that. And that's why I think some of them look to the 80s. In the early 80s there was a real reaction against the austerity of the style guide of punk and also against the legacy of prog-rock or folk-rock and things like that. There was a real excitement over the idea that you could use all of the machinery of pop but also have important things to say to your audience and that's another one of those peaks in that wave. Concrete Playground: Why do you think we always seem to hate the decade that's just passed? Do we need distance before we can appreciate the merits? Craig: I suppose part of it is that there's such a fast turnover of stuff and we're very well trained by the idea of the avant-garde — that music is a form of progress and every new innovation that comes to us is a kind of a supersession of the last. Often it's only much later, when things settle down a bit and you can get a bit of perspective on, say, the last 10 years of music that you can look back on it and say, "Actually there were really great things in there that I missed." Also it's a matter of what's most useful to you. In a sense for the last 10 years the 90s have been useless to us because bands had different things they wanted to say and different ways that they wanted to do it but already we're starting to see that bands are looking for other ways to say things that couldn't be said using the templates that have been around for the last couple of years, so they are looking to the 90s again. Bands like Manchester Orchestra who are very explicitly referring to Weezer and early Nirvana and all of that kind of stuff because that's the language that will best help them say what it is they want to say. I guess that's part of the reason I wanted to do this talk because I believe this ties as much to visual design as it does to music. We all need to learn from history and we all need to feel like we're part of a tradition. But we need the elements of that tradition that are most useful to us at any particular time that will help us say the things that we want to say about the world that we live in.