The Cat and The Canary Print

Music, a universal language and the illustrations surrounding it, have been central to my life. This voyage of discovery took me from conventional, arts-based education, by way of developing broadcast production skills, into what was then the world’s largest music publishing organisation. Here, I found myself drawn away from the music with which I grew up, towards the sounds that provided a backdrop to the early and mid-twentieth century. This became the cornerstone of what is considered the Great American Songbook and I was fascinated by the creators of this genre I met that were still living at the time and the pictorial narrative giving oxygen to their work. It is important to recognise images and sound in that era, were much more closely related. The music played live, was rarely recorded, at first. The existence of the tune and its lyrics were embodied in a piece of sheet music. For example, this was the only way to own popular dance band numbers, broadcast at night by the fledgling BBC in the 1920’s from London’s Savoy Hotel. This music in paper form must attract a buyer. The frontispiece became the picture selling the song. The process has always been a passion of mine and the discovery of many such original prints, tracked down following the overseas sale and disappearance of several major print archives, drove me using contemporary media, towards the restoration and re-establishment of prints and in some cases, stone lithographic works, that time simply forgot. A storytelling collection that will gradually grow, has interwoven years of my life, unearthing, curating, restoring. Imagine if you will, these visual timepieces laying silent, unloved, perhaps inside a piano stool, for decades. Once they stood proud on a stand above the keys. They would bond people at a time of festivity, trouble or simply round a front room piano on a Saturday night, in a world without television. Images that were once the emotional impetus for a purchase, illustrating the songs of the day. I want them to live again but this time, in their own right. They are more, much more than advertising. They are an embodiment of the emotion expressed through the music.