You may not know the name John Byrne, but you will have certainly seen his art work on the covers of albums by artists as diverse as The Beatles, The Humblebums, Stealer’s Wheel, Donovan, Gerry Rafferty and Billy Connolly.

Byrne is a Scottish artist and playwright, born in Paisley in 1940. He is the author of the multi-award wining TV series Tutti Frutti, which starred Robbie Coltrane and Emma Thompson, and Your Cheatin’ Heart, starring Tilda Swinton (to whom he is married).

For the theater, Byrne is best known for The Slab Boys which originally starred Coltrane, and later Sean Penn, Kevin Bacon and Val Kilmer in the 1983 Broadway production, Cuttin’ a Rug and Still Life. But Byrne is not just a writer and director for TV and theater, he is also a respected and successful artist, whose portraits of Coltrane, Swinton and Billy Connolly hang in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh.

When Byrne first started as an artist in the 1960s, he found it difficult to have his work exhibited in London’s galleries. He therefore released a series of faux-naïf paintings under the name “Patrick” claiming the work to been made by his untrained father. “Patrick” became a star and was feted by London’s chattering classes, even having The Beatles commission “Patrick” to paint a cover for their 1968 White Album (it was later used on their Ballads compilation in 1980). When Byrne eventually revealed himself as creator of “Patrick’s” work, not everyone was entirely happy with his ruse, however by then, Byrne had established himself as a highly talented and successful painter.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Byrne produced a series of album covers for his friends Gerry Rafferty, Billy Connolly and Donovan. Byrne’s style is instantly recognizable, and as can be seen from this small selection of covers, book and DVD illustrations, utterly fabulous.
 

 

 

 

 
More from John Byrne, after the jump…
 

 
In the mid-1960s, Billy Connolly formed a folk group with Tam Harvey called The Humblebums. Connolly sang, played guitar and banjo, while Harvey was accomplished Bluegrass guitarist. The duo made a name for themselves playing venues and bars around Glasgow, most notably The Old Scotia, the famous home to Scottish folk music, where Connolly would introduce each song with a humorous preamble, something that became his trademark, and later his career.

In 1969, The Humblebums released their first album First Collection of Merry Melodies, it was soon after this that Gerry Rafferty joined the band. Rafferty had previously played with The Fifth Column, which also featured his future Stealer’s Wheel partner, Joe Egan, and had scored a minor hit “Benjamin Day” with the group. Rafferty’s arrival into The Humblebums changed the band’s direction and Harvey soon left.

The New Humblebums, or Humblebums as most still called the pairing of Connolly and Rafferty, began to achieve far greater success with their mix of Rafferty’s plaintive vocals and melodies and Connolly’s upbeat tunes and fine guitar playing. That same year, the duo released their first record together and band’s second album, The New Humblebums. The album was a major-hit in Glasgow and was well-received nationally. Amongst its most notable tracks were Rafferty’s “Look Over the Hill & Far Away”, “Rick Rack”, “Her Father Didn’t Like Me Anyway” (later covered by Shane MacGowan and The Popes), “Patrick” and “Coconut Tree”. While Connolly contributed the single “Saturday Round About Sunday”, “Everyone Knows” and “Joe Dempsey”. The album’s famous cover painting was by fake “faux-naïf” painter Patrick, aka legendary playwright John Byrne, author of The Slab Boys, and subject of Rafferty’s song “Patrick”..

The Humbelbums’ success was compounded with the release of their next album, Open Up the Door, in 1970.  Here was Rafferty’s “Steamboat Row” (later covered by Stealer’s Wheel), “I Can’t Stop Now”, “Shoeshine Boy”, “Keep It To Yourself” and “My Singing Bird”; along with Connolly’s “Open Up the Door”, “Mother”, “Oh No” and “Cruisin’”.

If this had been a Hollywood film, the next part of the story would be international success and world domination, but this was Glasgow, and Connolly and Rafferty wanted different things. Rafferty wanted to concentrate on the music, while Connolly was finding he was more interested in talking to the audience and being funny than performing as a folk-singer. A split was inevitable. Rafferty went to form Stealer’s Wheel with Joe Egan; while Connolly started his career as a comedian.

In today’s press, Connolly is quoted as saying of his friend and former bandmate:

“Gerry Rafferty was a hugely talented songwriter and singer who will be greatly missed.

“I was privileged to have spent my formative years working with Gerry and there remained a strong bond of friendship between us that lasted until his untimely death.

“Gerry had extraordinary gifts and his premature passing deprives the world of a true genius.”

 
“Rick Rack” - The Humblebums
 

 
Scottish singer/songwriter Gerry Rafferty has died at the age of 63. Rafferty was best known for “Stuck In The Middle With You,” a 1972 hit for his band Stealer’s Wheel and later for his solo smash “Baker Street,” which made him a millionaire overnight.

The Beatleesque “Stuck In The Middle With You” was used to hilarious effect in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. And the haunting sax riff of “Baker Street” is an indelible part of 70s rock and roll. A great hook.

Through the 80’s and 90s, Rafferty continued to write and record critically well-received albums, but health problems related to alcoholism got in the way of any sustained success.

Drink drove him into fits of depression and he’d disappear for periods of time. Angry, garrulous and unpredictable, Rafferty sabotaged his musical career until it simply didn’t exist anymore.

He died of suspected liver damage.

In his 1978 Rolling Stone review of Rafferty’s album “City To City,” Ken Emerson wrote what might serve as a fitting eulogy for Rafferty’s career and life:

Even in his mother’s womb, Gerry Rafferty must have expected the worst. This Scotsman entitled his melancholy 1971 solo album Can I Have My Money Back? (the answer was “No!”). And when Stealers Wheel, the group he subsequently formed with Joe Egan, became an overnight success with the hit single “Stuck in the Middle with You,” only to lapse into morning-after obscurity, he probably said, “I told you so.” On City to City, his first LP in three years, Rafferty sticks grimly to his guns. Not only does he use the same producer (Hugh Murphy) and several of the same musicians, but a similar un-self-pitying fatalism pervades the record.

However, there is a slight but significant change for the better that makes City to City as eloquently consoling as the spirituals Rafferty echoes in “Whatever’s Written in Your Heart.” Indeed, there’s a prayerful quality to the entire LP, a quality reminiscent of the dim dawn after a dark night of the soul. “The Ark” begins as a Highland death march, complete with doleful bagpipes, but swells into a stirring hymn to love. And, after etching a relationship stalemated by the inability of two lovers to express their feelings, the somber “Whatever’s Written in Your Heart” (whose only instruments are a piano and a hushed sythesizer) concludes with a coda of vocal harmonies that sing of sublime forgiveness.

Hope, in almost all these songs, lurks on the horizon. And when it springs fully into view—as on “City to City,” with its rollicking train tempo, and on the jaunty “Mattie’s Rag”—the music almost burbles with anticipation.

Gerry Rafferty still writes with the sweet melodiousness of Paul McCartney and sings with John Lennon’s weary huskiness, and his synthesis of American country music, British folk and transatlantic rock is as smooth as ever. But his orchestrations have acquired a stately sweep. For all their rhythmic variety—from the suave Latin lilt of “Right down the Line” to the thump of “Home and Dry”—these are uniformly majestic songs. The instrumental refrain on one of the best of them, “Baker Street,” is breathtaking: between verses describing a dreamer’s self-deceptions, Rapheal Ravenscroft’s saxophone ballons with aspirations only to have a sythesizer wrench it back to earth with an almost sickening tug. If City to City doesn’t rise to the top of the charts, its commercial failure will be equally dismaying. And our loss will be greater even than Rafferty’s. After all, when was the last time you bought an album boasting more than fifty minutes of music? And great music at that.”

- Ken Emerson, Rolling Stone, 1-15-78.