I’m With Stupid – King speaks to SHOWstudio about the ‘media landscape’ that influenced this iconic cover for Sleazenation magazine
The following is an extract from an interview with Lou Stoppard. SHOWstudio, 12 August 2015.
LOU STOPPARD: You worked on Sleazenation around the time of 9/11. That must have affected your process?
SCOTT KING: 9/11 was the defining moment of The Spectacle wasn’t it? There’s nothing I can say about it, really. It affected the I’m With Stupid cover. It was an Earl Brutus song that never got properly recorded. I was great friends with Earl Brutus – I loved them and did some of their sleeves. Straight after 9/11 they were in the studio trying to make some new songs, but the momentum had gone by then, really. It was a bit of a sad time for me as a friend and a fan because they were so brilliant, but it was all coming to an end.
One of the songs they were trying out was called I’m With Stupid. It’s a great song and I sat and listened to Nick shouting it – I could see exactly what the record cover would be like – I mean, it couldn’t be anything else could it? It had to be the dumb ‘I’m With Stupid’ T-shirt, the one with the arrow that points to whoever the wearer stands next to.
I mean, this was doubly great, because in those days – if they’d made it into a single, it would have been a CD single… meaning it would have sat on a shelf next to all these indie band’s singles… the arrow pointing at them, saying ‘I’m With Stupid’. I said all this to the band as we sat in the pub afterwards, and it was agreed that this would be the cover, if they released it as a single.
As it turned out, the song was never finished. Even a few days after recording the demos, Earl Brutus had decided it was not a single. Now, this may be my Damon Albarn moment, because I just nicked the whole idea – I mean, the cover was my idea, but the inspiration, the big idea was all theirs. I was struggling for a post 9/11 Sleazenation cover – I mean, what can you say about it with a style magazine? So I just took that title and designed it like the corny T-shirt.
It was perfect. I just transferred it from being a CD single cover into a magazine cover. I’m With Stupid was an attempt to say nothing about 9/11 – given the context, given that the magazine had to come out two weeks after 9/11 and that every magazine in the world, from Trout Fishing Weekly to Knitting Daily, was compelled to comment on it in some way.
I’m With Stupid was about that – it was just about context, the cover sitting on the shelves at WH Smith surrounded by this mass inability, this loss of language or format, to illustrate or understand what had just happened.
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