🎵 IT046: Paralysed
✏️ Guy Field
🗓 18.12.19





Guy is an illustrator, designer and art director based in London, UK.

What’s up Guy. Can you tell us a little bit about your tape and your song selections?

I think there is a lot of upset and confusion at the moment among my generation. We have it all there but there is so much wrong. I wanted to make a playlist that reflects this feeling. A mixture of turmoil, angst, hope, worry, rage and embarrassment.

So, confusion at how things have turned out. We don’t always know what to feel or do about our situation, and sometimes music can be catharsis.

It’s a mixed up playlist that is very up and down, which is the ins and outs of the world we exist in. It should be listened to loud, and alone!

How did you go about the artwork?

I wanted to subvert a well known image that people know typically to represent joyfulness and being carefree, to flip it on its head.

I made the artwork in Photoshop using a display tablet for the drawing, which is how I do most of my work.

What are your fave album covers, records with a great music and artwork combo, or musical projects with a visual component?

There are so many! But a few that stick with me...

Licensed To Ill (front and back cover) – Beastie Boys
1986, Def Jam / Columbia
Artwork: World B. Omés
Art Dir: Stephen Byram

The Beastie Boys have so many great covers, but Licensed to Ill is so great. Their tour plane crashed into a mountain, looking like a snubbed ciggy. It’s only revealed on the full foldout of the booklet/vinyl, which is great when artwork uses the physical medium like that - and something we have lost with digital packshots! It’s a striking image and really sums up the group and what they were at the time - a bunch of famous brats.

Music for the Jilted Generation (inner sleeve) – The Prodigy
1994, XL Recordings
Artwork: Les Edwards


Another fold-out, but the inner artwork for Music for the Jilted Generation by The Prodigy is super impactful and fun. Ravers giving a big FU to the system, it’s such an over the top epic image, I love it.


Original Pirate Material – The Streets
2002, 679 / Locked On
Photography: Rut Blees Luxemburg
Design: Alex Jenkins


Original Pirate Material by Mike Skinner. It’s a straight pic of a tower block, the kind you see all the time in the UK, but in the context of the music it completes the image. The building feels warm but also kinda imposing and scary at the same time. I read that the original title of the photo is ‘Towering Inferno’.

What did you listen to growing up?

Mainly what would trickle down! My older brother would lend me all his CDs and I’d rip them to my crappy MP3 player or get individual tracks off of Limewire, to listen to on my paper rounds and walk to school. A simpler time!

Initially Smashing Pumpkins, RATM, RHCP, QOTSA were all big ones for me and my bro, then later we got heavily into hip-hop, and that’s all I listened to for a long time. All the golden era and 90s stuff like Public Enemy, De La Soul, Wu-Tang, and I was OBSESSED with the Beastie Boys. I’d also get a lot of CDs from my parents, and as a result everyone in my family are huge Bowie nerds. We shared a lot of music which is nice.

What’s happening in your creative world at the moment?

I’m currently working on a big jigsaw puzzle for an office in London. It’s nearly 3 metres wide and will be the biggest illustration I have ever done! Pics to come soon I promise.

Where can we find you?

︎ guy-field.com
︎ @thatguyfield

Cheers Guy.

TRACKLIST
Gang Of Four - Paralysed / Minutemen - Maybe Partying Will Help / Descendents - Suburban Home / Black Flag - Can't Decide / Bad Brains - Big Take Over / Beastie Boys - I Want Some / Black Flag - Life of Pain / Minutemen - There Ain't Shit on T.V. Tonight / Sonic Youth - 'Cross the Breeze (Album Version) / Queens of the Stone Age - The Blood Is Love / Slint - Nosferatu Man / Black Flag - Scream ︎

Mark