When John Lennon sat his O-level art exam in 1957 “there was one question which said to draw something to do with ‘travel’. I drew a picture of a hunchback covered in warts. They obviously didn’t dig that.” Unsurprisingly, he failed in every subject, including art, his favourite and best. “There was obviously only thing one for it,” writes Mike Roberts in his new book; “art school.”
This tart, illuminating anecdote sets the tone of appreciative wonder for How Art Made Pop (And Pop Became Art), a detailed, lively survey of the long, fertile and symbiotic relationship between pop music and the art schools, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. As Keith Richards, another art school alumnus, puts it: “In England, if you’re lucky, you get into art school. It’s somewhere they put you if they can’t put you anywhere else.” Richards’s alma mater was Sidcup Art College, which may sound comically unprepossessing but was part of a network of suburban institutions across the country each fostering several generations of talented layabouts destined never to threaten Duchamp, Picasso or Bacon but who certainly gave Lulu and the Bay City Rollers a run for their money.
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