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| Coming Home From the Mill (1928) |
LS Lowry, one of the most popular and respected British artists of the last century died on this day in 1976. That's 50 years ago in anyone's language. Today much of Lowry's work depicting the industrial North West hangs in the Salford gallery named after the great man. He declined many trinkets in his lifetime including an OBE in 1955, a CBE in 1961 and a knighthood in 1968. It's not Lowry was anti-establishment, he was just a very private person.
In the year that Lowry passed Mud released their fourth album It's Better than Working; its cover art was an out and out Lowry pastiche. By 1976 the band that had brought you Tiger Feet and Lonely This Christmas were beginning to flounder. Their songwriters Chinn & Chapman, as we know, were not in an exclusive relationship with any band and soon began working their magic on Smokie instead. They dragged it out another couple of years before Les Gray was left on his Jack Jones and eeked out a career on the cabaret circuit until his untimely death in 2004.
One of my favourite Oasis songs benefited from a Lowry inspired video. Seeing Liam in matchstick Manc swagger mode in The Masterplan is never not funny. Today's blog post title also eludes to Oasis but is actually a comment often made about Lowry's "matchstick men figures that frequently cast no shadows."
Oasis - The Masterplan (1995)
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