Art of Mo’ Wax: Ian “Swifty” Swift
Part of the appeal of a Mo’ Wax release, other than the music, is their amazing artwork, and the label became famous for their visually appealing packaging. This series will take a a brief look at some of the artists who worked with Mo’ Wax between 1992–2003.
The first Mo’ Wax artist, Ian Swift or Swifty as he is better known, completed a degree in graphic design at Manchester Polytechnic in the late eighties and soon began working with Neville Brody, art director for magazines The Face and Arena. After being introduced to editor Paul Bradshaw in 1989, Swifty was hired as the art director for his magazine Straight No Chaser, and has worked alongside Bradshaw on every issue of the magazine since.
It was while working at Straight No Chaser that Swifty met a young James Lavelle, who joined the magazine in 1991. Lavelle’s column Mo’ Wax Please first appeared in issue #15, and two issues later Lavelle announced the launch of Mo’ Wax Records. Swifty had already been creating logos for James Lavelle’s DJ gigs so he was the obvious choice to design the logo for Mo’ Wax, with the label’s first release arriving in 1992.
This wasn’t Swifty’s first time working with a record label either, as he had been working with Gilles Peterson’s Talkin’ Loud label since 1990, where he created not just the logo, but also several iconic covers such as Young Disciples’s Get Yourself Together and Galliano’s Jus’ Reach, the later of which was a homage to one of Swifty’s influences, Saul Bass.
Swifty’s work has always been inspired by the past, and in 2019 he discussed the inspiration behind one of his early covers for The Young Disciples:
Within the space of a few weeks of working on Straight No Chaser, I’m going to the clubs absorbing the music, hitting the record shops just to look at all the record covers on the walls. I’m in the DJ box digging through Gilles Peterson’s records looking for design inspiration…there were no Blue Note design books then. There was no internet. For your visual inspiration, you had to go out and find it…
The Young Disciples came to me with Joe Henderson’s Mode for Joe on Blue Note Records as inspiration for their new album, Apparently Nothin’. I thought, since hip-hop was sampling old music and turning it into something new, I’m going to do the same with the visuals. That was where it all started for me, the whole appropriation, visual remixing thing.
Back at Mo’ Wax, as the label was growing in popularity James Lavelle sought to explore new ideas, and he expanded the art team to include Will Bankhead and Ben Drury in 1994, marking an end to the Swifty era. The following year Swifty’s final Mo’ Wax credit appeared on Palm Skin Productions’ The Beast 12", and his work at Talkin’ Loud also came to an end around this time too.
But outside of Mo’ Wax and Talkin’ Loud, Swifty remained busy at Straight No Chaser, and he would also work with several new labels such as Far Out Recordings, M.E.L.T. 2000, Quango Records, and Especial Records, with each release featuring Swifty’s recognisable style in their logos and artwork.
In 2017 Gamma Proforma celebrated his work when they released the book Funky Typografix, a retrospective of his work which included large reproductions of his original designs spread over 374 pages.
Of course, even though he has had such a long career, Swifty has remained strongly associated with Mo’ Wax and has participated in several celebrations of the labels long history, including at 2014’s Urban Archaeology exhibition at Southbank, and the Build & Destroy exhibition which followed. At the later, several new prints by Swifty were made available to purchase, and then in 2019 he partnered with 1 of 100 for a series of t-shirts featuring the Mo’ Wax logo which were created for the release of a Mo’ Wax documentary film.
In recent years, Swifty’s work has been seen in the 100th issue of Straight No Chaser, and on artwork from the record labels Jazzman and BBE. In 2019 he printed a limited run of a new book The Graphic Art of Ian Swift Volume 1, with a second volume promised to be coming soon.
External Links
Swifty remains active on Instagram, and his work can be purchased from his website: swifty.co.uk
