Tomorrow - My White Bicycle

Tomorrow My White Bicycle silkscreen poster, Osiris poster, British psychedelic era poster, by Hapshash and the Coloured Coat 1967

Description

This amazing silkscreen poster was done by Hapshash and the Coloured Coat and was created to promote the new single by the band Tomorrow, called, “My White Bicycle.” The posters they (Hapshash was Michael English and Nigel Waymouth) designed for the UFO Club and Oz magazine drew on elements of Mucha, Ernst, Magritte, Bosch, Blake, and Dulac, pulling them together in a style that art critic George Melly called, "Nouveau Art Nouveau" and that was also referred to as, "Nouveau Frisco"

 

 

While other designers at the time opted for "an indiscriminate use of rainbows and any clashing color combination, [Hapshash] strived for maximum color effect without sacrificing balance or harmony", and frequently used expensive gold and silver metallic inks, which previously were rarely seen on advertising posters. They also introduced a new technique to screen-printing which allowed them to "graduate from one colour to another on a single separation"

 

 

During 1967 Tomorrow - whose guitarist was Steve Howe, later of Yes - released two singles, one of which, "My White Bicycle", was later covered by heavy rock act Nazareth. According to drummer John 'Twink' Alder, the song was inspired by the Dutch Provos, an anarchist group in Amsterdam which instituted a community bicycle program: "they had white bicycles in Amsterdam and they used to leave them around the town. And if you were going somewhere and you needed to use a bike, you'd just take the bike and you'd go somewhere and just leave it. Whoever needed the bikes would take them and leave them when they were done."

 

 

The group recorded, “My White Bicycle” in Abbey Road studio 1, at the same time as The Beatles were recording Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in studio 2, and John Lennon entered the studio while Tomorrow was recording. Later, Lennon wrote in the British music magazine Melody Maker that he considered the song to be the "psychedelic anthem", and the song subsequently became an underground hit.

 

 

Tomorrow's September 1967 single "Revolution" preceded the Beatles song "Revolution" by a year. In Joe Boyd's book, “White Bicycles – Making Music in the 1960s” he asserts the band's performance of the song one night at the UFO Club as the apotheosis of the '60s UK underground. Tomorrow also jammed with Jimi Hendrix at the UFO Club. There was a long delay between their 1967 single releases and the eventual release of their self-titled album in February 1968, and the album would fail commercially. It was OK because the band had already broken up.

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