F is for Mark Farrow

Mark Farrow is a graphic designer, known for his designs for sleeves of the Pet Shop Boys, Spiritualized, 808 State, Orbital, Liza Minnelli, Manic Street Preachers and others. Like many designers servicing the post-punk Manchester music scene, he began his career as a music fan who got to know musicians - in his case the Stockholm Monsters: in 1982, he was commissioned to design the 7-inch single for this new Factory signing. He made an exuberant statement using mock-leather paper and foil stamp printing, emulating the binding of an antiquarian book. The single, Fairy Tales, Fac 41, was available in two colours, green and burgundy and established his reputation at Factory and beyond.



Fac 58 Stockholm Monsters Happy Ever After

Farrow went on to design several sleeves for Factory including I Need Someone Tonight, Fac 72, by A Certain Ratio; The Durutti Column’s Another Setting, Fact 74; and Bad News Week, Fac 157 by Section 25. The fold-out sleeve with five spot-colour printing for Happy Ever After, Fac 58, by Stockholm Monsters was the most expensive to that date and Farrow recalls that he got a “bollocking” from Tony Wilson about the cost.


DeConstruction logo

Farrow’s long-term aim had been to design a corporate identity for a record label. His chance came through DeConstruction records set up by Pete Hadfield and Haçienda DJ Mike Pickering. At DeConstruction Farrow’s minimalist treatments echoed the contemporaneously evolving house music sound, which was defined by its deconstruction of disco music. In his work for DeConstruction, Farrow found a corporate rationale, partly born out of low budgets - to the problem of packaging ‘faceless’, technology-led dance acts, using wittily-sourced stock photography to create a collect-the-set, brightly-coloured family of highly hip designs.



The Haçienda 15th Birthday poster

But it is for his work with the Pet Shop Boys that Farrow is most associated, having defined the graphic identity of the group for almost all of their releases in a period of over twenty years. The first Pet Shop Boys sleeve to be designed by Mark Farrow was for the 12-inch remix of West End Girls. Farrow says “I hated the original sleeve - the fact that there were two different typefaces, one of the typefaces had three different sizes in it, just everything about it I loathed and detested. I had the whole Factory ethic in my head. So the first thing I did was strip all the type off it, and we just had the coloured blocks and the background.”



Pet Shop Boys Introspective

In an echo of Farrow’s initial collaboration with the Pet Shop Boys, in 1991, Farrow was commissioned to design a sleeve for the 12-inch remix of Electronic’s Get the Message, Fac 287r. Farrow’s sleeve bears no relationship to the original sleeve by Johnson/Panas, instead the designer appropriates the style and iconography of contemporary motor-cross bike racing.