“The whole point of T-shirts, I think, as a medium, is that it's accessible and it's a way of sharing what you love, and that's why I've always been fascinated with band T-shirts.”
Affordable Art Volume 1
- JOE TALBOT
JHG x IDLES - F.T.K. Limited Edition Commemorative Display Plate
ARTIST NAME: Josh Hughes-Games
CONNECTION TO IDLES: Worked closely with Joe on the TANGK album and previous projects.
MEANING BEHIND THE DESIGN: I think the meaning of the design is pretty obvious to anyone who has followed IDLES throughout the TANGK campaign.
BIO: Joshua Hughes-Games is a creative director, designer and printer working from the UK, creating bold and expressive campaigns for clients across the music industry and beyond.
Focusing on producing tactile and authentic artworks, Joshua has worked with clients around the globe Including the creative direction and design for IDLES number one album TANGK, art direction and design for incendiary underground grime label Bandulu Records and a wealth of artworks for artists and labels including AJ Tracey, Queens Of The Stone Age, Partisan Records, Jah-Shaka, Ishmael Ensemble, MALA, Kahn & Neek, Tom Rockwell, DEEP MEDi, Commodo, Black Acre, Joe Armon-Jones, FabricLive, Sector 7 and many more.
Josh Hughes-Games 
Mudwig x IDLES - Brutalism Longsleeve
ARTIST NAME: Mudwig
CONNECTION TO IDLES: Tom (the) Ham was the IDLES link to Joe, via the medium of mutual creative respect tissue.
MEANING BEHIND THE DESIGN: Dogs aren't real, and here we have a domesticated beast in a suburban domicile. The lid is off and to reveal it's mental 'landscape' presenting the animal's imagined totemic ego in the form of a sculpted brutalist brick idol. All elements that I feel relate to the band's ethos and lyrical angle! ... but aside from all that conceptual wax, it can also just be a visual trigger image for an enlightening that you may experience. (and the dog reminded me of Joe).
BIO: Sparkes cut his teeth as Müdwig in the Bristol street art scene during the 2000’s, gaining recognition for his comically spraypaint-subverted advertising billboards, mural work and self-deprecating tagging. Currently continuing this surreal abstraction, he applies interventions to found imagery with dark painted and drawn motifs that stylistically falter between the worlds of Dr Seuss, Philip Guston and 16th century still life painting.
His ‘gallows subversion’ induces an arcane, yet awkwardly recognisable visual language that blurs the distinction between the character-totem, and its landscape.
Sparkes has been nominated for the prestigious Jerwood drawing prize, and the ING Discerning Eye. He has created artwork for brands such as Nike, Givenchy, Braindead and Warp Records and continues to exhibit globally.
Richt x IDLES - Spring Flower T-Shirt
ARTIST NAME: Richt
CONNECTION TO IDLES: LOVE IS THE FING...
MEANING BEHIND THE DESIGN: ‘Dont Be Suspicious' responds to a government refusing to serve us, while criminalising our right to reply. If you have to wear a mask to object to moral bankruptcy, you must also question who these rules are for…
BIO: Rich Thorne (b.1982) aka Richt is a British artist exploring power dynamics through a multidisciplinary practice. Through playful graphic metaphors, he draws on nature, skate and graffiti culture to create satirical and polarising reflections of our collective frustrations.
Emerging from the UK Graffiti scene under the moniker ‘Richt’, Rich Thorne has been exploring creativity through original work, design, animation and on street pieces for the past 20 years. Projects range from Academy Award winning film studio Aardman Animations, to global powerhouse Vans. The artist also considers a social responsibility to young people, exploring dialogues with UNESCO and United Nations global partners. With a ‘feast or famine’ approach to colour, Richt’s aesthetic shifts between monochromatic minimalism to vivid saturation. Through his satirical compositions, the movement and memory of graffiti culture is reimagined through a contemporary lens to confront issues affecting the self and our environment.
Exhibitions include Spain, Netherlands, Germany and UK, with public art projects and commissions from Eastern Europe to the USA.
Bottle of Smoke x IDLES - Well Good Longsleeve
ARTIST NAME: BOTTLE OF SMOKE
CONNECTION TO IDLES: Joe and I met at University while earning bog roll degrees with as little effort as possible. We trod the same silly boy boards in Bristol, smack bang in the Indie Sleaze era when everyone scurried around in American Apparel zip-ups with the white string. I remember bumping into Joe one night and he mentioned that he’d started something. I’d played about in bands since I was a kid and was a bit like, “Oh right yeah, good luck with that”, like I’d somehow already been there and done it. Ha.
It was cool to see them slowly morph into the snarling biffer they are today. They were well-formed from the jump and really started mowing people down once they learned to convey all of their true strengths and flaws. I saw them at one of their first gigs at the Golden Lion in Bristol, and the last time was headlining the Other Stage at Glastonbury. Pretty damn good, no?
MEANING BEHIND THE DESIGN: Years ago, my wife and I had a go at drawing each other. Her picture looked like the kind of wonky portrait art a manic fan draws of their favourite celebrity. The smudgy shading and slightly off proportions were perfect. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good, and it triggered an idea to make some shirts with bad fan art pictures of famous people. But like many an idea, I mañana-d it until it was a forgotten mumble.
Many orbits later, when the band mentioned designing a tee for them, I put some ideas forward and the fan art style was one of them. They chose that one straight away. As Joe said, “There’s an eagerness in fan art ye know? The naïveté is somewhat panicked”, which nicely encapsulated the essence I wanted to convey. It’s much harder than you think to replicate that convincingly.
After many failed attempts the cosmos answered my cries when our household was possessed by the spirit of a ballistically obsessed IDLES superfan called Stan. He used our bodies as hosts to scratch out crazed pencil images of de lads and to communicate with the world via Instagram. He ended up spending many hours more on his Instagram than the t-shirt, vehemently ranting about the music and sartorial choices of the band in their early years.
After a tearful exorcism to remove Stan from our mortal vessels, he decided to move on to haunt every one of the tees printed with his design. Snap one up and you might find yourself with the same temporary talent we had.
BIO: I create art that’s so bad it’s good, or so good it’s bad. Welded to the lower end of high brow, BOTTLE OF SMOKE is my sporadic creative valve. It’s mostly t-shirt-based, but any medium will do.
