Third in our Illustrators’ Top Five series is Christopher Wright, a colourful Bristol-based illustrator. Colourful being an understatement. Reminiscent of those funny classic British cartoons, his work practically jumps into your eyeballs. He takes ponderings on sport, music, social behaviour, childhood memories, and other things from the caverns of his mind, and transforms them into intricately drawn, hilarious and totally rad creations. Chris has designed tons of gig and label posters which his style lends perfectly to, but in solo exhibitions and group shows he really shines.
Last year he featured at our Gainsbourg show at the Curzon, and earlier this year he held a show at Rise Records in Bristol, Poppycocked. For this, he asked bands to curate their dream line up for a festival – featuring themselves of course – then Chris designed the poster for each one. Our favourite show, though, has to be Heads and Volleys, where Chris became a live fleshy even more animated version of his own illustration, singing and dancing and fist pumping… like I always imagined his characters would. Chris’ next venture is into the strange world of surrealism. Cool!
Like Sam Coldy, Chris is a mega football fan. For his Top Five he opted for five ugly players from the Merlin’s Premier League 94 Sticker Album. Over to Christopher.
I completed the 94 Sticker Album, along with the proceeding three, with a rare degree of playground efficiency. The 97 was a joint effort between me and my younger brother, as I was too old to keep a wedge of men’s faces in my top pocket.
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1. Steve Ogrizovic (Coventry City)
His name probably exaggerates his ugliness, but his nose was really really messed up. It has about 7 visible breaks in it, it’s massive and he was a balding ginger goalkeeping monster. He also scored a league goal once, which was probably quite ugly too.
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2. Martin Keown (Arsenal)
Had to include someone from the team I support so dearly, to show no bias with the ugly name-calling. In fact, this is a double blow to my own stomach, because apparently I played like Martin Keown when I was 13 and I’m no oil painting. Although I didn’t look like Skeletor running up and down a field, looking for his bottle of Clearasil.
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3. Efan Ekoku (Norwich City)
Like in textbooks at school, I think I may have included this man for a sense of equality. We can all be ugly, no matter what colour skin we have. The Norwich kit really adds to the mix. The only kit that is made of mustard rather than nylon. He looks far uglier in the 95 album, when he played for the ‘Crazy Gang.’ They were crazy.
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4. Peter Beardsley (Newcastle United)
Only Carlos Tevez’s emergence from a car crash can rival Quasimodo’s reign as the most gifted of the ugs. There is also an infamous photo of Peter’s balls poking out his shorts. You could stick those nuts to his face and you wouldn’t notice. Am very fond of the man though, despite being about to search for ‘Peter Beardsley’s children’ in Google.
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5. Mick Quinn (Coventry City)
One of my guilty pleasures is Talksport radio. Unfortunately this fat, clueless, fat, shit, fat, ignorant, fat lardy fat man sometimes talks on it. He is nearly as bad a pundit as Andy Townsend. I apologise to Coventry City fans (of whom I have never once met, along with QPR fans) for selecting two of your teams talents in this top 5, but they both look like Boglins.
Honourable mentions… Luke Chadwick, Shaun Goater and Ia(i)n Dowie.
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