Want a piece of London music history? Call The Office posters are up for sale
CBC
Five years after a legendary London music venue closed its doors, one of its former owners is helping Londoners reminisce on a different time in the city’s music scene.
Former Call The Office co-owner Tony Lima is selling off thousands of posters he designed for the venue during his 28 years working there.
“For a lot of people, it is nostalgic. These are all documents of a very specific moment in time,” Lima said. “It’s just kind of fun to see the history preserved.”
Lima estimates he designed close to 3,000 posters for Call The Office, which was located at the corner of York and Clarence streets, that he now keeps in a collection of large binders at his home.
The posters are a visual record of the many musical artists who came through London in their early years, Lima said, adding that many have now gone on to achieve great success.
“Radiohead is the show that everybody talks about. In 1995, The Bends had come out, they were still a little bit of a secret, so it was a very cool show,” he said. The black and white Radiohead poster he designed for the concert advertises tickets for only $10.
Also in Lima’s collection are posters for acts like Blink-182, Queens of the Stone Age, Misfits, Arkells, and Tegan and Sara.
“A lot of these shows were important to people at the time. A band like GBH from England only came over to North America a couple times, so the odds of you getting a chance to see a band that you’ve been a fan of for 10 years [was slim]. That is a very cool thing,” he said.
Lima will be selling copies of some of the Call The Office posters at the Punk Rock Flea Market’s holiday market at Centennial Hall on Sunday.
While Lima said his earliest posters were made by cutting and pasting photos and words on a large piece of paper, most of his design work was done digitally on Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.
He said advertising was different in the ‘90s and early ‘00s before social media became the main way artists and venues promoted their shows.
“A lot of shows now don’t even have posters. They just have a Facebook banner and an Instagram square,” Lima said, adding that he used to print and hang up his posters around the city.
“These were really designed to draw attention to the shows and we would put these up on posts downtown,” he said. “The city was never a big fan of them. We used to go out every day and put the posters up, then the city would come and tear them all down, and we would do it all over the next day.”
While less artists are printing posters, Lima said his old ones still drum up a lot of conversation with Londoners.
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