Talk:Better Badges

message: I've appealed for input on Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Punk_music and Talk:Punk_rock Wwwhatsup 03:30, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Requests for input

message: Two recent books cover Better Badges, but both have inaccuracies. Details below. 
In Document and Eyewitness - an oral biography of Rough Trade by Neil Taylor, he mispells MacFie's name, having, one imagines, miscopied it from The Face article, which he sources, but does have a nice quote, which was repeated in  The Guardian 
: One of the more overlooked figures in the subculture that swirled around punk rock was a sometime resident of Cambridge named Jolyean McFie (sic). By the late 1970s, he was in charge of a self-explanatory enterprise called Better Badges, who supplied their wares to a range of rock groups, including Blondie and Joy Division. At 30-odd years' distance, it would be easy to think of him as a mere small businessman, but these were times in which even the production of lapel-decorations was charged with real ideological oomph. "We were a proactive company," he recalls. "We never waited for people to ask us to make a badge; we were on the side of fans rather than the bands, though usually, a happy medium was reached. This tied in with the original slogan I had thought up: 'Image is virus, disease is cure.'" 
That "supplying Blondie" is also inaccurate, carried over from The Face. There was a friendly debate with Blondie's manager at one point over BB's marketing of Blondie badges, which is what the original reporter was referring to. Definitely no secondary source on that. Joy Division, on the other hand, is well documented in the posthumous publication of manager Rob Gretton's journals. 
In Punk: An Aesthetic by Kugelberg et al, there is a major error. The book, recognizing BB's role in firing up the DIY cassette scene, conflates MacFie with KifKif of Fuck Off Records, who produced many early examples of the genre (FO Records deserves an article!). BB merely did the manufacturing, and some marketing assist, under its usual open access system. Which was, as with fanzines and badges, you bring it in, BB'll make it, you can buy at cost, and BB'll help market. One suspects that, since the book reproduces a Better Badges fanzine advert that includes FO Records, that might account for some of the misunderstanding. But it is extraordinary if you look at this video segment where Kugelberg actually encounters MacFie). What the book does have, remarkably, is a rare photograph of the original Better Badges stall at an early punk show at the London Roundhouse. Wwwhatsup (talk) 13:16, 17 January 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Rough Trade Book and Punk: An Aesthetic

message: An art book 100 Fanzines/10 Years of British Punk: 1976-1985 was published in 2011, containing many covers of Better Badges printed fanzines. See video of an exhibit at MoMA PS1, with MacFie participating in a panel. Wwwhatsup (talk) 13:40, 17 January 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  100 Fanzines/10 Years of British Punk: 1976-1985 

message: i-D 'A Better Badge' article from Jan 18 2013, is about the current business, which appears to have undergone a name change. It has some historic details, confirms a couple of other fanzines printed. I have added both.  "They produced the cover art for the Sex Pistols album Never mind the Bollocks." is not, to my knowledge, accurate - although plenty of process camera work was done for Jamie Reid in the earlier days. Wwwhatsup (talk) 10:09, 19 January 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  i-D 'A Better Badge' article. 

message: Content removed by User:Sitush in this (series of edits).
The inclusion of the Reynolds quote is a style decision. The rest of the body is a question of sourcing. Hopefully the disappearance of the history project that hosted the first teo ELs is temporary. The other images may indeed be added to commons. Wwwhatsup (talk) 17:01, 10 August 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Removed content

message: In these diffs MarioNovi made the article subject the current descendent of Better Badges rather than the punk era operation which is the source of notability. This was done without consultation and is arguably inappropriate. Since I have an acknowledged COI I will not reverse but I invite other editors to consider doing so.  I suspect the name change was caused by bankruptcy but have no source on that. Wwwhatsup (talk) 02:28, 24 August 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Undo move?