Interpreting Sonic NatureCover Artist for Issue 1 of Bother, Drew Millward discusses colour-blindness, being school governor and why his art is NOT psychedelic. Wait… What?

Viewed as a portfolio, Drew Millward’s art is a dizzying tropical storm of swirls, skulls, fanged creatures and fairy tale real estate dragged screaming out of a mind-melting ayahuasca ceremony. Beyond the intensity, the thing that leaps out is the reliance on a palette of primary colours: red, yellow and blue. The reason why his work is so tethered to this trio is simple.

‘I’m colour-blind,’ says Drew. ‘Using primary colours started almost 20 years ago, when I began screen printing. Before that I was all black and white and photocopies, so it was fine. But as soon as I got to the point of learning how to screen print, I realised that my colour-blindness was more of a detriment that I thought it might be.’

Drew already knew he was colour-blind, he just didn’t realise how badly that would affect his ability to mix inks. But, because he was only ever printing his own work, he could devise a workaround. ‘I was relying on pre-mixed inks, and I was using predominantly CMYK, and layering up a lot of images.’ CMYK are the colours printers use as the basis for virtually all regular colours, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key, meaning black. Even when he could rely on the colours being pre-mixed, Drew admits he still wasn’t much of a printer.

‘That messiness and colour palette came from using ready-mixed inks; using CMYK, because you can’t go wrong; and I was a really shit printer, so building in those margins of error into work was a fallback plan. If I have 5mm to play with, registration ceases to be an issue. Aesthetically I want it to look a mess, so I don’t have to worry too much about the printing.’

He hasn’t physically screen printed his own stuff for years, but the use of primary colours and the meticulously detailed onslaught of his images is the through line to his present work.

Don’t use the Psy Word

Drew won’t categorise the style of his art, but he doesn’t seem to like it being referred to as psychedelic, which is a description I might have used.

‘There’s a lot of stuff I do that gets labelled as psychedelic and it’s not. It’s coming from a very different place. I’ve never been into drugs, so [the psychedelic style] never really appealed to me,’ he says, from his home, in the Aire Valley, West Yorkshire. ‘Posters in the realm of psychedelia were made to appeal to a very niche audience. There was a gatekeeping element to it. “If you can’t read the poster these bands aren’t for you.”’ That’s not what Millward is doing, he stresses. Whether you can read the words on his posters or not.

‘If you’re drawing a full image and it’s a big flowing mass, you can’t then put the band names in Helvetica. It would make it a lot easier to read, I get that, but do you want a nice poster or something you can read?’

Does he ever get client pushback about the legibility of the information on the posters? After all they are advertising. ‘Ha! Sometimes. If I can read it, I’m willing to stand my ground.’ But you know what it says, I argue. He just laughs. He laughs a lot during our conversation.

Much of Drew’s current work is event posters, for bands of various genres and levels of global fame, plus festivals including those of the beer and comedy varieties. Sometimes the graphics follow a design brief, other times he’s free to create whatever he wishes. Whichever route is taken, commission Drew Millward and you’re getting a Drew Millward poster. It doesn’t matter whether you are neo-psych standard bearers King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard or stadium-filling, bluegrass fret-frotter, Billy Strings. And that’s the way it’s been for 20 years and counting.

‘I’ve been doing this since my early-20s. It didn’t take me long to realise I couldn’t do a normal job.’ After studying Fine Art at Leeds University, a course he was ill-suited to, Drew was managing a student housing office in Bradford. ‘That was not my calling in life,’ he says, bluntly.

Art Hermit

By night and weekend, he and friends were putting on gigs in Leeds, with Drew creating the posters. Then the simple act of someone paying £30 for him to create a poster for their show set the snowball rolling down the mountain. In a self-propelled act of nominative determinism, he could leave his ‘fairly comfortable, well paid and admittedly stressful and awful job’ for the life of a colour-blind graphic artist for hire. Drew quit to draw. And now he can spend all his days where he is happiest: at home.

‘That’s a huge factor. I love being at home. I’m really quite lazy. After high school and university, when people get the bug to travel, I never had that. It never hit me. I’m terrible to live with because I don’t really like going on holiday. I love working from home, I love being by myself. I love the solitude, as long as I can see friends once a month or so. I could live as a hermit, I think.’

Talk of home leads to the topic of local community. He describes the most pivotal key milestone in his art career as becoming involved in the punk and DIY music scenes soon after moving to Leeds in 2000.

‘That realisation that you can just do things makes everything else easy, in a way. That background and the thought, what’s stopping you doing things? If you want things to happen, just shut up and do it. I know there are barriers and it’s not an open playing field for everyone, but a lot of the time it’s as simple as you want to make it, as long it’s not going to leave you destitute or endanger your life. Being surrounded by that kind of mindset formed the bedrock, so that when I did have a job that I didn’t like I realised I could be paid £30 to draw a picture.’

Focus On The Local

Drew is currently part of collective putting on bands and nights, including the Downer Disco, local to him, in Shipley, West Yorkshire. He explains it’s mainly so he can still see bands, but not be up too late, now he and his friends have kids.

Remaining on the subject of doing things locally, Drew says, ‘I think it’s incredibly important, and it should be important to everyone. It’s important to have communities around you. It’s been hijacked from an environmental standpoint. It is important to have sustainably sourced things, but also that idea of building community is really important. I think things that happen on your doorstep are often overlooked.’

He’s also a governor at his son’s school, ‘Because why wouldn’t you be if you could? Things like that are important.’ Asked what he brings to the role, he answers, ‘A fresh pair of eyes helps, and the attitude of just making things is quite important. A lot of the people on the governing board come from an educational background, so it’s quite interesting having someone with absolutely no skin in that game. I haven’t been doing it that long, but if I can raise money for local causes, and everyone does that, the world’s a better place, isn’t it?’

On his website’s short, self-penned biography page it says: ‘This is the bit on websites where people start to brag about the clients they’ve worked with, like that means anything to anyone. I can’t be bothered doing that.’

Drew is quick to explain that he doesn’t rate the commissions he receives on the size of the band. I reel off some of the names I’ve seen on his work: Nine Inch Nails, Foo Fighters, Queens of the Stone Age, Iggy Pop…

‘I get the same buzz from working with bands like that, as I do with bands that I really, really love, who I work with for free, because I know they’re going to be sleeping on someone’s floor when they go on tour, and that’s shit. If I can make them a T-shirt, they can get it printed, take it away and make some money, so I’m helping out. I get as much gratification out of that as I do making a poster for some enormous stadium gig for a huge band. I put the same amount of effort in.’

DNA Wheedling

Chow down on the full Millward menu and you also see his own interpretations of posters for cult movies, like The Fog and The Big Lebowski. They’re created for companies who buy a limited license to print interpretations of film posters.

‘It’s weird, because I don’t love doing them,’ Drew admits. ‘It’s quite restrictive. You’re drawing something that already exists. With music you’re not drawing something that already exists. I’m interpreting the sonic nature of a band, and making something visual out of it. With a film, I’m taking something visual and wheedling my own DNA in there, somehow.’

With a career span of 20-plus years, Drew is established, but even so, the unravelling of Instagram, the graphic artist’s social media platform of choice, still irks him.

‘I’m speaking from a position that I started doing this before social media [existed], so perhaps I’m less concerned than people who’ve always had it and know no different. [Still] I can’t understand how things can go so shit. Instagram, as a visual platform, has prioritised video over everything else. It’s trying to be TikTok. I’m not a social media strategist, but from an artist’s or a photographer’s or a designer’s point of view, it is utter bollocks. People are being pressganged into making a video to show their day or do a dance. It’s utter rubbish. It’s turned everyone into a performing monkey. I’m a 42-year-old man, I’m not interested in TikTok trends and when I see people do it, I’m disappointed. Come on! You’re better than this. Instagram was a place to showcase work. I don’t care about a day in the life of an illustrator in the style of a Wes Anderson film. Show me your work. That’s why I’m here. They’ve muddied the water so much. It’s weird.’

Howling into the void, Drew posted a reel (Instagram’s name for a short video) of a barely moving lampshade with a long, excoriating caption damning the social media platform itself.

‘I put a couple of reels up and they reached thousands and thousands more people than any of the other recent posts of my work. The algorithm doesn’t service anyone. It’s working against the interests of the people who built that platform. I don’t expect any multinational conglomerate to have my best interest at heart, but for fuck’s sake…’

Not willing to play the social media game, Drew will keep drawing.

Create To Survive

‘There’s usually some client work bubbling away. Sometimes I’m more motivated to do that than others. I don’t think that’s particularly unusual. I just like to plough on. Even after 20 years, it’s a bit of a compulsion to start new things, and I still find it quite difficult to switch off. Where does the financial need stop and the act of being start? I think everything is so enmeshed, everything’s up here [taps his temple]. No matter what you do and how your life pans out, it all plays out in your mind. You’re responsible for everything. I don’t think I’ve ever been particularly motivated by the financial side of things. It’s almost a by-product. It would be lovely to sidestep that altogether and work on some kind of barter system, which could be about six months away at this point.’

Drew’s art throbs and gurgles with life, much of it extra-terrestrial or mythical. Third eyes stare, unblinking. Tentacles reach and fangs drip, while the school governor dips a pen in his own imagination.

‘I have to create something to survive, but there’s also the point where I don’t know if I’d survive without creating something, even without that financial pressure there. It’s a weird balancing act.’

 

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