ORIGINALAGAIN / ABOUT
ARTWORK WITH ATTITUDE.
There’s enough beige in the world.
Enough motivational bollocks written in nice fonts.
Enough mass-produced prints of Highland cows wearing sunglasses.
Enough stuff made to offend absolutely nobody, say absolutely nothing and match the cushions.
We’re not adding to it.
Welcome to OriginalAgain.
We make artwork about things we actually give a shit about.
Music. Cars. Manchester. Culture.
The things you remember. The things you obsess over. The things that made you stop, look, listen or turn round for another glance.
Because that’s where the good stuff comes from.
Not trends.
Not algorithms.
Not somebody telling us that sage green is having a moment.
WHY WE EXIST / 001
THERE’S ENOUGH BEIGE IN THE WORLD.
Art doesn’t have to be clever.
It doesn’t need a bloke in a roll-neck standing next to it explaining what it means.
And it definitely doesn’t need to match your sofa.
Sometimes you love something because it reminds you of being seventeen.
Sometimes it’s the record your dad played in the car.
Sometimes it’s a gig you still bang on about twenty years later.
Sometimes it’s a Porsche 911 disappearing down a wet road.
Sometimes it’s a bit of Manchester concrete that everybody else walks past without looking.
And sometimes you don’t know why you like something.
You just bloody do.
That’s enough.
OriginalAgain is about taking those things, the stuff that’s already lodged somewhere in your head, and turning them into something worth putting on a wall.
THE IDEA / 002
MAKE THE FAMILIAR FEEL ORIGINAL AGAIN.
That’s the name.
OriginalAgain.
We’re surrounded by brilliant things we’ve stopped noticing.
Album sleeves. Cars. Buildings. Signs. Lyrics. Machines. Streets. Photographs. Typefaces. Moments.
Stuff becomes familiar.
Then familiar becomes ordinary.
We want to look again.
Take something you think you know, strip it back, mess with it, rebuild it and make you notice it again.
Not nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake.
We’re not trying to recreate 1994.
It was good. We were there. We’ve got the T-shirt.
The point is taking the attitude, design, music, machines and culture that meant something and doing something new with it.
Same obsession. New wall.
WHAT WE’RE INTO / 003
01 / MUSIC
Records aren’t background noise.
They’re dates. Places. People.
You can hear three seconds of a song and suddenly you’re somewhere you haven’t thought about for thirty years.
That’s magic, that.
We love the records, but we love everything around them as well.
The sleeves. Posters. Tickets. Venues. Typography. Labels. Guitars. Studios. People who decided doing it differently was better than doing it properly.
Manchester obviously gave us plenty to work with.
Factory. The Haçienda. Joy Division. New Order. The Roses. Oasis.
But this isn’t a Manchester music museum.
If it’s got attitude, there’s probably something in it.
02 / MOTORING
Some cars are transport.
Some aren’t.
Nobody ever parked a beautiful car, walked away and didn’t turn round for another look.
You know the ones.
The shape is right. The stance is right. The noise is right.
A great car is industrial design with an engine in it.
Porsche. Ferrari. Jaguar. Alfa. Old racers. Rally cars. Weird forgotten stuff. Machines built when somebody was still allowed to draw something beautiful without asking a focus group first.
We think they deserve walls as much as paintings do.
03 / MANCHESTER
Manchester doesn’t need another souvenir shop.
We’re not interested in sticking a bee on everything and calling it Mancunian.
The interesting Manchester is deeper than that.
Red brick. Rain on concrete. Factory windows. Music coming through walls. Old warehouses. New ideas. Great architecture next to something completely knackered.
A city that has spent a couple of hundred years making things, breaking things and then making something else.
Manchester has never needed to be pretty.
It’s got character instead.
We’ll take that every time.
04 / CULTURE
This is the difficult one to explain.
Which is probably why we like it.
Films. Clothes. Buildings. Photography. Advertising. Subcultures. Football. Design. People. Places. Moments.
The bits of culture that somehow become part of your own story.
That’s the territory.
If something makes us think, there’s a piece of art in that, we’ll follow it.
MADE PROPERLY / 004
FROM IDEA TO WALL.
We’re not interested in filling a website with ten thousand designs.
There’s enough stuff already.
We’d rather make fewer things and make them worth having.
It normally starts with an obsession.
Something gets noticed.
Then researched.
Then pulled apart.
Then there’s an idea.
Then the idea gets changed.
Then ruined.
Then changed again.
Then somebody says, that’s it.
And occasionally they’re right.
01 / IDEA
Find something worth making.
02 / CREATE
Mess with it until it becomes ours.
03 / PRINT
Turn it into something worthy of a wall.
04 / SEND
Get it out of here and onto yours.
Simple.
Well, simple-ish.
ART SHOULD MEAN SOMETHING.
Even if it only means something to you.
That’s really the whole point.
We don’t care whether somebody standing next to you understands why you’ve got a particular piece on your wall.
You do.
Maybe it reminds you of a record.
A car.
A city.
A night out.
Someone you knew.
Someone you were.
Or maybe you just looked at it and thought:
That’s fucking brilliant.
Good enough for us.
ORIGINALAGAIN / 005
WE DON’T MAKE ART TO MATCH YOUR SOFA.
ARTWORK WITH ATTITUDE.
OriginalAgain.