“SITTING IN MY STEVENAGE OVERSPILL CREATING THE POSTERS FOR MORRISSEY’S LOS ANGELES CONCERTS”

By Dickie Felton | 3 January 2025 |

If you are going to stage concerts in two iconic Los Angeles venues you’ll need posters that match the magnitude of the occasion.

And Morrissey turned to a designer sat in a box-room in Hertfordshire to create the visuals for his trio of end-of-year shows.

Sam Mabbitt was tasked with coming up with posters for the shows at United Theater and Hollywood Palladium.

He was also asked to work on a huge New Year’s Eve stage backdrop featuring Coronation Street stars from yesteryear.

The 1963 image features a Rovers Return Christmas knees-up. And it is just so Morrissey.

I spoke to Sam about how he came to work with Team Morrissey. And what’s it like to see his gorgeous purpley blue and peachy orange handiwork plastered all over downtown LA…

DF: Tell me who you are and what you do.

SM: I’m Sam Mabbitt and I live in a town near Stevenage. In this Stevenage overspill, I actually teach English literature, but have been using InDesign, Photoshop etc since I was at school myself.

I recall creating title slides during teacher training and using duotone images from plays and films in the style of The Smiths’ artwork.

 

DF: The posters for these LA Morrissey gigs are fantastic Sam. How did it all come about?

SM: In 2018 I was at the last night of Morrissey’s tour after following it down from Aberdeen. I noticed that one of my forays into Photoshop (Hollywood High School ‘Low in High School’ picture) had been used for the price tags on the merch stand.

So I suppose my various social media pages with my designs were perhaps on Morrissey’s radar for a while.

After a few years of just messing about with photomontages and mockups, with a few being shared on Morrissey Central website, I got a DM from Morrissey’s then management saying he loved one my mockups. And they’d like to see if they could use it.

I thought it was a scam at first!

Those plans kind of fell-through, especially when they’re literally stopped in their tracks by a wrecking ball event at Capitol Records.

But my email address must’ve stayed on file and they later got in contact asking for the high-res images of George Segal I’d put on another mockup and Germaine Greer to use for Brendan’s drum headers.

And then in November I was contacted and sent an outline of what was needed for these Los Angeles dates.

DF: How did you feel to get asked to do the designs?

SM: Absolutely flattered. Honoured. I have a modest collection of Morrissey’s tour posters, and to have something of my own among them still hasn’t quite sunk in.

I couldn’t believe I was sitting in my box-room overlooking the care home at my computer making material for a Morrissey tour in LA.

DF: What was the brief?

SM: I was sent the photos that Tina Dehghani took and was given the tour dates.

I was told that it was for print and digital which gave me the hope that I could get hold of one of the posters or shirts in the flesh.

Morrissey always has a very clear idea of what images he would like to be used, so the two images used on the tour posters were the two I was sent.

It’s always interesting to be sent something I’ve seen shared on Central from a while back. I believe these were uploaded about three years ago on there with a few others.

I wonder if he always had them in mind for a project and was waiting for the right time to use them.

Morrissey had really liked my choice of typeface that I’d used previously on a few of my mockups, so that was an obvious choice. I put together a few different crops for socials and paper sizes.

DF: How did you approach the commission?

SM: It made sense to resize and crop the photos a bit so that there were better spaces to arrange the type. The photo of Moz and Wendy Wu had a much warmer tone to it, so I went with the peachy/orange colour for the text to match.

In a similar vein, the photo for NYE with Tina Dehghani seemed much cooler, so I went with the purpley-blue.

As for the T-shirts, I sent over a layered file so the merch company could shift bits around.

It looks like the big dates on the back of the T-shirts are lifted directly from the poster design, as I had that section of text all together in a folder of layers.

DF: What were the challenges to these designs?

SM: Fitting all the information on it while making it accessible/readable/appealing. I ended up having to add shadows over the images and behind the text to give enough contrast.

DF: Tell us about the brilliant New Year’s Eve image used on stage

SM: The NYE backdrop was laugh-out-loud funny when I got sent the choice of image.

All I did was add the text and Hollywood Palladium logo.

Moz even noted the colours he wanted. It’s from a series of colour photographs taken on the set of Coronation street in 1963 when it was only broadcast in black and white.

I made another similar one but Ena Sharples looked like she’d had too many glasses of Christmas cheer or milk stout for it to play up to the miserablist joke.

DF: These shows seemed to appear out of nowhere. Were you up against the clock to come up with the designs?

SM: As soon as I have a chance to put some music on and start eeking out a layout or spending an age switching between shades of a colour, I take the opportunity to isolate myself and disappear for a few hours.

I like to think I’m always quite quick at getting this sort of thing done.

There wasn’t a strict deadline, but seeing how quickly the dates were approaching, I knew I should get my skates on.

That being said, Morrissey had the idea for the NYE backdrop later on in December. I believe I sent that over on Christmas Eve.

DF: Thanks Sam! I hope you get a call soon to start designing posters for a much-rumoured UK tour! 

You can check out Sam’s work on his *Instagram page*.

Read Dickie’s review of Morrissey’s Los Angeles dates *here*.