“And you’re not the man who fell to earth
You’re the man of La Mancha
And we’ve love enough to light the street
‘Cause everybody’s here

We got open arms for broken hearts
Like yours my boy, come home again
We got open arms for broken hearts
Like yours my boy, come home again”

The album cover:

And the single:

and more than that, at his blog and at the official Elbow You Tube channel, East has been busy putting art to music in a series of little animations. Little perhaps, but very lovely. This is Dear Friends….

Yep, Oliver East (of Trains Are … Mint) is doing more work for Guy Garvey and Elbow. New album cover and singles covers.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjE71l4tRLE

(a page from Trains Are Mint #7 by and (c) Oliver East)

(artwork from various artists from Berlin and That, published Blank Slate, pic by Andrew Gannon)

(a pages from Trains Are Mint #6, by and (c) Oliver East. you can buy some very nice hardback collections of Oli’s work from Blank Slate Books on the FPI webstore. This would make him very happy and encourage him to draw more)

(cover to Berlin and That by and (c) Oli East, published by Blank Slate Books)

That’s a lot of different artworks to take in, so it sounds to me like comics fans in and around Manchester are in for a treat. Some of the artists involved include Scott Alexander, Gareth Brookes, Rachael Davies, Malcy Duff, Clare East, Guy Garvey, Annie Gibson, Dean Hughes, Emma Jay, Mia Kiuru, Stuart Kolakovic, David Mackintosh, Jim Medway, Katie Popperwell, Katel Sevellec, Richard Shields, Sarah Thompson, Steven Tillotson, Emma Unsworth and more. The book will be available at the exhibition at the International 3 (8 Fairfield Street, Manchester), which has a preview on Friday 30th of April from 6 to 8pm then runs from Saturday 1st of May to Saturday June 5th (it’s open from Wednesdays to Saturdays, 12 to 5pm).

(Berlin and That’s contribution by  Stuart Kolakovic, published by Blank Slate)

On a related note Oli’s friend Gavin MacDonald, who is doing postdoctoral research into mapping and walking as  related artistic practices and is also a contributor to Berlin and That, has written an essay to go along with the exhibition. Oli is going to post up the essay after the show, but as part of it he was interviewed by Gavin and he’s posted this up on the Trains Are Mint blog ; snipped from the interview:

“Oli: Trains are… Mint, came from me walking from Manchester to Blackpool, which is something my mum did when she was about fifteen. She was living in either Benchill or somewhere in Wythenshawe, and her and her mate were just really bored and didn’t have anything else to do so they walked to Blackpool in a straight 26-27 hours, and I thought that’s really fucking cool, but B-roads are really boring so I’ll follow the train line as best I can, on which you end up on a load of B-roads anyway. So I followed Manchester Oxford Road Station to Blackpool North.

Gavin: So the process becomes you trying to cleave as close to this line as you can.

Oli: I stick to the train line as close as possible, without exception, without trespassing.

Gavin: Without ever trespassing?

Oli: Not intentionally. I do in Proper Go Well High by accident. I get lost in the Berlin book, but not intentionally. But because if I’m really close to the train line, and say I can see an aesthetically pleasing industrial estate over there, or let’s take it to a stupid conclusion, say if I’m on a path that hugs the train line as close as it can, and there’s a safari park over there, I could lie, and get a load of really cool content and stuff, but then where do you stop? Once you’ve made something up, where do you draw the line?”

(David Mackintosh’s page from Berlin and That by Oli East, published Blank Slate)

To celebrate the release, there’s going to be a Berlin And That exhibition – the preview is this Friday 30th April and the exhibition runs from May 1st – June 5th at The International 3 Gallery in Manchester.

And Oliver’s latest – Trains Are … Mint #6 is online, for free, right now, just waiting for your eyes.

(a page from Trains are Mint #6 by and (c) Oliver East; I thought there was a really nice sense of depth in the composition here – Oli’s artwork and layouts continue to improve with each new work, I think)

Trains Are Mint #6 deals with a pretty disturbing and delicate issue, with Oli explaining it “sees the start of me serializing a biography of a child abuse survivor that I’m working on,” and that “This will make up the bulk of most issues of TAM for a while.” As with Darryl Cunningham’s Psychiatric Tales – although in a very different style – Oli’s handled a sensitive subject with some empathy and intelligence. Go and give him some support and let’s hope that even if the issues aren’t coming in paper form at the moment that they will join his previous works in a collected edition further down the line (on which note his Berlin And That should be coming this spring from Blank Slate and remember there is an associated exhibition at the International 3 in Manchester on April 30th)