
Jordan Stokes & Kevin King setting up at Somerset House this week: Photo by Emli Bendixen
Secret 7, the annual project that brings music and art together for a good cause, is back and bigger than ever at their impressive new home at Somerset House. We were lucky enough to get a sneak preview and sat down to chat with founders Kevin and Jordan earlier on this week.
As well as giving us the awesome opportunity this year to buy unique one off record sleeves designed by the likes of Peter Blake, David Shrigley, Yoko Ono, Paul Smith, Martin Parr, Julian Opie and some seriously talented emerging designers, they have also arranged recording sessions complete with musical instruments, and the opportunity to walk away with our very own recording on a seven inch vinyl, as part of The Public Records sessions. What is not to love about that.
They collaborated with Monotype this year too and created some seriously covetable prints from Erik Spiekermann, Craig Ward, Felix Pfaffli, Spin, Bread Collective and Counter Press who all created typographical prints based on this year's selected seven tracks.

Monotype x Secret 7: Erik Spiekermann: Dead Flowers

Monotype x Secret 7: Bread Collective: Sledgehammer

The Monotype x Secret 7:Counter Press: Go
And if that wasn't enough they have organised a series of talks throughout the show from Pete Paphides, discussing the nature of collecting records, Tomato unpacking the process behind their projects, It's Nice That coming down with Hanna Hanra from Beat Magazine and Grafik Magazine bringing with them Malcolm Garrett, Pete Fowler and Chrissie MacDonald. And tons more. This year the massively deserving Nordoff Robbins are on the recieving end of all the proceeds from this brilliant show.
Sitting along the river, with photographer Emli Bendixen taking photos, we chatted about the beginnings of Secret 7, seizing opportunities, the art of badgering people, trying to curate seven hundred sleeves, their infamous spreadsheet of doom, blind ambition and why they just want to bring goodness to the world.

Secret 7: Photo by Emli Bendixen

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Jordan: Kevin travelled up to manchester and needed help launching Secret 7 but instead of us just getting on board to just do some design work on it we just starting working together on it from there.

Kevin King: Photo by Emli Bendixen

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Secret 7: Sleeve 440
Kevin: When you say that out loud it sounds mad that we do what we do in that time frame, especially with Jordan on the other side of the world doing a full time job. Time is definitely a challenge and distance too. Skype is great but its not the same.
Jordan: We thought it would work to our advantage at the beginning didn't we ! with me being in Australia.
Kevin: Well you sold it in as a good idea ! 'I’m a day ahead' you said !

Photo by Emli Bendixen

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Photo by Emli Bendixen
Jordan: Orlando did another one in the first year don’t you remember and he had stamped all over the inserts. We even had Pixie Lott kiss the envelope of the invite.
Kevin: That’s at home. That’s at home in my box of oddities.
Jordan: We had a few of celebrities for a while actually, Lauren Laverne did one and Nicolas Hoult too.

Photo by Emli Bendixen





Jordan: Mine was Oasis What’s The Story Morning Glory. But that sounds like I was trying to be cool.
Kevin: I stole my dads vinyl when I went to university. Harry Nilsson’s Nilsson Schmilsson was the record I loved the most. It had this poster of the artwork too. I remember putting it on my wall at uni and telling everyone it was my dad for some reason. It was so weird because he was in his dressing gown so I was like ‘yeah that’s my dad'. No one believed me.


Jordan: I think designers wise I get excited about a lot of the smaller names. But I would still love somebody like Damien Hirst to do one because it would just be so celebrity it would almost be pretty funny.
Kevin: I mean if we got Grayson Perry and Damien Hirst then we would start running out of options. We could retire really, we would be pretty much done.




Secret 7: Sleeve 386

Secret7: Sleeve 461
Jordan: It is a really hard job to do and we usually have a week to go through about 4000 artworks. I guess we should give ourselves more time but we like to keep the momentum going launching in January with the exhibition in April, which we starting doing to coincide with Record Store Day. The curation bit is a bit mental, it just sort of comes together, it is not an exact science.
Kevin: When I invite people to contribute I like to give them the choice of what track they’d like to work on, so they can take their pick. And I am spread sheeting it in the SPREAD SHEET OF DOOM in the back ground. And trying to keep a handle on it.
Jordan: I am not allowed to look at the spread sheet of doom. So when I am shortlisting people that I have seen that I want to include that is the only time I check the spread sheet of doom because I am a designer and visually minded and when I see that spread sheet I just panic.
Kevin: I am just worried he is going to press delete.
Jordan: I deleted it for you.
Kevin: Do not touch that spread sheet.
Jordan: Its gone now.



Jordan: We have a hit list every year, same as we do for the artists, so there will be a certain number of people we will aim to get and we go after them and then try to keep a mixture as they are confirming.
Kevin: I guess it depends on some other factors too like in the second year we were raising money for Art Against Knives and we wanted to involve the young people they support. So we got Nas and Public Enemy, a deliberate choice because we wanted them to feel like this is a project they cared about.



We also have people asking us to reveal the artists during the exhibition. People literally come to the exhibition and find out who knows the answers and then follow us around the entire show going ‘Is this one a Martin Parr ?' and then they watch my face for a response.
Jordan: The reason for me not knowing a lot of them now is in the first year I was going around like shouting at the top of my voice ‘Oh my god I cant believe that is so and so’.
Kevin: Jordan’s not good with secrets !!.
Jordan: I get way too excited about it.



When we worked with Art Against Knives we got all the young people involved so they sold t shirts that they had made. One guy had helped Jordan with some graphic design and then got a job at Universal off the back of that. Its more work for sure but we don’t really want to just hand money over to a charity, that not really why we are doing it, as much as possible we want to feel like we are doing it with a charity.



Jordan: It was also because it had an available twitter handle !
Jordan: I guess in our heads we will never be doing a big massive campaign though. It won't ever be that standard design or advertising campaign or big agency work. Its not what either of us want to do with Goodness.

Secret 7's Heaviest Sleeve: Photo by Emli Bendixen

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So I think it is that kind of honesty behind the two of us that kind of makes things come off, not all the time, but people seem to respond to that. And I am really proud of what we have done with Monotype now. I know a few typeface names and a few typeface designers and we have made some really nice posters that I want in my house.
Jordan: I just think we worked at it, we were quite lucky we got on and worked together so well. A lot of it is luck and hard work. I mean we are not out for anything with this either, we are just doing it because we like it and it is for a good cause. I think sometimes things that on the face of it seem quite good actually have a lot of bureaucracy behind it, but there isn’t enough of us to be bureaucratic.
Kevin: And I think for me I didn’t really feel I had accomplished anything in my role and it was having that desire to really do something good. We would kind of talk about having this blind ambition at the beginning, wanting to do something and not really knowing how to do it. I guess that worked in our favour as if we had known all the work and effort involved, all the emails and all of that side of things we would probably not have even done it.
Jordan: Keep it naive !


Secret 7: Sleeve 198

Monotype x Secret 7: Felix Pfaffli: Born Slippy

Monotype x Secret 7: Craig Ward: Reflections

Monotype x Secret 7: Peter Bankov: Let Forever Be