Everyone loves great record sleeves. Remember Ian Dury and the Blockheads’ Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick: a spotty puppet dog with origami bits? Or the charging elephants from Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces? Hawkwind’s intergalactic Space Ritual, perhaps? Or even the light- bulb simplicity of Billy Bragg’s Life’s a Riot with Spy Vs Spy? All of them share one common thread: Barney Bubbles, a colossus of British sleeve design in the 1970s and early 1980s. The Factory Records designer Peter Saville cites him as “the missing link between pop and culture”; his former mentor Sir Peter Blake, whose occasional brushes with cover art include Sgt Pepper, concedes “he was so good, I couldn’t have really competed with him”; and Ian Dury called him “a genius. . . the most incredible designer I’ve ever come across”.

As Bubbles was the creator of some of the most brilliantly inventive, anarchic works of post-war pop art, you’d be forgiven for wondering why he isn’t the household name he deserves to be. Maybe it’s down to sniffy attitudes — can record-sleeve design ever qualify as high art? Or perhaps it’s due to Bubbles’s utter lack of interest in fame.

Self-promotion, it seems, was the least of his concerns. “He never credited himself on his work,” explains a close friend, the photographer Brian Griffin. “He’d use other names, like the name of a local builders’ supplier around the corner.”

Whatever the case, a new Bubbles anthology might help to reverse that. Paul Gorman’s fascinating, definitive, lavishly spread Reasons to Be Cheerful: The Life and Work of Barney Bubbles collects all the essential pieces of a man whose art was as striking and complex as his personality.

Bubbles, then plain Colin Fulcher of Middlesex, began as an art-schooled product designer for Terence Conran in the 1960s. One of his earliest feats was the Norman archer logo for Strongbow cider. Yet the music scene was his true habitat. By 1968, he was pouring out illustrations for the underground bibles Oz and Friends. One of his closest chums was the photographer Phil Franks. “Even when he wasn’t drawing,” he recalls, “his mind was working, ideas bouncing around and popping out all the time. He lived on the edge. Barney was nervous in the sense that there was an abundance of him. He was ebullient.”

Soon Bubbles was designing record covers for Hawkwind, an explosion of ideas that pushed their freeform space-rock into a new dimension. The 1971 classic X in Search of Space, which unfolded into the shape of a cruciform hawk, was an elaborate triumph of sci-fi nouveau. “It was in the days of LSD, and I think Barney used to take the odd acid tab when he was doing the sleeves," laughs the Hawkwind co-founder Dave Brock. “You can probably see the results of that in his artwork, like Space Ritual.” Indeed, with its sleeve panels of cosmic embryos, nipple planets and sonic waves, Space Ritual combined Bubbles’s ideas on philosophy, theatre and art. Still he refused to sign his work, though his reputation was growing apace.

By the mid-1970s, Bubbles made the transition from hippie to punk, reshaping NME’s logo and landing a job as in-house designer at Stiff Records. His graphics gave the fledgling label a sharp, smart new identity. He created sleeves for Nick Lowe, the Damned, Dury, Costello and more — many of which cleverly subverted art movements such as dada and constructivism. It was a fiercely intelligent streak he carried through to F-Beat, Radar and Go! Discs. “His sleeve work was sensational,” asserts the Stiff photographer Brian Griffin. “And his work rate was phenomenal. I never saw Barney sleep, ever. Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick is one of the great art pieces of the 20th century. It’s mind-blowing. I think it’s up there with a Picasso painting.”

Such was Bubbles’s all-round ability and prodigious workrate, he even directed pop videos, including Costello’s Clubland and the Specials’ timeless ride into inner-city dread, Ghost Town. But there were other elements to his character. Hawkwind’s Nik Turner, his best friend, remembers disarming Bubbles after he’d been waving a knife around: “The more I knew Barney, the more I came to realise he was a manic depressive. He’d have manic times, then freak out and go to hospital, a safe place to rest and get well again.” Griffin recounts an episode in 1983, after he and Bubbles had argued over the phone: “He was upset with me, so I told him I was driving over to his home in Islington to see him. He opened the door and his face was lacerated, delicately, with a razor blade. There were about 100 nicks. He was obviously going through a bad time.”

Bubbles was indeed troubled. Haunted by the death of his parents two years earlier, and stricken with personal and financial worries, he committed suicide on November 14, 1983. He was just 41 years old.

His work, true to the seasoned adage, lives on. Hawkwind’s former manager, Doug Smith, insists: “He’s the most important artist in the music industry since the 1960s.” Franks contends that “of all the people I’ve worked with, Barney is right at the top. Compared to him, there isn’t anybody else. He was totally natural”.

So, next time you’re flipping through the small print of a favourite cover, look out for Heeps Willard, Big Jobs Inc., Sal Forlenza or even Jacuzzi Stallion. Behind these pseudonyms you’ll find Barney Bubbles.

“He had this unerring ability to make unprepossessing blokes look cool: Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, Johnny Moped, me,” Billy Bragg writes in Reasons to Be Cheerful. “Misfits in the pantheon of pop, Barney made us look magnificent.”

Reasons to Be Cheerful: The Life and Work of Barney Bubbles by Paul Gorman is published by Adelita on December 4.

To buy it for £22.50, inc p&p, call The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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