Ufomammut, Iggy Pop and Amanda Palmer: Italian metal and silkscreen art


Urlo, a long-haired, 45-year-old Italian dude with a beard worthy of ZZ Top, is struggling to find the right word to sum up his home town of Tortona.

"Boring," he finally says. "That is the word. There's not a lot to do here. It's a town full of middle-class people. There are no venues for music. There is one festival in summer and it is just the big, boring names of Italian music. But it is good that we are from a boring small town. You have to create something yourself and build it up and develop in your own way."

Malleus' poster for Amanda Palmer's Dresden Dolls makes reference to the WWII bombing of the German city.


That's exactly what Urlo and his friends – who all work under nicknames – have done over the past couple of decades, as both a poster art collective called Malleus and a band called Ufomammut that most often gets described as space-doom.

If you're unsure what space-doom means, don't worry. Neither does the band.

Space-doom band Ufomammut hail from the "boring" Italian town of Tortona.


"It's difficult to describe our style," says Urlo. "When we started playing in 1999 we were doing something really spacey and psychedelic. Then we got heavier and started getting called stoner rock. We didn't like that very much. Now they call us space-doom, but we're a lot less spacey than we were in the beginning, plus we don't really like doom metal. I mean, we like Black Sabbath, but doom music like Pentagram or Cathedral is not our cup of tea."

"We've received many labels over the years," says Poia, also 45, who sports an equally impressive beard, but has a shaved bald head. "I liked the label 'heavy mental' best. That fitted us."

Lu, who isn't in the band, is the third partner in Malleus. She doesn't have a beard. The 37-year-old also hardly says a word during the interview.

There's a crossover between the music and the artwork. You can hear it in songs such as Hecate and Eve, based on female figures who were "powerful and went against normality and the status quo", according to Poia.

Mudhoney poster by Malleus.

Mudhoney poster by Malleus.Credit:Malleus

Most Malleus posters revel in the female form and the women are portrayed as exotic, erotic, mysterious and powerful. The art nouveau period from the late 19th and early 20th century is the most immediate and obvious influence, especially Alphonse Mucha and Gustav Klimt, but the trio also take cues from a wide range of other sources, including US comic artists Rick Griffin, Mike Mignola and Jack Kirby.

"In the classics and the art nouveau period, women represented the concept of beauty," says Urlo. "For all of us too, the most beautiful thing is the figure of the woman. We don't want women to be just seen as objects. There has to be something different behind the image, something hidden, or something you have to discover."

The images can be beguiling, titillating, confronting or funny – an Iggy Pop poster of a woman kissing an iguana; a Mudhoney poster of a girl stinging herself on the tongue with a bee; a Queens Of The Stone Age poster with a crying woman in a chastity belt, surrounded by a sea of keys. Their work has occasionally been criticised – mainly in the US – for fetishising or exploiting women, something which the group rejects.

"Many of our fans and many of the people who buy our posters are women," says Poia. "Of course there is something erotic about our work. We are humans. But we try to be subtle and not vulgar in what we do."

Amanda Palmer is a long-time fan who has commissioned work from Malleus, initially with her band Dresden Dolls and then her solo career.

"The Malleus posse showed up at a Dresden Dolls show in Europe with a poster they'd designed," she wrote in an email message to Spectrum. "When I was confronted with an image of little dolls dropping like bombs over the ruins of a city I was like, 'Sold! And how did you guys get into my brain?'

"With so much design nowadays lingering in the kitschy patina of the past, it's really hard to find artists who understand how to fuse the classic and the modern, and these guys manage to hit it out of the park every time. They have this beautifully deft way of creating something that looks timeless and totally contemporary."

Part of that timeless look has to do with the fact that Malleus uses silkscreen rather than offset printing. The process takes longer, is more hands-on and more expensive to produce, but the result is that each layer of colour is separate, with ink being squeezed through a screen, so there's a richer, more textured finish to the artwork and every poster is unique.

Since producing their first silkscreen print in 2002, the trio has created prints for a string of high-profile acts, including the Black Keys, Sonic Youth, the Cure, Sigur Ros and Nine Inch Nails.

"We are quite lucky because we have worked with many of our idols, like the Sex Pistols and Iggy Pop and the Melvins," says Urlo. "The first time we met the Melvins we were like children, we were so excited."

Do they have others on their wish list?

"We would have loved to have done something with Motorhead," says Urlo. "But now [frontman and bassist] Lemmy is gone, so it's too late, like Pink Floyd and the Beatles. One day I hope we'll do something with Rob Zombie. We love him as a musician and a movie director. Nick Cave is someone we like a lot too, especially in the period when he started doing soundtracks."

"We would also love to work with Eros Ramazzotti," adds Poia.

The friends break into laughter, then notice that their interviewer has a puzzled look on his face.


"I'm sorry, we are joking," says Poia. "He is an Italian singer. And it is good if you don't know him. Don't go and search for him."

Ufomammut play The Bald Faced Stag on October 7. See their artwork at malleusdelic.com.

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