In 1968, Ella Fitzgerald (1917–1996) was on tour in Europe, possibly with material from her upcoming album Misty Blue. For the concert at Rheinhalle (today: Tonhalle) Düsseldorf on February 8, Günther Kieser designed a colorful poster in DIN A1 landscape format.

For “ELLA” and “’68”, he used a typeface that might have originated around 1899 at the Theinhardt foundry under the name Viktoria. In 1967, Kieser already worked with Viktoria for his Soul Time poster.

In January 2024, Michele Casanova released his open-source digitization under the name DisSenso.

Manuscript Capitals in use with overlayered glyphs and repurposed swash bits, partly masked by photography, for the poster of a Can concert in Hamburg.

We’ve seen designer Günther Kieser employ the same typeface with similar techniques before, in a poster for Tina Turner’s concert at the same location in November 1973, just a few weeks after Can. “Concert 14.10.” is in another Letraset face, the then freshly released Cut-In Bold.

In August 1973, Can brought out their album Future Days. In October, they embarked on a Germany Tour, with Hamburg as the final stop. The poster depicts the five members, Irmin Schmidt, Michael Karoli, Damo Suzuki, Holger Czukay, and Jaki Liebezeit. Japanese vocalist Suzuki left the band around this time. According to all-blues.de, it’s still subject of discussion when exactly this happened. The fan site states that the Hamburg concert took place at Ernst-Merck-Halle (not at Musikhalle as announced on the poster). The comments to Bootleg Archive’s recording suggest it was the last Can show featuring Suzuki.

Damo Suzuki ダモ鈴木 died on 9 February 2024, at the age of 74. RIP.

The shown copy of the poster by Popdom is signed by Irmin Schmidt, now the last surviving member of the band’s classic lineup.

In 1973, King Crimson was on tour to promote their album Larks’ Tongues In Aspic. On November 2, the English prog rock group played the Audimax Hamburg.

Günther Kieser’s poster is exclusively typographic. Maybe the band’s name was considered more attractive than photos of the musicians: after all, all founding members except for Robert Fripp had been replaced shortly before. “King Crimson” is rendered as a pile of tumbling and partly overlapping glyphs from Premier Shaded. The shaded caps feature a rainbow gradient fill and, if you look closely, they cast yet another shadow on the background, for more dimensionality. The second I got a dot, probably to improve legibility.

Two giants who left us this year: Tina Turner, the Queen of Rock ’n’ Roll, passed away on May 24, 2023. Günther Kieser, the German King of Concert Posters, died March 22, 2023.

This A1 poster announced a concert of Ike & Tina Turner at Musikhalle Hamburg, with support from Blue Magic. Kieser used two photographs that capture Tina Turner’s vigorous stage presence and combined it with two typefaces that were available from Letraset at the time: Manuscript Capitals and Herkules. The former doesn’t include any numerals. Kieser simply made them himself: the 7 appears to be composed from parts of a mirrored F and V, while the 3 is a mirrored ampersand.

The show took place fifty years ago, on November 6, 1973, promoting the album Nutbush City Limits. Three years later, Tina fled her abusive husband, filed for divorce, and launched her highly successful solo career.

Concert poster for the Grateful Dead’s only stop in Germany on their European tour in fall 1974, at the Olympiahalle in Munich. The poster was designed by Günther Kieser, who died earlier this year, just short of his 93rd birthday.

From the description by Heritage Auctions:

It features a very colorful bust dressed up in Dead fashion through the eyes of Kieser. Worked into his creation are skeleton & rose elements and even a Jerry Garcia “U.S. Blues” top hat. Speaking of which, the Dead were on tour behind From the Mars Hotel, released three months earlier.

The band name is shown in contoured and tightly spaced Pretorian, with some letters overlapping. The late-Victorian heavyweight is contrasted with caps from Condensed Sans Serif No. 7 (Stephenson Blake, 1893). Additional text is added in two weights of Helvetica.

Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne, both signed to Asylum Records, played the Jahrhunderthalle in Frankfurt, Germany on May 9, 1972. The poster for the concert organized by Lippmann & Rau was designed by Günther Kieser.

For Mitchell’s name, Kieser chose Apollo. This design distinguished by diagonal double braces and curling terminals was possibly inspired by the earlier Flirt (Farmer, c. 1886). Apollo originated in 1902 at the Aktiengesellschaft für Schriftgießerei und Maschinenbau in Offenbach – less than 20 miles east of the concert venue in Frankfurt-Höchst. Kieser used it in all caps, joining the serifs in MI and LL, and filling the space between the double braces with blue. In order to enable tight linespacing, J had to let go off its descender. And H got a completely new form – in the typeface, this character follows the minuscule construction that was common in blackletter, and by extension also in many more-or-less hybrid faces from around 1900.

The rest of the display typography is set in two widths from Windsor, tightly spaced.

Dimensions: 46.4×33 in. (118×84 cm)

Dimensions: 47.2×33.4 in. (120×85 cm). Headline in Orbit Shaded.

Poster for the concert at Berlin’s Deutschlandhalle on November 24, 1971

Poster for the show at Jahrhunderthalle Frankfurt

Posters for the German leg of Fats Domino’s European tour 1973, presented by Lippmann+Rau with Robert Paterson.

The typeface is Bottleneck, released by Letraset the year before. Tony Wenman’s bottom-heavy design was likely inspired by the success of Chwast Art Tone, and is most similar to its Boot Black style (AKA Tulo).

Tour poster with all dates

Günther Kieser designed this poster for B.B. King’s short 1971 tour of Germany put on by famed German concert agency Lippmann + Rau.