Alongside every sleeve which we can admire today sit hundreds which rightly get ignored. Here is one, picked up recently for a project. It shows us the hum drum work some designers had to churn out to make ends meet! (There’s a fun project for somebody, asking designers for their most soul destroying design job – no question mine was stationary and logo for a local hire company, whose boss thought he was a designer, kept rejecting each idea I came back with, then when I resubmitted the original one, thought it was brilliant – it wasn’t – and went with it.)
Concert Hall was a record club mail order label, but unlike some (the World Record Club being a good example), made very little effort to package their releases (although a couple of decent designs did slip through the net!). This one looks like they cut the dashing couple off a box of Quality Street chocolates, adding a hand drawn artist name and then a magenta tint. 30 minutes tops. The label started in 1960 (“3 LP records of your choice for only 6/-“) but there is none of that decade’s design exuberance on display here, just plodding mundanity. And now, because I just looked it up on Discogs and found their scan was awful, I have got to do my duty and replace it…