Vaughan Oliver

The death of Vaughan Oliver, one half of design partnership 23 Envelope, was announced over the Christmas holiday period.  For anyone interested in vinyl sleeve art, Oliver’s name would be impossible to ignore and it seems wrong to be losing someone of his talents at such a relatively young age.  Forever associated with the 4AD label, his work as half of the design duo 23 Envelope pushed at the edges of what could appear on a record sleeve, and it wasn’t long before other bands began imitating the label’s unique look. Indeed if you look at 4AD’s early releases which are fairly nondescript, it’s not hard to see how 23 Envelope made such an impact and arguably gave the label a very serious, professional, often mysterious and dark look, which synched perfectly with much of the music. 

Their designs went well beyond the front cover though, and Oliver gave as much importance to the inner sleeves and labels, so helping to create a unified and immersive feel for each package (as on the Xmal Deutschland cover above).  Many designers mangled type sizes and shapes as the Mac unshackled the restrictions of set fonts, but 23 Envelope always seemed to do it with purpose and an eye for what looked right. So while some of their contemporaries work now looks suitably dated, 4AD covers manage to remain largely timeless.

It was label signings The Cocteau Twins which first hooked me and it was a treat to go out and purchase each new release; you knew you owned something special.  I loved the way 23 Envelope covers played with seemingly abstract or wrongly exposed photographs, material which would be rejected by most, and got these to work.  There was a willingness to experiment with out of register images, overlaid typography and later on special colours and metallic inks. 

I would struggle to think of another label who so consistently came up with as many great covers during the Eighties.  Indeed I think Oliver was lucky to be involved at the peak of vinyl design, because although there is still scope for great individual covers, the ability to so firmly help shape a label in this way is unlikely to occur again. Although I have a modest collection of 4AD’s catalogue (and of course own the great anthology of his work published a few years ago which I must add to our site’s book section), many bought just for the sleeves, I thought it would be nice to just run with a handful of my favourite designs to mark Oliver’s contributions to album design, and I’m sure there will be many other sites doing similar posts.

Twist

I got a few 7″ EPs scanned recently including this great cover from 1962. It’s a dance offering from band leader Victor Sylvester, providing older ballroom addicts with a lush alternative to the more hectic pop records pushing the twist craze. The cover illustration is very deft, done pin pen, pencil and rough crayon – this as an orange overlay.  The EP title is given a nice barley sugar twist too, though the name of the artist, done in a cartoon credit style hand lettered format, is perhaps less successful, if very much of the era.  The illustrator is only credited by the letters N.D. down by the girl’s ankle, but the style does look very similar to the art used by HMV on their 10″ record sleeves of this era (see below), so both might be one of the in-house staff. Otherwise the cover follows the standard EMI layout with the top bar having title and ‘mono’ message. The front is gloss laminate too, which has kept this example nice and pristine. There are more HMV related images on the site.

HMV 10″ single bag

Flamingods

I must confess the resurgence of vinyl during 2019 actually pushed me the other way. So many reissues, a large percentage of which don’t take enough care in their reproduction anyway (and judging by the percentage of limited editions still clogging the racks I’m not alone), plus new releases I might have bought on vinyl with below par art which put me off the expense.  But this sleeve stood out amongst many I spotted over the year…

Not a band I know, but the illustration took some familiar ideas (the outline drawing trend isn’t that new and can be seen on sleeves in the Seventies) and really made something interesting and visually engaging out of them. It was pressed on vinyl, a sold out glitter gold edition with embossed cover (400 only), a ‘marigold’ colour edition (500, see below) and then a black run as well (both still available from their own website).

The work is by Jakarta based illustrator Kendra Ahimsa, who operates under the name Ardneks (work it out!).  Having been influenced by the work of the 60s San Francisco poster designers, he is now doing some really great posters for the local music scene as well as lots of non-music graphics.

He has seemingly done some other sleeves but his website was offline when I was writing this, and I don’t want to join umpteen social media sites (what is Linktree anyway? I only just got around to deleting my Linkedin page!) but you can see more ‘stuff’ on this page and even order a few bits and bobs, though not sadly the posters.  As for Flamingods I shall have to check them out too, and hope the music lives up to the sleeve!

Don & Faith

Religious records are a category which I do find grimly fascinating, as much for the pious sentiment or illustrations on many of the sleeves as anything.  Georgia dwelling Don and Faith Dunlap here are at first sight a curiously matched couple, strolling toward the camera in front of a clinker built chapel of some sort. But the pair are still going strong and you can now find them on Facebook (they’ve even been over to visit Downton Abbey if the heavily redacted image they posted is anything to go by!) celebrating their 50th anniversary. Don has signed the back sleeve for a former owner, although instead of “best wishes” has suggested a Bible passage to look up. I’d imagine the album dates from the early 1970s. I did find a box full of this sort of stuff a couple of years at a charity shop in the godless wastes of South Yorkshire which I picked over to make a selection, I’ll get some scanned eventually. They were all about 50p which is fine, but I was surprised to see one of Don and Faith’s other second hand albums being sold for $69.99 on Amazon. Especially as it still has the thrift shop price sticker for 99 cents clearly visible on the back.  I’m sure the Bible has something to say about profiteering like that!

Paris Musette

Some cover finds are just so much if their time it’s hard to resist. This easy listening 12″ was issued in France on the Bel-Air label, founded in 1959. Curiously I cannot find the album on a web search BUT I think it may be a reissue of an earlier version, which came out in a sleeve featuring a shot of the Eiffel Tower – what else?!

Bel Air apparently went went bankrupt at the end of 1965, so I imagine the company which took the label over quickly pushed out some of the back catalogue and decided to give this album a bit of a make over and feature a more modern teenage couple on the front instead.  It came out for a second time in 1965 (it isn’t dated anywhere but other albums with similar catalogue number help to confirm this). The very saturated colour photo is by Anne Marie Berger, while the designer is also named in the corner but in such as way as I cannot make out the name.  It is a very gallic couple, if nothing else the cap gives it away but the look particularly of the man is familiar from French films of the Sixties.  Bel Air also had a new label design done (I found the image below on the web), which is quite nice, black on orange with the logo also tinted across it.

Randoms

I usually have a few random picture sleeve 7″ discs propped up on the desk which have taken my fancy when scouting through charity shops, so here is a batch I scanned recently and had fun researching. It’s stuff you wouldn’t pay over the odds for, but most of these were 50p or less and deserved rescuing.

Natalino Otto turned out this song for the San Remo music festival, with a striking vintage scratchy fashion style illustration on the sleeve of a lady relaxing with her record player providing background music and hunky feller wondering when his dinner will be ready. The great illustration is credited too but frustratingly I cannot make out the signature. The single came out in early 1963 while the cover artist also did this sleeve below for the same label, Telerecord, which singer Natalino apparently started himself in 1961. It ran through into the early 1970s, and the label design itself is quite smart too, so I will illustrate that as well.

The Nini Rosso / Isabella Iannetti 1965 EP below has two songs a side by each of the artists, but who won the battle of the cover stars? It’s not Nini, an Italian jazz trumpeter, but Isabella, an Italian female singer who went for a glam very blonde animal skin cover shoot here. Normally her sleeves feature more demure cover images and her natural hair colour too. Isabella’s career seems to have carried on through into the early 1970s, nearly all her records cut for the Durium label.

What a contrast!

The Panorama sleeve below could only be from France, a clue being the stylised circular poster display which are a common feature of the urban streetscape there. The photo is credited to Derly but I did not realise until I got it home that the cover is generic. There is a cut out in the top corner which shows the artists and song title, printed on a loose sheet inside, along with selected titles from the full panorama catalogue.

These singles date from around 1959 / 1960 and there seem to have been fifty or so with the same basic sleeve. To ring the changes, they swopped the colours about so you get blue, yellow and green backgrounds as well. From what I can work out the music is mostly covers of the recent French “hits of the month”. Panorama, which seems to have disappeared mid-1960s, also had a sort of matching series featuring the same model in what look suspiciously like prototype jeggings turning a roulette wheel, also shown below. Great fun, I am having to resist trying to buy some more in the set.

Lastly to Britain for an unusual Frank Sinatra sleeve. 99% of his releases show Frank himself, usually a photo, cheery or sad face, sometimes an illustration, cheery or sad face (no we’re not fans here!). But in this case, on one of several 4 track Sinatra EPs they issued (aimed at people whose budgets could not stretch to a full album), Fontana have gone for a girl on a couch instead. The titling is pretty naff, but otherwise it’s a nice sleeve and dates from 1961.

Fashion

We all probably have regrets about unwise fashion choices we’ve made in the past, but if you were in a band this once hip gear is often captured for all time on an album sleeve for all to marvel at (or not) years on. Neither of the two covers here would win awards but do provide interest for fashion historians.

Pussycat were not a band known to me, an EMI Dutch based septet but licensed out to the Sonet label in Britain in 1976 when a hit beckoned. The cover shots on this debut album are credited to Jaap Sluis and illustrate the dangers of guys going shirtless with just ill-fitting jackets. The women (all sisters) come off somewhat better although the blue bin bags nailed up for a backdrop are a bit low budget. The group had a number one hit with Mississippi, which is why it dominates the titles on the front, though it doesn’t ring a bell with me. For Pussycat that was about it for about Britain (about to see the dawn of Punk), but they continued to have success in Holland for years. I have left on the original Woolworth’s price label too; I usually take these off if it’s a sleeve I really like but here I’m happy for it to remain part of the history of the album. £3.25p.

Budgets were obviously higher for the much better known New Seekers, as their much sharper clobber on the front of this 1972 album demonstrates. The clothes are a lot better made and work well for a band studio photograph. Much of this would have not seemed too out of place as evening wear at the time with the possible exception of the detailed leather ensemble centre top. Curiously the photo is not credited, although the overall design is by Graphreaks, a team who did lots of great cover work for Polydor during the Sixties and into the Seventies. This is not one of their best however, with an awkward cut out job on the front to montage the group unconvincingly onto the slopes of Holyrood Castle. The group had huge chart success and this album contains their first UK number one, I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing, plus our Eurovision entry for 1972 (beg Steal Or Borrow) as the sleeve makes much of. The contest was held that year in Edinburgh, hence the background choice, and one suspects a bit of a rush job to get this out in time for the event (they came second).

The best thing about the sleeve (apart from the clothes!) is the band’s logo, which I think is a great design. After a couple of uneventful attempts, this logo first turned up on their Beautiful People album in 1971, credited to Robert L. Heimall, a busy sleeve designer for most of his life (he did some of The Doors covers). Here he just gets a credit for the logo. It is both contemporary and very elegant, and although the words “the new” tend to get lost, the band wanted to retain the familiarity of the original seekers so that was no bad thing.

Graphreaks did one of the James Last sleeves on the site.

Mike Hammer

This great sleeve came from a bunch of odds and ends I bought off a Canadian dealer last year. It dates from 1959 and I thought it was fabulous abstract sleeve, with cool jazz imagery.

The art is credited to Jason Kirby (his signature is seen bottom right) who I’d not heard of (Jack Kirby yes!), but seems to have been an early album designer working for Columbia from 1950 onwards. Like other designers of the time it’s likely he did more sleeves than he gets credited for. This particular album dates from 1959, but I hope he got repeat fees as RCA used it as a generic design for at least dozen or so releases between 1956 and 1959!  So it crops up quite a bit on covers for Honky Tonk Piano, Henry Mancini, Duke Ellington and others. I suspect this was a way for RCA to reissue older material in contemporary packaging, but using the same cover must have caused some confusion in-store. Frustratingly Jason’s work is not well documented online, with just a few interesting book jacket designs and some commercial magazine cover work seen.

 

Detour To The Moon

With all the news hype* over the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing the past few days, here’s a nice sleeve sort of on topic which I picked up a while back! Mary Ann McCall’s Detour To The Moon actually avoids any of the sci-fi imagery you might expect from a 1958 long player, even though most of the song titles manage to feature the word moon!  Instead we get a great cover photograph by Charles Varon, showing the singer, lit from behind, sat on a large abstract studio background (done in the style of Pollock), looking up into the lens. For a time Mary Ann was rated as one of the best white female jazz singers, and had worked with many of the famous big bands before and after WW2 ahead of cutting this. The finished design was by Sy Leichman but to be honest with a cover shot as good as this he didn’t have to do too much work.

* not that I’m knocking the actual event; I’m old enough to have sat and watched the grainy monochrome coverage live as it happened, we even got a day off school specially. One of the most inspirational events I’ve ever witnessed.  My first long player purchase wasn’t some hip rock album, but a record of the Gemini capsule’s flight recordings! The second was the 2001 film soundtrack…

Sheffield shop

Spinnings Discs record shop in the city (below) is added to our list of places to visit at last! Our modest list also updates Jumbo Records in Leeds which has moved back into the Merrion Centre just across the road. Not had chance to visit yet, unless you count going there in 1978 before they first moved out!