Casatschok!

Here’s another Vacaciones sleeve (see our previous posting below), which is quite timely given the growing tourist trade boycott some Spanish hardliners are stirring up right now. A Casatschok is a Ukrainian traditional dance which was lifted and adapted for one of those summer holiday hits in 1968, itself much covered across Europe. The original French single sleeve (below) had a helpful set of photo instructions on the dance steps, which has been copied for this Spanish holiday hits album. They have helpfully added what passes for a Russian looking hat and boots for the bikini photo shoot! The back cover (at the bottom of the page) reproduces a set of holiday postcard views of Spain.

My thanks to Joe Robinson for the photographs.

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Covered

I was involved in a terrific book called Covered a few years ago, which looked at several hundred album and CD sleeves which either lifted, borrowed or paid homage to older classic cover art.  Amazingly a band called The Weight have produced a great video for their new album which does a similar sort of thing, but with animation.  The whole video is just a seamless montage of classic album sleeves but adapted to include the group or individual musicians.  It would take someone with more time than I have to spot them all, but it would make a great party game.  Everyone from Dylan to Deep Purple!  The track itself?  Well, see what you think.  The video lasts just under three minutes, so give it a go.  My thanks to Tim Summers for the heads up.

If you want to read more about the Covered book, nip over to the publisher’s website, it’s still in print.

Blazin’ Squad

Sometimes bands get far better sleeves than perhaps they deserve, and this hip hop crew – Blazin’ Squad – might be an example, though please don’t ask me to listen! It reached the top five of the UK charts in 2003, and this 12″ pressing (which turned up in a local charity shop) was put out to accompany the CD formats which had the usual trendy portraits on the cover. The 12″ may have been an attempt to get them some acceptance amongst an older age group or DJ market credibility, and the cover was handled by the Tom Hingston Studio. They went very much into the more rarified 12″ sleeve arena, with a grey rough surface card and a bespoke design using their excellent logo (Hingston had created this for their first record.)
The single was titled Flip Reverse, so they took this, filled the cover with it and… flip reversed it on the front and back. For added impact the type was foil blocked onto the card, with a line pattern added to the repeat. The result was a very eye catching cover which varies in visibility depending on the ambient light. It also picks up refractions, so you get lovely rainbow colours at certain angles. It must be the magpie in me.
As with any cover printed on card, the original price label has left an adhesive mark while the label boss (East West Records, owned by Warners) has also insisted on a barcode sticker on the back; the original design just printed the number itself amongst the credits on the back.
Hingston Studios have worked on some great sleeves for big (Stones, Robbie Williams, Massive Attack) and less big names, starting back in 1997, although this is only part of their work. Whether the band understood the genius of the design I’m not sure; a free-gift in the form of a rather non-descript felt pen graffiti-style band sticker fell out of the cover when I looked.

in the post

I do like vinyl art spin offs, and this was scanned for me by Pericle Formenti. Older collectors will be familiar with the blizzard of promotional material which labels sent to record stores during the 1970s and 80s, much of it now very collectable. It would be dropped off by label reps in the UK, who would then take back older material to be destroyed as legally it was not allowed to be sold (I think because it was written off against tax.) America being a tad larger, a lot would go out by post, and this is an album sized generic envelope from Warner Bros. used to do just that.
This one was shipped in November 1974 and contained album size window banners for Deep Purple and Frank Sinatra albums. It was shipped Fourth Class (whatever that was!) to the Bargain Warehouse, a vinyl outlet in North Carolina. I like the way the front just has ‘promotional material’ on but the label’s famous logo appears on the flaps at the back of the envelope. There is a sticker to let the store owner know what was inside, and in this case they clearly couldn’t be bothered promoting either Deep Purple or Frank Sinatra and it just got stuffed in a back room for 40 years!
I’ve also discovered that Pericle has kept a bag from every record shop he used in Italy and abroad, so will be pestering him for pics of those before long.

 

you spend your holidays in Spain

As the Bonzos once sang.  A new sleeve gallery of half a dozen budget Spanish holiday albums like the one below to mark the summer!

More illustrations

Two more album sleeves with illustrations on the cover which I picked up recently. The Student Prince is a really nice job and looks very Sixties, but was actually issued in 1956 by Columbia.  It’s a pencil sketch drawing, with water colour overlaid and is signed R. Watkins but frustratingly I cannot find out anything about the artist. The album is actually an early vinyl reissue; there is nothing particularly bad about the original 1953 release which I found on the web, but it does seem a bit old fashioned alongside the cover which replaced it just three years on. You could argue that the type on the original is handled much better, although perhaps Columbia decided there was simply too much of it for a front cover.

The Rolf Harris record is about a decade later, issued in 1963. This was Rolf’s first proper album release (after an Australian only LP in 1959). It came out in 1963, then this World Record Club mail-order version quickly followed later in the year, a clear sign that the original didn’t sell too well and Rolf was best left as a singles artist. The original on Columbia (below the reissue, again off the web) is very typical of the time, although the regular studio image had an unusual twist as the background painting was by Rolf himself.

WRC as usual did a new cover, and for this the illustrator (who is not credited) has come up with a very Sixties style painting; abstract brush strokes, hand drawn lettering, and images associated with the Australian landscape blended in. Being mail order, the label could afford to be less brash.

More on ST33

World Record Club covers are often of a high standard, there are more on the site if you search, but some great ones on this page:

https://st33.wordpress.com/sleeve-artists-designers/jan-parker/

And some more hand painted sleeves on site:

https://st33.wordpress.com/sleeve-pages/sleeve-illustrations/

Billy The Kid

I can remember this sleeve design turning up on a Music For Pleasure catalogue given away in one of the local record shops, and taking one home to admire. And yet it wasn’t adorning a cover on one of the major rock labels, but instead appeared on EMI’s budget label Classics For Pleasure (itself a spin off from the Music For Pleasure series.)  It’s impossible to imagine any label going to this much effort for a budget release these days.
It is from an album of Copland’s music, often associated with Western films, and that has provided the inspiration for the cover illustration, with figures from the Wild West era painted from surviving photographs of the time.  The lettering is also hand-painted, again in the decorative style of the period.  All this alone would have marked it out, but the whole piece is painted on a sheet of old wood, with the cracks and breaks forming part of the finished design. Once photographed, that’s the cover done except to stick the CFP logo in the corner.
The illustration and design from 1971 are the work of Geoff Hocking, who worked on designs for many budget albums both in the UK and Australia, where he notably handled the Australian World Record Club catalogue for several years (and published a book about the label a few years ago, reviewed on the site.) Although Geoff commissioned a lot of work, he was also hands on as well, and to me this is one of his finest covers.  Geoff also did some of the montage covers for MFP which we covered in a gallery on the site a while ago, well worth a look (an example is shown below.)

rubber stamps and brown paper

Three more brown paper record bags which give us more glimpses of shopping for records in the past. The London Jazz Club on Bryanston Street, near Marble Arch, was a popular jazz venue in the fifties (referred to as the The Bryanston Jazz Club in some histories). The club must have had their own record shop for a time in London’s St. John’s Wood as this paper 10″ 78rpm bag shows. They’ve stamped the name and address of the shop on and also added a small paper sticker advertising Ken Colyer’s Jazz Men playing there each weekend (New Orleans Jazz at it’s best!) circa 1954-56.

The second sleeve is quite a bit older I would imagine. Whitaker Street in Doncaster has long been demolished, the town having suffered badly at the hands of council redevelopment schemes (and is still doing so, they destroyed an amazing late deco cinema only a few years ago).

So we can only imagine what the Recordia shop was like, but it’s an evocative name. The typeface has a 1930’s feel about it.

The last bag is another nice example of the sort of home-made approach to shop keeping in the 1920s. Plain again, with an even smaller rubber stamped name and address oval logo to avoid the expense of printing up sleeves. In this case the retailer is M. Drinkwater, Music Dealer, Broad Street, Parkgate. It’s quite likely the premises are still there as this stretch of road near Rotherham in South Yorkshire is mostly intact albeit in a very run down kind of way (there was a cycle repair shop at 31 Broad Street in 1905, which might be the same place; I have seen 78 record sleeves advertising cycle repairs). Drinkwater – what a great surname – also had a set of rubber stamp numbers so they could make up their own labels and used them here to price up the records by hand. 4/8d in this case, which would be a lot of money at the time.

1977 and all that

I was getting a bit nostalgic the other day while playing some tracks from Talking Heads: 77 and wondering where those 40 years had gone!  So I thought I would take a look at the sleeve and then perhaps follow it up later with more covers from 1977. It’s filed under Sleeves and their designers.  And I am always fond of those screens full of the same image when I’m researching covers.  All the same, but yet all slightly different.

Taiwan In Rock

I’ve been getting a book devoted to the Deep Purple In Rock album back into print for the publishers. There is plenty about the cover art in there but tidying the files away I thought this curious Taiwanese version of the familiar cover was worth a mention here. I’m sure most collectors will have come across these as they issued local editions of just about every album around in the Seventies.  I have this, through to the soundtrack of 2001!  The format was always the same; a fairly crude copy of the original sleeve (generally the American editions), often in reduced colours, and printed on paper. A back sheet, sometimes using the lyrics, was also produced.  The two sheets were then sealed in a plastic cover to form a pocket, with the album slipped inside.

Where did they come from?  The consensus of opinion now is that they were pressed in Taiwan (unofficially of course) during the late Sixties and early Seventies with one specific market, the American forces in Vietnam.  Available cheaply they were bought to play while on duty there, and some were brought back when the soldiers returned home.
After the end of the war the trade just ended.  These homemade looking albums have remained quite sought after as they are so different from the usual sleeve variations.  To add a further layer of interest, when repressed they were often done in different colourways or designs.  The labels were often changed as well!

I looked at the original In Rock sleeve on this site some time ago.

The Deep Purple In Rock book itself is featured on the publisher’s website, Easy On The Eye Books, and can be ordered now.

Here are two more Liming issue sleeves which give you an idea of how the albums all looked; they are very hard to photograph cleanly as you would need to dismantle the plastic seal to remover the cover sheets, and of course who wants to do that?!