Steve and Simon met up the other day to take careful delivery of the last sleeve needed for this next book. We didn’t trust the post as it had already been delivered to one wrong address. Quite what the people behind the counter in the cafe at Penistone thought we were all up to as we all marvelled at the insanity of it I have no idea. We will NOT say what it is just yet, except to reveal that Des O’Connor was involved, which is always the guarantee of a certain lack of quality as far as we’re concerned. Though it isn’t an actual Des O’Connor album (and if you don’t know who he was, think yourself very lucky. Or do a web-search. With audio off). It has also ended up being the most expensive disc in Steve’s collection. Anyhow, with that in place, our design intern at Easy Books has spent most of today trying to sort the final list of contents for page one, which has driven him mad…
Here it is – complete with tick marks, bleed marks, registration guides and colour bars (don’t say we never teach you anything). Simon at the publishers does add that this is one of his favourite covers, simply because it is a great photo technically and artistically, and then you see the barking album title!
With the layout finished, The Art of The Bizarre Vinyl Sleeve is now into final proof reading stage. This takes the form of a b/w laser print out, as we all spot things better on paper! Prior to this, Steve came over to the Easy On The Eye office so we could sit and talk through changes as well as swop a few sleeves about and discuss other odds and ends. It’s always easier to do this in person so you can look at the layouts on screen in real time.
For example the Vietnam Chain album on the desk in the photo here is one I had not even scanned first time around, yet Steve explained it was almost always in the top ten of people’s choice of worst sleeve at his exhibitions, so we needed to make room for that. Happily talking to the printers, we found we had an extra 4 pages to play with so did not have to part with any of our other particular favourites!
On the monitor here is one such, the amazing World of Joseph Cooper sleeve, which, with all the dead leaves on top of his piano, we always feel looks like Joseph has been embalmed and placed in the garden as a memento mori… and for those too young to know, wait until you read about his famous dummy keyboard.
It doesn’t take much to turn me back into a fan-boy and getting a lovely endorsement from guitarist Tony McPhee for the book of Brian Smith’s Blues Photos last year (after sending him a PDF proof) certainly did the trick. He was of course enthralled by the music of the musicians featured in the book and became so well versed in their records that his group The Groundhogs were often booked to back them on UK tours. They needed little rehearsal, they already knew the songs backwards. Here the band were caught by Brian outside their tour van with Jimmy Reed. I recognised some of the group (Tony is second from the left) but Tony kindly filled us in on the exact details. I’m a generation down from Brian, and The Groundhogs were the first live group I ever saw, setting me off on a love of their material and in particular his remarkable guitar work, which remains to this day. He will be very much missed here.
If all goes well and I can stay awake, I am chatting about record sleeves with other guests on BBC Radio 5’s Colin Murray show, May 29th midnight to 1.00 am (but playable on Sounds later). They wanted someone to chat about the Bizarre Record Sleeve book we’re publishing later this year. I will post a link afterwards if it goes OK. If I gabble too much I won’t!
Just a reminder that you can subscribe to mailing lists for titles which are getting closer to publication time. This way you will get news updates, page previews and pre-order information before it appears anywhere else.
Due to a screw up (we’re not sure who is to blame yet! Brexit?) the subscription button for our ART OF THE BIZARRE VINYL SLEEVE title failed to register anyone who tried to subscribe. So if you did just that anytime before the date of this post, please resubmit your request!
Details can be found on the links to the relevant pages. One of our other upcoming titles THE ART OF THE MEXICAN LOBBY CARD has also now got a subscription button for getting future news. It is part of our planned LANDSCAPE larger format series.
We have put half a dozen preview pages from The Art Of Bizarre Record Sleeves on the site to mark the opening today of the worst album sleeves exhibition in Huddersfield (details below). This gives a good idea of the designs even as they continue to be worked on.
Just to mention collector Steve is returning to the scene of his first successful Worst Record Sleeves exhibition, this time at part of the Huddersfield Literature Festival.
The exhibition runs 10am til 4pm Thursday 23rd March – Sunday 2nd April at the Huddersfield Literature Festival Hub, Huddersfield Piazza, Princess Alexandra Walk HD1 2RS.
If you can get along a really good laugh is guaranteed, plus you can help visitors select the three most bizarre covers!
Easy On The Eye managed to spirit away the first 100 or so sleeves from the collection a couple of weeks ago to get these scanned at high resolution for the book, in time for them to be collected for the display. More details on the book at the publishers site.
We recently met up with sleeve collector Steve Goldman to bring back 100 or so covers in connection with the Art Of The Bizarre Record Sleeve book project. The idea was to work on these to give us a good start on the book then make further selections. The sleeves will either be scanned, photographed (or both!). This batch needs to be done sharpish so we can get them back to Steve ready for him to start work on his next exhibition. Easy On The Eye Books are lucky to have a dedicated scanning workstation. This is not quite such an indulgence as it might seem as all the kit is reused! The scanner is the core of the system, an Epson large format machine made primarily for the American market as it exactly scans a single US tabloid sheet. This was purchased years ago when I was a partner at RPM Records and had got fed up of trying to splice together album sleeves for the many reissues we were doing. I realised the Epson could scan an album cover in one pass, so it is now brilliant for a project like Steve’s book.
The scanner is linked to an aging Macintosh G5 tower, a computer which was phased out in 2006! I picked this up second hand several years ago to supplement my older G4 machines. My last G4 has now had to be retired as it cannot run current software. Nor can the G5 really, but it doesn’t have to. Instead it just runs the Epson scanning software and my last pre-subscription version of Photoshop. This means the scans can be checked quickly on screen before I move on. For this I have another vintage item, the Apple studio display. This design dates back to 1998 and uses LCD technology but again it doesn’t need to be 100% colour accurate, just good enough to let me know if the scan is going to be OK or needs redoing to adjust any levels. I’d love to find the matching Apple Cinema display in working order but these seem to have quickly become prized design icon objects and priced accordingly!
Any work done on the scanner is copied over to my current workstation using a memory stick. I could use the cloud server in theory but the G5 has such vintage versions of the browsers now it’s too much hassle!
I have some of my own scan presets on the Epson system to give me a fairly good starting point for the sleeve scans. Sleeves do present a problem in that the scanner picks up all the original 4 colour screens from the printing process. I have found that using the descreening option on the Epson tends to blur the results more than I like, so instead I usually scan much larger than needed. This adds to the time for each scan but when done, the scan can be reduced a lot in Photoshop which usually eliminates any screen clashes.
Because we need such a lot of images for the book, I am also using a Sony A5000 camera to photograph the less troublesome covers. This is on a tripod and speeds things up a lot. If I am not happy with the results, I add it to the scanning pile. Again the camera was second hand, bought of a woman who had only used it for Vlogging! It is my fourth Sony digital camera and I mainly went for it as it is much more portable, I like to have a camera handy at all times (if I had the cash I would be shopping for an A7C…).
And the Schweppes boxes? Well using the scanner I like to keep on my feet rather than sit, so I used three old wooden Schweppes delivery boxes to make a temporary stand for the monitor, keyboard and mouse, but quickly got so used to this that I have kept it going! If I run out of room for storing 45s it’s going to be a tough choice…
Another of Brian Smith’s great images. But for once is NOT shown in the Brain Smith Blues Photo Book! Why you may ask? Well, when we first began investigating Brian’s material it quickly became clear that his archive fell into two distinct phases. There was the collection of black and white blues photographs made up to around 1966. Then there was his second phase of work which began after a period away from photography, when he moved into colour in the 1970s. This was also very extensive and covers a longer period as well. So we decided to tackle the mono work first and if there is enough interest, and we feel there might be, a follow up of the colour work might be on the cards. But in the meantime, Brian continues to work with blues labels on their reissues and this striking new CD sleeve is from JSP Records uses Brian’s colour photos on the front and back inlays, and the booklet inside. So we thought we’d show it off here anyway! It’s a scary thought that while we sort of looked upon this material as modern when deciding on the book contents, these shots are already over thirty years old. What was it Cher sang about turning back time? Thanks to Brian and JSP for the artwork scans.
Another of Brian Smith’s great images. This is an early appearance of Spencer Davis on the stage of The Twisted Wheel in 1965, with Stevie Winwood on the right. It has been used for the sleeve of a new collection of Spencer Davis BBC archive sessions by the 1960s Records lab and works quite well we think. They have used other shots from Brian in the past. The original shot is shown in the Brain Smith Blues Photo Book.
easy on the eye books 