It’s interesting how an advert like this takes you right back to the Eighties (1982 in this case), and the height of the cassette boom. At the time a vinyl album was around £4.00 in Smiths (pre-recorded tapes about 50p more), and you could get two albums (“whatever you’re recording” as the text coyly puts it!) onto a C90, so it was no wonder blank tapes were the bane of record labels. Don’t ask me what the difference between the two types was, I was confused at the time by all the differences and worried about wearing my tape heads out if I used the wrong formula!). And we’ve just lost W H Smiths to the marvels of rebranding too.
Hammonds department store in Hull is a remarkable building, a marvel of elegant 1950s post-war design. And like many big department stores it had a record department, so I was pleased to find this 7” card sleeve from there recently. From the Sixties and carrying the store’s classy in-house corporate look, it is a great piece of vinyl memorabilia. The shop was taken over in the 1970s by Binns which is probably why the sleeves are not easy to find.
The store finally shut in 2019 but various schemes to get it back into use are under way. Though whether anyone is brave enough to open a record store in there I don’t know!
Here’s what I assume is an earlier sleeve – it would be awful to think it replaced the orange design! All hand drawn as well.
Slade’s Merry Christmas Everybody is a single which, in Britain at least, has become embedded in the commercial run up to the festive season, played over shop speakers so often it does generate a backlash from shop assistants forced to hear it over and over again. It was a number one in December 1973 and a reminder of how big the group were as a pop act by then. It is estimated to still generate royalties of half a million pounds a year.
As with most UK singles it came in a plain sleeve, and this hand drawn copy was clearly owned by a young Slade fanatic. Certainly the band had by this time become part of the teeny glam rock scene, although their origins were far grittier. She (or he) has got the biro (and some crayons) out and added a number of comments, from which we can deduce they felt the group and Noddy = Ace! But before he gets too big-headed, we learn on the other side that Dave (Hill) is just as Ace. To me this is where sleeve design becomes part of social history.
I confess Kinky Machine (the band) passed me by in the early Nineties, amidst all that Britpop malarky. Not for them stadium reunions 40 years on, but this ten inch vinyl sleeve caught my eye the other day. It should perhaps not have been a surprise to find Stylorouge behind the interesting cover design. While ostensibly an indie band, Kinky Machine were quickly picked up by MCA, moved to their in-house not at all indie label Lemon, hence the elevated cover budget. Stylorouge crafted a series of clever sleeves for the band which were treated like art gallery exhibition pieces, each given a gallery style caption title and exhibit number on the front. The cover I chanced on was for 1993’s Supernatural Giver, which has a reversed negative image of a woman under a hairdrier (with a bike wheel on top to add an extra element of strangeness!) and a second version overlaid. Sadly for the band, and despite a lot of prestigious support slots for indie outfits you will have heard of, chart success eluded them.
Looking online there are other interesting covers in the series to look out for. I like Shopaholic, with a vintage chrome electric drill, and a diecut cover showing the red vinyl disc inside. Going Out For God riffs on the loaves and fishes parable, carried in a shopping trolley, and reminded me of those mid-Seventies classic sleeves done by Peter Whorf for Westminster in America. The Kinky Machine discs can be picked up online for a few quid, start your own art gallery!
Stylorouge had a book of their work done a while back, reviewed on this site.
Here’s the back cover for Supernatural Giver, also a nice piece of design. The star shape surfaces on other covers.
Another Christmas offering from the Fifties, this time a more obvious greetings card, cut out in the centre to show the label of the enclosed card backed flexi disc. These were produced by (or for) the Valentine & Son greeting card company. They did quite a few birthday tunes, and at least half a dozen different Christmas ones as well. They must have looked great on the shelf in the shop at the time and considering their age often survive in good condition. I suppose most were packed up and saved with the other decorations. Valentines were already a long established printing company, having been founded back in 1851 in Dundee, and always on the look out for new postcard ideas and novelty cards. There is one of their birthday flexi discs on the site.
I assumed this was a children’s novelty record from the 1960s but the label was releasing great picture disc flexi records in 1948, and their 7″ vinyl singles started in 1949. They were issued by the VoCo label, based in New York but often seen as Canadian pressings like this one. Some were on colour vinyl too, others on 10″ pressings, anything to make them eye-catching. It would be a great series to collect as they all feature very nostalgic art with nursery rhymes set to music, novelty records, and several Christmas songs. This particular single coupled Away In A Manger with Silent Night. The records were all 78 rpm, the 45 rpm 7″ single format was still being developed by RCA and launched the same year.
Being Christmassy, this one was sold in a suitably decorated sleeve, with a jolly santa on one side, and a holly wreath on the back, so it could be given as a gift. I particularly like the well drawn label, which was common to several of the vinyl singles, showing children dancing and playing around the centre. As I found this in the UK I assume it was sent over as a present, one of the parents has added the playing speed in pen to avoid getting confused! According to researchers, the label’s catalogue all ended up a couple of years later with Pickwick who had their own children’s series going in the Fifties.
Sorting out some of the plan chest recently I came across this proof sheet, which gives an idea of how a 7″ single sleeve was prepared. The flat black and white art was done finished size on board, with the titles, lettering etc. typeset (or maybe letrasetted in the case of the title) and then pasted on. The two photographs were taped onto an overlay sheet, onto which the colours chosen would also be indicated using Pantone numbers. This was then handed over to a reproduction house, who would produce the final filmwork, from which the printing plates were then prepared. It was usual practise to then run off a few sheets on the paper stock to show the client – in this case Safari Records – how it looked. If needed they would mark up any changes, although in this case they signed the job off. Depending on the printer and the quantity of sleeves needed, the filmwork might then be copied to set up two or three sleeves side by side before the job was run. The cue marks here show how the bleed for the overlap was included along with fold and cut marks, and down the right side the colour bars used by the printer to ensure colour accuracy. I am not sure where this single was printed. There are no design credits here. Safari was a small indie label and did not have an in-house designer so it would have been placed with a local London agency.
Please note I had nothing to do with this design! Putting large capital letters like this is a no no as far as I am concerned, never mind that the cover photo was taken at a concert five years before and had nothing to do with this studio recording. I came across the proof sheet when I was working at the Safari office on another project and they were happy to let me take it away.
I caught this old column of adverts while I was scanning an old scrapbook recently. It dates from 1967 and would have appeared in the back of one of the music papers. Bands signed with agents and promoters who tried to get them bookings and sometimes resorted to these display adverts to let people out there know what bands were available. Over fifty years later some of the names will be more familiar than others. The biggest amongst them being The Moody Blues, who you could still call and book back then. The Herd were well known for a time but may be less remembered today except amongst Sixties fans.
The Troggs of course had a couple of hits and Wild Thing still gets played a lot, but The Good Time Losers? I’d certainly never heard of their one off hit Trafalgar Square.
Galaxy on the other hand had a good roster, with a number of bands popular on the live scene including Mod rockers The Action, the ever reliable Nashville Teens (who also made a living doing backing for others), and The Move. The Amen Corner has several hits too. Nice to see a few early band logos as well!
At the top of the list are those champions of farmer pop, The Wurzels. Whether “The Champion Dung Spreader” ever made the charts I’m not sure (and certainly won’t be looking it up!). The Sixties weren’t all classic rock and pop you know…!
You see quite a few reprints of old music memorabilia so it’s quite a treat when something turns out to be original, as this flyer issued by Capitol Records turned out to be. What I liked about it was not the cheap design but the context it gives to the early days of Fifties rock and roll. It was printed in 1956 and given out in record shops, aimed at the hep cats of the time, as we can see from the illustration of the jiving couple at the top. Borrowing from Bill Haley’s lyrics, Capitol went with Gene Vincent as their big star, then made an effort to find six more early rock and roll tracks from their catalogue who might appeal to the same audience. Although who on earth Tabby Calvin and his band were I have no idea, and the internet doesn’t help much! Anyhow, once you had “dug the crazy releases” you could turn the leaflet over to get details of the Capitol radio show on Radio Luxembourg.
This poster turned up in a sort out recently, from one of many shows I went to at the Academy in Manchester. It’s a confusing venue name as there were four halls under the Academy banner last time I looked! But this was the largest, the 1990 Academy hall built just out from the older Union. The show was in 1991 so this may have been one of the first times I went to the place. It was always a terrible sound in there, no attention had been paid by the developers to the acoustics, so depending on the band it was best to stroll about a bit and find a spot near the mixer (usually housed toward the back of the venue) where it was generally less painful. Despite that it was always a good atmosphere as the die-hards would crowd the front of the stage and you could usually see the band OK as the stage was quite high. I was lucky enough to see the Cramps early days (supporting The Police of all things) and they had an authentic love of all things vintage which really came across on stage and a sound like no other. So we would get to see them most tours, sometimes more than once! As a design the poster isn’t going to win any awards but these cheap mono silkscreen designs always stood out on a wall which was the main idea! These days such posters are seen less and less for name bands as tickets usually get sold out on the web so quickly (though musician’s egos often demand promoters make some sort of an effort!). Many Cramps posters simply used the band’s very familiar logo, but here they nicked a shot of Ivy with her Gretsch, possibly off a record back sleeve. Here is the shot in colour.
ST33 
