Although I snapped this in 2025, it could date from almost any time over the last fifty years. Indeed I do wonder if it has been on the wall for some time, and an aged punk rocker living in the town (or visiting for a punk weekend festival) keeps refreshing it! Across the road on the pier some pub band was going through a medley of chart hits from the 60s and 70s so badly it was huge fun to see how long it took us could recognise what they were trying to cover!
Certainly the town has a rather faded air about it once you get off the council street front refurbishments and the building itself has seen much better days (unless of course you think lapdancing clubs are a way to encourage families to visit). And whoever did the brick replacements here (to a listed building) needs a good kick.
The magazine cover is rather beaten up but shows American DJ Martin Block (credited with inventing the DJ on radio in 1935) tinkering with his home made hi-fi system in 1956, with a slew of vintage 12″ vinyl LPs from his record collection of course. The hi-fi system was made by adapting a retro cabinet, and installing a record turntable in the top, plus a radio receiver and also a reel to reel tape which slides out to make access to the controls easier. You’ll be pleased to know there is “nothing to stand in the way of anyone putting together” a similar system according to his article. But then this is a magazine where they show you how to make your own capacitors. 15″ speakers were sited in stand alone cabinets. Disc wise I can only identify the early Oklahoma Soundtrack which he is holding.
HMV managed to reopen it’s flagship London store in 2023, in the very building they were in back in 1921. They lose just a few housepoints for covering the amazing black art deco facade in tacky banners! Nearby M&S are preparing to smash their 1920s bespoke store to pieces, vandals.
Anyway, this came to mind when I was scanning this smart vintage mono HMV trade advert which dates from 1962. They were clearly proud of their new browserie area, which sold the chart titles and the like, and offer 32 listening booths ( I still bet there was a queue!). Be nice to have a time machine to go back for a look…
Here is that Walker Brothers sleeve spotted on the wall of the record shop below. It was the last of the vocal trio’s three Sixties records and the best of the sleeves, although musically it is regarded as patchy today. Issued in 1967 for once they ignored the boring colour photo on the front and tried something a little more adventurous, using lith prints off three photographs and tinting each a different colour, allowing them to overlap. There are no credits for the cover. By this time the group were huge in the UK thanks to some powerful orchestrated ballads, and somehow persuaded Philips to leave their name off the front cover. Other countries were nervous and added it anyway! It was just a single sleeve, with one colour back (see below).
Over in New Zealand they really messed it up, using different colours on a black background, and printing one as a negative (above). I guess it’s possible they were sent the separated filmwork without proper colour references, or someone screwed up (I have seen that happen with a few other covers in New Zealand).
My sister in law was a huge fan of the trio and saw them live; we still have her teenage scrapbooks on the group which I will snap some time. We do have her singles but she couldn’t afford the albums! I had to source the images off the web.
This Helen Shapiro concert programme passed turned up in our office recently. I picked it up some time ago when working on a Helen Shapiro CD package and sleeve for RPM Records, after which it got filed away. It dates from 1962 when Helen was first making waves on the pop scene here and set out on a headlining package tour around the UK. It would probably not attract much attention, except that The Beatles were one of the supporting acts!
I really like the programme cover, which is quite unusual for the time. Mostly back then they slapped a grainy monochrome publicity photograph on, the headline act’s name in bold type, a second colour block and left it at that (many didn’t even have a photo on the front). Here, somebody at the tour agency has had a bit of fun using a shot of a Columbia vinyl disc (maybe an EP from the size of the label) and overlaid a nice colour publicity photo of Helen in a great early Sixties frock. Probably they figured anyone going to the show didn’t need to be told who it was!
Inside is a full page advert for her debut album and an EP, which was clearly done in more of a hurry (see image below). ALL the lettering except the EMI address is hand done, to which were added coarse half-tones of the two records, and it was ready for the printers. I’m guessing this was done for the music papers at the time, which struggled to reproduce photographs. Note that the album is in mono and stereo editions, EMI were really pushing the boat out. I do like the moody cover shot for her blues EP too.
Sadly never issued on vinyl, but this is a great CD cover image. I’ve always been a sucker for out of register images either accidental or done on purpose, so this caught my eye while looking for something on the web. Transonic is a Japanese label which seems to exist now only to reissue back catalogue items from the 1990s, this being a deluxe double edition from 2023 of a 1994 CD by Interferon (with remixes etc added). Artwork was by TTJA who I can find nothing about. They did several of the covers for the label, but this is by far the best. Needless to say you then get curious to hear what it is like, and there is an official audio video of one track on YouTube.
I do like a lot of the Czech label Supraphon’s album covers, but they also put a lot of effort into their generic single sleeves as well. There are an awful lot of them and they are often quite hard to date unless you are lucky enough to find them with the original 45. I have tried contacting the label as they are still going and claim to have archives, but they could not be bothered to reply.
I suggest this example which I found lately might date from the Seventies, with the label name rendered in various plain and decorative fonts, predating those often overused word cloud concept of recent times.
Another from the ST33 poster archive. This is the original in-store UK poster for release of single Gary Gilmore’s Eyes, “available now”, issued by Anchor Records sometime in August 1977. As you can see it was very simple – and cheap, with the single cover art but in monochrome. The single design was by Nicholas De Ville who is better known today for his work with Roxy Music, but this was a really good cover which managed to capture a lot of the spirit of punk without looking too trendy (see below). I found a few of these in the collection so have put spares on ebay! There are lots of reprints out there too.
You would not expect someone of my vintage to have a clue who singer Sabrina Carpenter was. Except, thanks to an album cover, I now know far too much (although I have yet to work out what the hell a “multi-hyphenate global popstar” – as she describes herself on her online shop – is!). So Carpenter’s new album Man’s Best Friend has done its job, which is to make a lot of noise in an increasingly narrow, over-crowded and saturated media landscape, with every female journalist and commentator wading in to the furore. It’s hard to know whether there is a hidden agenda here photo wise, all we have to go on is the cover image, which just looks to be a bad pun on the album’s title. If there is a clever subversive commentary behind all this, then it is very well hidden. But from those days when pop music was just that, this sleeve from 1971 gives us another angle on submissive sleeve photographs. That this adorned one of those iconic Top Of The Pops albums was beyond strange.
Top Of The Pops issued over ninety of these bi-monthly records (plus these ‘best ofs’), covering the chart hits of the day using session musicians and singers. Every sleeve featured a young woman in a glamour pose of one sort or another, never naked but often in revealing, tight fitting or momentarily trendy outfits. And then they came out with this. The uncredited model is Susan Shaw, who did quite a few of the Top Of The Pops covers (alongside many other revealing photo shoots). At first glance in the record shop rack the front cover here followed a standard Top Of The Pops formula, Susan in a tight top alongside the titles of the hits. But when you flipped the gatefold over, it turned out she has a bloke in even fewer clothes sat on the floor … on the end of a dog lead. This shot somehow questioned the whole way these sleeve shoots were set up and placed Susan firmly in charge for once. We have never got to the bottom of the story behind this cover and sadly Susan passed away not long ago so we will never get her take on it. Other commentators have been quick to liken Carpenter’s cover to this infamous (again only for those of a certain vintage!) Spinal Tap debut album sleeve.
Fictional, in the film the story of how the cover for Smell The Glover was rejected by the band’s label in favour of an all black design is part of the in-joke. Both the new and rejected art did feature on advertising for the film and amazingly one or two sites are now offering reproduction LP sleeves for sale… For my money, Carpenter’s art director may have been aware of punk’s Siouxie Sioux’s fabulous gothy photo shoot for one of their albums seen here, although Siouxie was never going to resort to the rather tawdry cover antics of our one-time Disney singer.
Nine Inch Nails. Manchester Co Op Arena June 17 2025. Photo Simon Robinson
Well it certainly feels that way the day after a Nine Inch Nails show. One of my favourite bands since the Nineties, it was with some surprise that I realised thirty years had passed since I last saw them live. Mainly because they haven’t toured here much and the gigs often sold out before I knew about them anyway, such was their popularity by then. So it is nice to report that they still pack a real punch, indeed while I really miss the ramshackle and intimate vibe of the last show I saw (at the Manchester International) they do seem tighter and more on the ball these days. I daren’t risk the Co-op Live arena floor for a gig like this, so up in the gods it does feel a little detached to begin with but they were powerful enough to connect nevertheless (and I’ve long given up moaning about bands abandoning the city hall circuit!). As well as the excellent music, they offered a remarkable square stage set, simple but very effective and atmospheric, so the whole set became a dreamy mist soaked affair at times surrounded by flickering monochrome movies and relayed live clips. The two short sections where the band decamped to a modest arena in the middle of the floor were nice touches (see picture above) but it was the driving force of the second part of the show which found them really pushing at the edges of sound. This was certainly not an outfit falling back on past glories, and even the closing encores of the classic Head Like A Hole (the first disc of theirs I bought, on a 10″ vinyl single!) and the now iconic Hurt didn’t feel tired in any way.
Thanks to Russ Berger for organising the trip. I can’t say ticket, because there wasn’t one, what with the promoters being miserable tight fisted gits. It’s not rocket science. Just print a couple of thousand and give them out at the door. £150 tops! In other words less than the price of two tickets.
ST33 
