Tag: music

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Sleeves

Specifically record sleeves.

I spend a lot of time looking at record sleeves, thinking about their design and looking back at themes via the excellent newsletter, The Art of Cover Art. There are some labels that consistently do great cover art.

For my own venture, Unspun Heroes, I use the original artwork, often spending weeks or months tracking down the original files. It can be a real labour of love to do this, even if most people simply think these images are easily to hand. Or worse, able to be recreated using ai. Reader, they can’t.

I’m yet to have to consider what I might do if I were unable to find the original design files and photography. Which might be a consideration were I reissuing something from Folkways Records, one of the most legendary labels I know. It was founded in 1948, the same year that Columbia invented the long playing vinyl record. And there’s a new limited edition hardback book on the history of the label and, more specifically, the designs of the record sleeves. As a fan of great design and vinyl records, I got myself a copy.

Ronald Clyne was the primary designer at Folkways Records. His work adorned more than 500 record sleeves, with his artwork covering almost every subject imaginable. You can find his designs on the releases of numerous artists including Woody Guthrie, John Cage, Lead Belly, Langston Hughes, Pete Seeger, Angela Davis, Mary Lou Williams, Sarah Webster Fabio, Allen Ginsberg… I mean, that’s quite the list and it barely dips into the long list of artists for whom he’s designed.

If the book is not within your grasp, for whatever reason, the label is now part of the Smithsonian and you can view a great many of the releases on their website. It’s worth scrolling through and taking a closer look.

I pick my book up tomorrow. It’s a weighty tome, coming in at a tad over 2kg in weight that I’ll be lugging about in my backpack most of the day, and later to a gig. It might seem like madness, but the chance to hold a beautiful hardback book full of beautiful designs for record sleeves covering almost half a century of releases, well, that’s an opportunity you don’t pass up no matter how much it weighs!

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Fruit flies like a banana

So the punchline to the joke goes.

There is no setup here, though.

I realise that a whole month has gone past where I’ve not posted anything. Not a single word. And there is no excuse for this, although if anyone does read this blog they might be happy that I didn’t just throw out some words into the LLM machines of this world for no reason other than I could.

Instead, I have news of a project that stalled and then got sidelined. A big project that was exciting and led by brilliant people. It may come back to life, but for now ai is disrupting things and there’s no way to ignore this any longer for this organisation. Shame, as I feel like there’s a brief there I could help with.

However, I’ve wrapped up three projects. A simple piece of branding that was as painful as being constipated for a year. I’m sort of glad to be shot of it, although the work is solid. And the client is already getting a lot of hot leads based on it. Then there was a piece of work around employee benefits that’s half done. Another interesting area to consider and an attempt by me to make something less complex for its audience and also flexible enough that it can grow and change as the organisation does. Lots of good stuff in there, they just need to make some decisions.

Tomorrow I’m with clients for the day to help them with strategic planning for some comms around a huge organisational milestone, as well as interview senior leaders in the business about the previous 25 years and what that means for the next 25 years.

After that, I don’t know. A social housing brief has shown a little ‘leg’ and caught my attention. Nothing doing as yet, but I think trying to find a way to do some interesting comms around their new proposition would be exciting. There’s a decent strategic thought sitting there but just blandly saying it over and over again will not only make it meaningless, it’ll also weaken the kernel that sits at its core. My fear is it’ll be a strapline that’s repeated ad(vert) infinitum and nothing more. Such a shame when that happens, but it’s also seen as the inevitable end of a piece of brand work. I want to make it more of a systemic proposition for the organisation, because that’s what it, and the organisation, deserves.

So, that’s been the last month.

Oh, no, of course, I did some work on a vinyl release for the Dan Arborise album, Of Tide & Trail. It came out on 9 October and so far has received some fantastic feedback from customers. Long may that continue.

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Access

Back from a much-needed break, away from home and away from the heat of summer. I’ve never been so glad to wake to rain and temperatures below 18ºC. Sadly came back to scorching temperatures again, with this week heading above 35ºC again. Ah well, maybe someone in power will recognise that action needs to be taken.

Moving on from the weather, I came home to an email from Nick Cave. Well, his team.

I was lucky enough to go to the recent Brighton ‘festival’ where Nick headlined with his Bad Seeds, alongside some great bands like English Teacher, and Cate Le Bon. Living with cancer means I have access needs, which we were informed would be possible if we went to a specific gate.

That gate was poorly signposted and not all that accessible. Security staff were vaping and standing around while we were forced to stand in the pitching sun for 50 minutes before we were let in. We had arrived with almost 45 minutes to spare to get in, get settled and see the first band. That didn’t happen. Okay, small issue in the bigger picture.

Except I was asked to empty my bag of my food and questioned about my meds. The man next to me was embarrassed publicly by being asked to take out his spare catheters and put them on a dirty table. I was then scanned airport-style. When it beeped I was treated like an idiot for not removing things from my pockets. I wasn’t asked to and there was nowhere to put them other than the floor. AWS Ticket staff were surly and unhelpful; they didn’t scan my wife’s bag or person. About 75 minutes after arriving at the gate we got in. No water to be found, so we went into the ‘Access’ tent. Five chairs available. The staff in there were lovely and helpful, but it wasn’t organised particularly well.

There was no shade to watch the bands. Food queues were up to an hour’s wait. The merchandise queue was at least three hours (after asking, someone from the Access tent got us ahead of the queue as there was no way I could stand in the sun for that long).

I saw about 50 minutes of music as I had to keep finding somewhere to sit down, which means a hike of at least 500m to the Access tent. In the end we left early.

I’m glad we did. National Rail at Brighton Station had not a clue about how to deal with a large influx of people. Different people told us different information and we ended up walking around in circles until I decided to move a barrier so we could get to the platform. The staff were rude, the police were helpful. Headless chickens.

So on the train to Portslade, where we’d parked, my wife wrote an email. A clear and concise email to state why our day wasn’t great and how they might want to improve things for people with access needs – and therefore improve things for everyone! The excuse on the day of ‘we weren’t prepared for that many people’ when they knew they’d sold 50,000 tickets was, quite frankly, the kind of BS I expect of a political party representative about the heatwave.

I didn’t expect to hear back. And so it was a pleasant surprise when an email arrived from Nick Cave’s team. It was really well considered, took our points and specifically addressed them, and told us what they would do different next time. It was an A* grade response. They’ve asked us to feed into their process and said that, should we wish to go next year (I assume this will now be an annual thing) someone will be in touch to facilitate that and to get our feedback on how well they’ve improved things.

National Rail? Crickets.

So, well done to the events team that organised this for Nick Cave and, I presume, Brighton Council. You went above and beyond in your response compared to just about every company I can think of. You recognised you’d got things wrong and accepted responsibility for that and then stated how you would change. While I wasn’t about to renounce my Nick Cave fandom, I will now tell everyone just how great his team were and how excited I am to go again next year, if that’s a possibility.

So, consider yourself told.

And if you run crisis comms for anyone, or just need to respond to someone’s legitimate concerns about something you’ve done, this is how you do it.

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Start again

This month has been terrible. Let’s hope May is better.
Anyway, I wrote a post on Unspun Heroes which I think probably sums up how things have been. On the more positive side, I did some strategic work for a client and they loved it. I’m also working on some brand strategy stuff that is being dragged out by the client that I have no idea if it’ll ever get finished. Which is a shame as I’d really like to get paid.

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Carry On Regardless

Not a comedy film from the post-war British film franchise, but some thoughts about projects and when it might be time to call a day. This applies as much to my own personal projects as it does freelance/contracting stints.

I’m currently waiting for a project to get going having stalled somewhat due to what I would term ‘client reticence’. My feeling is the client knows what they’re offering and therefore they don’t need to go through the preliminary strategic work to determine how they take it to market. I could be wrong, but that’s my takeaway from the email conversations I get to see.

It’s a tiny bit off for them to make such an assumption – both for me and also for their current and prospective customers. It’s also telling that the thing they’re wanting to bring to market does not yet exist, and nor do they have customers queuing up to buy this service. That’s not to say it isn’t amazing or perfect for the market, etc. It’s the state of play.

When do you walk away, having already invested a great deal of time and effort?

The second project is my own. Unspun Heroes.

It’s faltering a little. It’s incredibly time consuming and it takes a long time for the financial side of things to stack up. So, when the next release has clauses from the rights owner that shortens the time available to sell a given number of records, adds in costs that could be handled differently – all while you’re still selling the last of the stock from the previous releases… well, there are times when the easy decision is to throw in the towel and move on.

However, as money is not the motivator, it’s hard to make that decision to stop. It doesn’t feel right. There’s definitely something there, with willing customers and a lot of love, but the risk/reward has shifted more towards the risk and farther away from the reward (beyond the joy of playing the record once it’s pressed).

As with all these things, there is often a way through. The easy option is not always the right one. In the first instance above, someone else will likely make a decision that I’ll adhere to; in the second instance, some creative thinking is needed and some test-and-learn principles applied. If, after that, it doesn’t stack up, then it will be mothballed as a physical product project and shift into a simple blog/newsletter project. I’m still convinced that at some point I’ll be able to resurrect the physical product side of things, even if it means saving some money to do it.

What both of these situations have shown me is that failure is what happens in other people’s eyes. I know I’ve done some amazing work on both, and had a lot of successes (small ones, but successes all the same). There is a chance to renergise, to recoup some losses by shifting how I make the gains. That could be creating momentum with the client on what their vision is and then looping back to start some of the strategy process afterwards once they see why it’s needed. That could be pulling together enough people to put up some funds to make the pressing happen and using that to offset the risk – and finding a way to do it without anyone losing money, or at least the fear of it.

Ultimately, I think acting creatively and thinking creatively will win out. Even if the final verdict is to stop and walk away. It’s just that doing that without some form of exploration is as much a failure as continuing when it’s clearly not working out as intended.

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Catching up

I’ve been unwell. And also busy. Mostly unwell, recently; mostly busy previously. I think the two things are connected.

Anyway, as such I’ve not posted for a week. And this post is just an update on why I’ve not posted.

That said, I did read a piece about taste and ai that I found interesting. Essentially, they put forward the idea that the reason there is so much ai slop about is that people have no idea of what taste is and consequently believe that curation is the same as taste. It is not. This lack of a clear point of view on what is good vs. what is not good (subjective, but a starting point of all art) is the sole reason that ai will always produce huge amounts of slop.

You can read about encrusted tortoises and that lack of a point of view that’s behind this avalanche of awful ‘ai content’ here.

While I’m mostly behind the ideas it sets out around taste and slop production, I do think that ai lowers the bar for most people’s taste levels and therefore it’s a vicious circle that creates more slop upon more slop. And yes, the idea of ‘curating’ things that are not an act of curation at all might well be the beginning of this slippery slope, this is also what happens when tools are democratised – you get a turgid cultural response.

Anyway, read it. Plenty of agree with, plenty to disagree with. Ultimately, have a point of view, even if others think it stinks, because without it you’re just part of the slop.

Aside: A long time ago, I wrote about this using the River Thames as an analogy for the crap created on a daily basis, mostly by brands or commercial entities. I also recognise the irony that I’m very likely adding to it here.

What else?
I’ve also been listening to a lot of music. Every week I try to pick an artist and listen to their entire back catalogue. Often it’s bands or artists whom I don’t know or perhaps even like. I have an idea that listening to so much of their music, in chronological order, provides an insight into their creative process. This week was The Doors. I was struck by how much of a blues band they were, how Morrison’s lyrics were often overrated and dreary – with some notable exceptions – and that the extended wig-out jams were where they truly excelled.

I also listened to Twine’s 2024 album, New Old Horse. And about 1000+ other tracks I’m not listing out for what should be obvious reasons.

Oh, I’m still not feeling that well. I’m still busy. I’ll try to be better at posting.

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Devon knows how they make it so creamy…

This isn’t a post about a line in an advert for tinned custard. Instead it’s about Talk Talk. Yes, the band from the 1980s who stopped recording in the early 1990s after five albums. One of my favourite bands.

Yesterday I was in Totnes, Devon, to meet Dan Arborise and have a chat with him about his second album, Of Tide And Trail, which I’m putting out this year for its vinyl debut. There wasn’t a huge amount to discuss, just a few details about vinyl colour and which photos we could use, etc. Oh, and the split of the tracks across two discs. That took about half an hour.

The rest of the three hours we spent together we talked about music. How it’s made, what it’s like to tour and so on. Quickly Talk Talk came up and Dan asked me what my favourite album was and I said it’s their final one, Laughing Stock. Ask most people who know the band’s output and they’ll be Spirit of Eden, or Colour of Spring. Both excellent choices.

And yet, to me, Laughing Stock is the pinnacle of their releases simply because it pushes to the absolute limit what musicians can do with a simple request: to experiment and improvise, using your emotion and ‘gut’ to lead your playing. It’s not really about technical ability, although that clearly exists. It’s what makes jazz so exciting, once you get past the idea it’s navel-gazing noodling. It’s Dan’s favourite album, too. A strong bond was formed.

Music has got me many places, opened a lot of doors and gives me, still to this day, immense joy to play and listen and discover. It’s clear that ai is coming for it, although it’s been a long time since anyone got into the music business as an artist to make money.

As I’m listening to Talk Talk’s final album, Laughing Stock, I get to following the obvious thread. The idea of providing freedom to over 50 people to improvise from the seed of an idea only to select a mere 18 of them and using their music as the starting point for what became the thing you hear. I mean, it’s ridiculous.

If Mark Hollis had ai to play with, would he have used it? After all, he was ‘prompting’ musicians and then taking their output to build up his final version while adding 100s of overdubs and tweaks. It came out rather well, too. He was using the chops and ideas that these musicians had learned and refined and built their own ideas from and creating a set of bits and pieces from which he then went on to create Laughing Stock.

Is it any different to using ai? Perhaps, given that Hollis himself was an excellent musician with a keen ear. And yet, if he was using it, is it a tool to allow him to recreate what’s in his head?

So, would he have used it? I think not. Why? I don’t think he’d have the happy accidents, the unexpected, the mistakes and misshits, the madness of doing those sessions. Then again, he conjured something from the initial sessions. It was a lot of his own work once he had the outputs to his ‘prompts’.

Whatever the answer it matters not a bit. Laughing Stock is faultless. I’m forever amazed it was created by humans whenever I listen.

Oh, okay, here’s the Ambrosia advert with that memorable line.

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Just because you can

Sometimes you just have to. The thing, whatever that is. When I was a copywriter it was write a pun. Not to actually publish it but to get it out of the way, remove it from my head and then get down to the actual work of crafting a headline or strapline or script.

Some things, though, invite a response so weird and unexpected that to even attempt it seems like a folly. Only a madman would try. Of course, history has shown that these often inconceivable ideas make astonishing breakthroughs, or simply demonstrate that seeing a thing with a fresh perspective makes for understanding it in new ways.

Today I got that with the music of Autechre. Minimal eletronic music interpreted for acoustic guitar. All thanks to what amounts to a ridiculous idea by a musician called Shane Parish and his album, Autechre Guitar. It works because it shouldn’t.

Does it sound like the original compositions? No, of course not. Does it add something to those original tracks? Yes, undoubtedly. It breathes new life into them, almost like they’re a new species.

Which, it turns out, Autechre Guitar might be in terms of genre. Here is another version of that musical genre, now referred to as Guitartechre.

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We Are Leaving You

One of the many joys of starting and running Unspun Heroes is that I have made some really great friends in the music community, not least the artists themselves. It’s a generous and gracious space that has welcomed me in.

One of those artists is Davey Woodward, who was in a band called Brilliant Corners back in the eighties and nineties. I saw them live at Reading one year and then they split. His next band, The Experimental Pop Band was exactly that, experimental and pop. Also very much not.

Davey and I had a lot of fun making a vinyl pressing of the band’s third album, The Tracksuit Trilogy. It involves a lot of art and artists, and a hand-finished LP sleeve. It’s by far the most bonkers thing I’ve done. Since then, Davey and I have caught up in person a few times when I’ve been down in Bristol. He’s one of life’s more gregarious people.

Today he sent me his latest song, which comes out in a month’s time, with an album, The Bristolian, coming in September. Just emailed me the details with a link to download it. Of course, it’s fucking ace. I really mean that. He’s obviously been inspired by his own music from 25 years ago, and yet it feels incredibly fresh and contemporary. And it’s spoken word but doesn’t feel flat. It’s literal poetry in all its guises.

I’ve snatched a 10-second snippet which you can play below. Enjoy.

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Thinking about the end

I’ve been thinking a fair bit about death this past week or so. I mean, I think about it quite a lot. My own, those who have passed whom I love(d) and also what it means to those left behind. Not in a morbid sense, but to understand what I might want to have achieved, tried, not tried, etc.

Last night, while my wife was at the theatre, I watched Dying For Sex, a one-season series about a woman who is terminally ill with cancer and decides she hasn’t experienced a her sexual gratification as a woman. It’s both laugh-out-loud funny and incredibly sad and moving. Apparently it’s based on a podcast, but I’m not really a fan of those so I’ll assume it’s worth a listen.

Also, a very good friend recently had a heart attack and when I went to see him I saw a new vulnerability and, if I’m honest, a scared person. And I know I’ve been there. I’m not sure I actually managed to move all that far from being that person, but I’m working on it.

Now, I’m not likely to divorce my wife and go off on some weird sexual adventure. Or any adventure, really. Instead, I started to think about my ambitions for the time I have left. It’s been no secret that I’ve not enjoyed working much, but at the same time I’ve missed having something to do. I have come to the realisation that I have to make a decision: what is it I want to spend the next ten years (if I’m lucky) doing?

I have a wonderful side project/hobby that I want to continue. It may not be successful financially, but it’s a joy I don’t want to stop. So I need to find some way to fund it longer term until it’s at the point where I think it might be self-sustaining. My old consultancy business doesn’t excite me any more. I’ve lost the spark.

So, I’ve been looking back at the work I enjoyed. It’s mostly branding and strategy as an ‘in’ and then building on this with workplace transformation. I also very much enjoyed mentoring, but have no wish to be a ‘life coach’ or formalise that. So I’ve come around to the idea that I would be quite useful in a branding/strategic design agency, and I’m focusing on finding something interesting I can do in that space for the next few years until I can launch a new venture (already branded, thought through and worked up – it literally just needs to be started when a suitable ‘venue’ comes up).

I’m job hunting. Yes.

It requires me to have a CV, which has been a fucking nightmare to achieve given I have a lot of experience in brand and advertising, plus a lot of adjacent projects that are interesting enough for future employers yet they won’t want to wade through fifteen pages of work history. I’m doing what I would always suggest someone else does: making each CV fit the job I’m applying for. It’s hard work, sure, but it also means I can take similar projects and write a narrative that works hard against the job description. And I’m also enjoying being honest about the skills I don’t have but might need – and how they get a lot of me for a small return where I might have to play catch-up about a specific thing. Like retail or packaging, two things I know as someone who lives in the world but who hasn’t got very many obvious projects directly linked to putting new products on a shelf, for example.

I’m also having to make a portfolio. Which I hate doing. Absolutely detest it. The whole ‘big yourself up’ BS that comes with it. So I’m finding interesting ways to tell a story, because strategy in these worlds revolves around the ability to tell a good story. A compelling story that draws people in, that they might want to be part of. It’s good practice for me and a great way to showcase my skills.

In other news I’m listening to Hen Ogledd‘s latest album, Discombobulated, a lot. It’s very much my kind of thing.