The (nearly) perfect Storm

I know everybody says this but it really was with genuine sadness that I read last night of designer Storm Thorgerson's death. Liking the kind of music I do then it seems as though the covers he designed, or co-designed, are also are part of the story. If someone mentions The Dark Side of the Moon then even people who haven't heard the record will almost certainly know the cover.

 

My first introduction to Storm, and his company, Hipnogsis - apart from the DSotM cover which, along with Tubular Bells was seemingly in every home in my childhood, except ours - was when I got a copy of Led Zeppelin's fourth LP.



 

It's clearly a gatefold with the main cover image on the right. It's supposed to convey the ripping down of the old and the development of the new, which seemed like a pretty neat idea when the album was released in 1971. I think it shows a certain melancholy over that 'neat idea'. I've always loved the painting, that man crooked over with those bits of coppiced birch on his back. Apparently the painting was picked up in a second hand shop in Reading, fancy! I wonder how much it would be worth now?

 

You don't need me to tell you that his most famous work was with Pink Floyd. Not all of which was a success, I think. Ummagumma looks rushed while Meddle just looks incredibly brown. The cover of Meddle is an image taken of sound waves in the ear, it just looks more like a blob of earwax to me. I reckon Storm, and his company Hipnogsis, first truly successful design was the cow on Atom Heart Mother.

 

 

No, I don't know what it means either but I suppose a cow with a full udder has to be a mother, doesn't it? I also find it incredibly English, rather like early Pink Floyd music.

 

Coming back to Ummagumma, I've always quite liked this back cover photograph of all their instruments, stage gear and roadies laid out in front of their van. It's based on a photo of a jet fighter with its armaments laid out in front of it. But these are weapons for peace! Geddit? No, oh. I'll get my Afghan coat...

 

 

Back to Zeppelin and while this isn't one of my favourite covers by either the band or Thorgerson, the trouble with getting the colours right on the image caused the album's release to be pushed back by months. For any fact fans, one of the children - and there are only two, their image kept getting reproduced - is Stefan Gates who now presents food programmes on the telly. The other child is his sister. At the time they both child models, in particular on knitting patterns

 

 

These two Peter Gabriel covers are also some of my favourites. The first one for Peter Gabriel I love because he almost looks like he's dead behind that windscreen and with no colour in his face. The rain on the car is also effective. Shame the car's not taxed though, naughty naughty, Pete. Perhaps the Genesis royalties were drying up in the punk era when this was released. There was an image of the usually anonymous dubstep artist Burial a few years ago. It showed his hooded head reflected in a puddle, it must have been inspired by this.

 

This one for Peter Gabriel 2 is just brilliant, I think. A simple idea that's well done.

 

 

Now, his best cover for Pink Floyd. Unfortunately due to an accident with an inflatable pig, the pig here had to be added on to the photograph later. Obviously it refers to 'pigs might fly' but why Battersea Power Station? I dunno. Like the Dark Side of the Moon cover it's passed into public consciousness as a standalone work of art, often imitated. Not least by tribute act The Australian Pink Floyd Show where the pig is replaced by a pink kangaroo.

It's not all great of course. I suppose this cover image reflects the music contained within: sexist pap. The reverse image shows the woman laughing as she holds a framed photo of Scorpions. I don't blame her, I always laugh at Scorpions.

 

 

This is a good one, How Dare You! by 10cc. The image here is the wrong way around though, sorry. The main cover image is the man in the office/drinking woman. Quite a few questions asked on this sleeve: who are the people in the photo on the desk? Who are the people climbing out of the Austin Healey? Why has she been crying? Why is Dudley Moore making an obscene phonecall?

 

I'd like to point out here that I'm not a 10cc fan, but I got my girlfriend a vinyl copy of the LP as a present and I was quite taken with the cover and wasn't surprised to see that it was designed by Hipnogsis.

As for more Pink Floyd, I'm really NOT fan of this LP but no trickery was used in this photograph. Every one of those beds is real and were placed on a beach in Devon. The government keep thousands of beds in storage in case of an emergency and they were borrowed for the shoot. Again, I haven't got a clue what it means. Thorgerson suggesting Dave Gilmour should give Pink Floyd a rest perhaps, given the rottenness of the music contained within..?

 

 

 

This one I find quite sad. On the surface it's bog standard artist shot, I guess. But everyone knows of Syd Barrett's mental torment. He seems to be detached in this image, almost pushed away. The fuzzy resolution of the photo reinforces that, like the fuzziness of his mind at the time. The alternately painted floorboards also act like a barrier, like he's pushed away but also doesn't want to let you in. The wilting flowers also perhaps show his once fresh talent is now withering. I dunno, that could all be bollocks and it is just a simple artist shot. What do I know?

 

I've not been massively keen on Thorgerson's recent works with the likes of Biffy Clyro, Muse and The Pineapple Thief. The stuff he did with The Mars Volta has been good though. What I did recently enjoy was the work he did to mark The Dark Side of the Moon's fortieth anniversary. He recreated the cover image forty times in forty different styles. I liked this Roy Lichtenstein styled one, amongst many others.

But my favourite Thorgerson cover has to be this one - no, not Dark Side of the Moon, that's more like a trademark these days - it's Go 2 by XTC. I love the idea of it, and the text continues on the reverse of the sleeve. I know it's a bit monochrome, but hey. For me it just works. I love the idea of it. They proved that new wave acts could also get in on the Thorgerson/Hipnogsis magic and that sometimes, classic album covers aren't beautifully, and expensively, shot photographs or paintings.



A Nipper read

Everyone else has their thoughts about HMV so I thought I'd give mine a go. Look at it as a bit of a companion piece to Friday's post.
HMV doesn't really hold any sort of affection for me; we never had one in my town. The nearest was the Nottingham branch on one of the busiest thoroughfares in the city. It was an enormous shop. A shop I never went into until I was a teenager and old enough to go shopping in Nottingham with my school friends without parental supervision. What I remember most about it then was that the records were displayed with records inside the sleeves. Up until that point the record shops I'd been used to would display the sleeve in the browser where they assistant would pull what you wanted from a shelf behind the counter - which helped combat shoplifting, I guess. Obviously in a store as big as HMV Nottingham and with a huge turnover of stock, they could take the shoplifting hit if it meant staff didn't waste time looking for the record or tape. That, and that alone, was what impressed me most about HMV. I've never felt much affection for the brand, other than all record shops are good. It always seemed a bit staid, they way they stuck with the Nipper logo. Edward Elgar opened their first store. Do you see what I'm getting at? A bit old-fashioned.
Then Richard Branson decided to open a huge, and I mean huge Virgin Megastore in Nottingham (I vaguely remember that it held some sort of record at the time as being the biggest record shop in the UK outside of London). Now say what you like about Branson ("Pol Pot with a beard" being my favourite, courtesy of Andy Partridge) but Branson knew how to do a big record shop. Inside there were two floors purely of music and music related stuff like VHS videos, t-shirts, posters etc. There was also somewhere where you could buy a coffee (years before Starbucks), a hairdresser (!) and an in-store DJ in a proper DJ booth. And his brand was associated with loads of cool bands. I know it's a bit daft to get nostalgic about a massive record shop but believe me, it was like stepping on to another planet.

Fast forward more than 25 years to just over a month ago. I was in Birmingham doing a spot of Christmas shopping when I decided to have a browse around HMV in the Bull Ring. Oh dear. It was dreadful. The shop didn't know what it wanted to be. Was it a music store? Somewhere to buy computer games? A bookshop? An electronics store? It was suffering an identity crisis. To make matters worse the whole thing just looked a mess. As soon as you walked in there were pyramids of awful American comedy boxsets stacked on the floor which you had to negotiate. I mean, does anyone really need every episode of The Big Bang Theory?
There were schoolkids taking up a huge amount of room while they played Xbox games which were being demoed in-store.
There were pyramids of iPod docks and other audio equipment stacked on the floor. One brand of which bore Bob Marley's face. Now I don't know much about Bob but I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have wanted his fizzogg and name to be used for marketing electrical goods. And why this thing about headphones in HMV by brands you've never heard of. Skullcandy anyone? Beats by Dr Dre? No? Okay. I already own some decent headphones, they were made by a little known Dutch electrical company which goes by the name of Philips. Ever heard of them? And I got them from a shop called Currys, which is where a lot of people go for electrical goods.
The music section just seemed secondary. All the top-selling chart stuff was at the front of the store while anything else was chucked in at the back seemingly as an afterthought. And I've been in multifloor branches of HMV where you had to go upstairs for music. I think they'd lost sight of their core business - don't forget that CDs still make up 70% of music sales.
It was one of the most miserable retail experiences I've had for a very long time.

So while I'm truly sorry for all those people facing an uncertain future over their job and hate to see more record shops go to the wall, I can't help thinking that HMV had it coming to them. Your business is selling music, so sell music and don't alienate your loyal customers who like to buy CDs. Perhaps they should have taken a leaf from one of their subsidiaries, Fopp. Now they're proper big record shops.

Last Shop Standing

We watched a film over the Christmas period called Sound it Out. If you've not seen it, it's a film made by Jeanie Finlay about the last record shop in Teeside called, erm, Sound it Out. The main thrust of the film concerns the owner, Tom, and the customers who come into his shop. Tom is exactly what I would look for in a record shop owner: knowledgeable, friendly to your face, wide range of taste. The customers are all, what I would call, 'good people' They aren't the sort of people who cause trouble. They're the sort of people who know what they like and are prepared to talk about what they like with other people. we often hear this ridiculous term 'Broken Britain', watch Sound it Out and you realise that most people are inherently good. Friendly, even.
The stars of the film, apart from Tom and his shop, are Shane (a rabid Status Quo fan who didn't have the best start in life but doesn't let that hold him back) and Gareth & Sam (a couple of metal freaks who make their entrance into the film by announcing that they like any music "as long as it's suffixed with the word 'metal". A bit of a double act, these two). What these, and others in the film show, is that music is the best form of escapism. It really is, as someone once said "The dog's bollocks".
The film is tinged with sadness as we all know that record shops have died a death. We're all to blame, we all got our heads turned by cheapo internet deals and downloading songs we liked off the radio. I know I did. The only place I can now buy records in my town is in a supermarket or Oxfam or a wonderful old hippy who has a market stall on a Friday. Even as little as 15 years ago there were four stand alone record shops in my town as well as record departments in Boots, WH Smith and Woolworth's. Sad times. Nothing could beat going in to my favourite, R & K and looking to see what the latest metal releases were. The owner, Richard (who looked, and spoke, like a dark-haired Mike Nolan off of Bucks Fizz) was a metal fan, so he was always well stocked. Just browsing a shop is much better than entering a search on Amazon, you never know what you'll find when you do a proper browse; we went into a branch of Fopp just before Christmas to buy a DVD for someone's present - £80 later...

As an add-on to this, I heard Paul Gambaccini on the radio last week saying that Steve Jobs was the 'saviour of the record industry'. Nonsense. Steve Jobs was the saviour of making money for Apple. How else do you explain why Macbooks are now coming without CD drives? No CD drive, no ripping CDs into iTunes = more money for iTunes Store. If Apple can't make any cash off it, they'll get rid of it. I like to have something physical in my hand when it comes to music, I still buy CDs and records. I might be old-fashioned but I like looking at sleevenotes, I need to know who engineered track 6, I need to know who played marimbas on track 12, I need to know who made the sandwiches during the recording sessions (in the case of Motorhead's Iron Fist, it was Katy). Which is why I will never fully embrace downloads or Spotify, I want that sense of ownership of something, I want something tangible. And that is slowly being taken away from us.
Hopefully people like Tom or the excellent Unknown Pleasures in Edinburgh or the equally excellent Swordfish Records in Birmingham or even that daft old Krautrock-loving hippy on the market can ride the storm for people like me. They said vinyl records, turntables and cassette tapes would all be gone by now, well they're still all here and hopefully there'll be some record shops left too in thirty years' time.

Making plans for Nigel

The John Taylor autobiography then. My girlfriend brought it into the house a month or so ago. I thought I'd pick it up and have a look out of curiosity. I'm in no way a fan of Duran Duran (save for the odd track. And not Save a Prayer, either) but I thought it'd be handy to have a laugh at, especially as he's sucking his cheeks in as much as his bandmate, Le Bon, ever did on the jacket photograph.
On first viewing I put it down pretty quickly, like it was burning hot, because, as a child, he wanted to know why his parents didn't spend an extra £600 on a nicer house on the other side of the road where he was raised. That had me screaming "Because in those days £600 was a fortune, you materialistic get!" So I put the book down and vowed not to pick it up again.
Anyway, while listening to Matthew Rudd's Q the 80s show on Sunday night I was reminded of the book when he played Duran Duran's second single, Careless Memories. So yesterday I thought I'd bestow the mighty honour of making In the Pleasure Groove by John Taylor my toilet book of choice.

Where to start? The flap on the inside cover perhaps? "In his frank, compelling autobiography John recounts the high points - hanging out with icons like Bowie, Warhol and even James Bond" Bit of a problem there, James Bond is a fictional character. Unless he means spending time with a bloke whose real name is James Bond, in which case that's not really impressive as the only famous James Bond is a fictional spy.

So because of the £600 incident I decided to skip his childhood and get to the bit where he's started playing the guitar and forming bands. To say it's been ghostwritten with a professional writer, even someone as inexpert as me can see the prose is terrible:
"Standing in front of my classmates, holding this weapon [a Telecaster copy], all the rules changed. I was no longer nerdy Nigel...I was the bomb"
"Music was moving on and we were moving with it. We were the zeitgeist"
"We retreated to the room above the toy shop and plotted our revenge"
"Inevitably the parties would meet; there were encounters at undesignated times in neutral demilitarised zones such as the dilapidated ground-floor kitchen where the washing-up never got done, and sneers and cigarette papers would be traded" Not doing the washing-up, now that's what I call rock 'n' roll.
"He [Roger Taylor, not the Queen one] is also the least moody guy I know. A nice yin to my yang."
"He was a sympathetic and encouraging producer, the midwife who would be responsible for the birth of UB40" I bet after hearing Red Red Wine he wishes he'd committed infanticide.

One of the glaring things though is that he seems the perfect encapsulation of an only child - a bit spoiled. He implores his parents, after being refused any chance of doing a BA, to let him concentrate on music for a year while he still lives in their house - while all the other new wave and punk bands he loved honed their talents in squats, seedy flats and communes. But in chapter 16, he throws all that in his parents' face when he decides to change his name from Nigel to John: "I needed to reinvent myself. Not be Mum and Dad's son" Not to be Mum and Dad's son while clearly still enjoying their hospitality. "It would take Mum years to get with the John plan" Nice. So he insisted that his mum called him John, what a slap in the face for her. And how is John any more of a rock 'n' roll name than Nigel? What about Rick or Garry or Mick? John, I ask you. The most common first name in Britain.

Anyway, I'm determined to battle on with it even though I don't think it's aimed at me. I seem to be an enthusiast for shite autobiogs - I've read Ken Bruce's (all juicy bits left out) and Richard Whiteley's (a son mysteriously appears with absolutely no reference to his mother).

Crisis? What crisis?

No matter how well photograghed this ad is...



...it'll never have the same impact as the ad that clearly inspired it:

I'm Jimmy Sirrel of Meadow Lane and The Gorbals

I went with my girlfriend and her dad to the Nottingham Playhouse on Saturday to watch a play about Notts County. Quite odd for a fan of Nottingham Forest* and two fans of Chelsea FC to go and watch a play about Notts County, do you think? Well, not really. Diary of a Football Nobody is a play by William Ivory (commissioned to celebrate 150 years of Notts County not wining anything) which is based on the book Steak...Diana Ross by former County midfielder David McVay and it's about much more than Notts County.
David isn't your average footballer, he left school with three A Levels and likes to listen to Nick Drake LPs when he's alone in his bedroom. That's when he's not alone in his bedroom 'having a wank' because as McVay points out "having a wank's a bit like scoring a goal - there's no such thing as a bad one". McVay wrestles with why he chose a football career over going to university. It's clearly something his grandfather can't understand. We know this because three generations of McVay's family live in the same council house in the Clifton area of Nottingham, which isn't a situation you'd imagine one of today's dynamic young players having to contemplate. But however much of a tortured young man McVay is he still falls into the same trappings of being a professional footballer as most others, like drinking copious amounts of Shipstone's bitter on nights off and 'backscuttling' anything that moves down some of Nottingham city centre's darkest alleys. In stark contrast to today, some of the players - including McVay - have to supplememt their income by selling eggs around Nottingham suburbs. Which includes 'backscuttling' a housewife who doesn't have the funds to pay. Can you imagine Frank Lampard selling eggs? No, thought not (although I can imagine Wayne Rooney doing it).

The performances here are comically brilliant. Perry Fitzpatrick is outstanding as McVay, Eric Richard is superb as the incomprehensible Glaswegian nutcase manager Jimmy Sirrel (he attempts to see off some Manchester United fans trying to invade the County dressing room with a corn scalpel). Those two are the only actors with only one part to play. The rest of the cast play multiple parts including an excellent Rupert Hill playing Don Masson (when every English league team had an armoury of Scottish enforcers to pick from) and Sophia Di Martino who also has to play supporting roles of various County players.

The scenery is cleverly done with projections in a Roy of the Rovers comic style providing the atmosphere. Something which comes to the fore whenever we're confronted with the unseen but not unfelt presence of giant County centre half Brian Stubbs who makes his non-entrance with a giant shadow and with the opening riff of Deep Purple's Smoke on the Water playing.
So, not just for County fans. It's a play about life, family and where you're from. And I'm proud to say I'm from Notts. Diary of a Football Nobody deserves to be up there with the greatest works of art about football like Gregory's Girl, Fever Pitch, The Damned United novel and Another Sunday and Sweet FA. Which are, of course, about football but much more besides. And anyway, who wouldn't love a play that opens with a photo montage of Nottingham in the 70s with Yours is No Disgrace by Yes playing over the top? Heaven for me, that.

*Notts County fans are like Scotland fans: it sticks in their craw that the hate they feel for their biggest rivals isn't reciprocated. Forest view their biggest rivals as Derby County closely followed by Leicester City and any team from Sheffield. Notts County are generally viewed by Forest fans as a team your old men support. They're the Dad's Army of football fans, and the team will forever be the bridesmaid of Nottingham football. I work with County fans and one always has to shout "Goo-in dahn!" whenever he sees me along with a finger pointing down gesture, no matter how many games Forest have gone unbeaten. The County fans attitude to Forest is summed up in one of the best lines of the play, after a local derby played at Forest's City Ground in March 1974: "And we do 'em, nil-nil!"

Disappointed

The Jimmy Savile thing then. I must say that I'm hugely disappointed:

Disappointed that this man used to come into our homes of a Thursday and Saturday night and, as a child, I was sold on him being an eccentric man who was indescribably wealthy who made people's dreams come true and did loads of good works for charity. And that was it.

Disappointed that his colleagues and acquaintances of his knew of rumours of his alleged deviency but did nothing to address the situation.

Disappointed that there may be loads of other people who use their standing in the entertainment world as licence to do the same thing or similar.

Disappointed that people whom I previously respected and thought would have stood up for themselves putting their career before reporting sexual harrasment in the workplace.

Disappointed that The Sun are - quite rightly - expressing their horror at underage sex, and then over the page there's an opinion piece by a Page 3 girl called Peta about why people are wrong to call for Page 3 to be dropped.

Sorry, Coldplay but we live in a horrible world.