ALBUM COVER

A good cover DESIGN is one that attracts more buyers and gives more pleasure. This writing is trying to pull you in much like an eye-catching picture. It is designed to get you to READ IT.

The Slits' Cut (1979)

This is called luring the VICTIM, and you are the VICTIM.

The Soft Boys' Underwater Moonlight (1980)

But if you have a free mind you should STOP READING NOW!

Tom Waits' Rain Dogs (1985)

because all we are attempting to do is to get you to read on. Yet this is a DOUBLE BIND because if you indeed stop you’ll be doing what we tell you, and if you read on you’ll be doing what we’ve wanted all along.

Townes van Zandt's Our Mother the Mountain (1969)

And the more you read on the more you’re falling for this simple device of telling you exactly how a good commercial design works.

Thomas Mapfumo & the Acid Band's Hokoyo! (1977)

They’re TRICKS and this is the worst TRICK of all since it’s describing the TRICK whilst trying to TRICK you, and if you’ve read this far then you’re TRICKED but you wouldn’t have known this unless you’d read this far.

Nic Jones' Penguin Eggs (1980)

At least we’re telling you directly instead of seducing you with a beautiful or haunting visual that may never tell you. We’re letting you know that you ought to buy this [place album format here] because in essence it’s a PRODUCT and PRODUCTS are to be consumed and you are a consumer and this is a good PRODUCT.

Allen Toussaint's Toussaint (1971)

We could have written the band’s name in special lettering so that it stood out and you’d see it before you’d read any of this writing and possibly have bought it anyway.

NWA's Straight Outta Compton (1988)

What we are really suggesting is that you are FOOLISH to buy or not buy an album merely as a consequence of the design on its cover. This is a con because if you agree then you’ll probably like this writing – which is the cover design – and hence the album inside.

Lô Borges' Lô Borges (1972)

But we’ve just warned you against that. The con is a con.

Wire's Pink Flag (1977)

A good cover design could be considered as one that gets you to buy the [album format], but that never actually happens to YOU because YOU know it’s just a design for the cover. And this is the [ALBUM FORMAT] COVER.

Arthur Russell's Another Thought (1994)

From XTC’s Go 2 (1978)

The Weary Blues

The stars went out and so did the moon.

Muddy "Mississippi" Waters Live (1979)

The singer stopped playing and went to bed

Howling Wolf Sings the Blues (1962)

While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.

Elmore James' The Sky is Crying (1965)

He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.

Robert Johnson's King of the Delta Blues Singers (1961)

From Langston Hughes’ The Weary Blues (1926)

English Journey

Southampton to Newcastle, Newcastle to Norwich: memories rose like milk coming to the boil. I had seen England. I had seen a lot of Englands. How many?

George Shaw's Scenes from The Passion: The Cop Shop, 1999-2000, Tile Hill Estate, Coventry, CV4

At once, three disengaged themselves from the shifting mass. There was first, Old England, the country of the cathedrals and minsters and manor houses and inns, of parson and Squire; guide-book and quaint highways and byways England…

Colchester Organ Society, Colchester, Essex, CO1

Then, I decided, there is the nineteenth-century England, the industrial England of coal, iron, steel, cotton, wool, railways; of thousands of rows of little houses all alike, sham Gothic churches, square-faced chapels, Town Halls, Mechanics’ Institutes, mills, foundries, warehouses, refined watering-places, Pier Pavilions, Family and Commercial Hotels…

Alan Howard's Black History Mural, London Road, Reading, Berkshire, RG1

…Literary and Philosophical Societies, back-to-back houses, detached villas with monkey-trees, Grill Rooms, railway stations, slag-heaps and ‘tips’, dock roads, Refreshment Rooms, doss-houses, Unionist or Liberal Clubs…

Narbi Price's Untitled See-Saw Painting, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, L3

…cindery waste ground, mill chimneys, slums, fried-fish shops, public-houses with red blinds, bethels in corrugated iron, good-class draper’s and confectioners’ shops, a cynically devastated countryside, sooty dismal little towns, and still sootier grim fortress-like cities.

Folkestone, Kent, CT20

This England makes up the larger part of the Midlands and the North and exists everywhere; but it is not been added to and has no new life poured into it…

Eduardo Palozzi's An Empire of Silly Statistics . . . A Fake War for Public Relations, New Art Gallery, Walsall, West Midlands, WS2

The third England, I concluded, was the new post-war England, belonging far more to the age itself than to this particular island. America, I supposed, was its real birthplace.

Fairport Convention's Unhalfbricking (1969)

This is the England of arterial and by-pass roads, of filling stations and factories that look like exhibition buildings, of giant cinemas and dance-halls and cafes, bungalows with tiny garages, cocktail bars, Woolworths, motor-coaches, wireless, hiking, factory girls looking like actresses, greyhound racing and dirt tracks, swimming pools, and everything given away for cigarette coupons.

Teignmouth, Devon, TQ14

From JB Priestley’s English Journey (1934)