...SEE ME , FEEL ME............

Earlier this week I came across the artwork for the Fleet Foxes new album,' Helplessness Blues '; It looks really nice, but it suddenly occurred to me how much nicer it would be if it arrived as a 12" album sleeve rather than an insert in a 4" jewel case - I might actually be able to see the artwork then.    

With the demise of the LP and its associated album sleeve , a whole tranche of visual design , artwork and career opportunities has been consigned to the past ; given that most designers are music fans it must have seemed like the ideal brief lending visual form to an album of music, a relatively low-end semi/disposable medium. After all, no one ever thought that they were designing history .

I spent my formative years in the sixties spending what money I had on American jazz imports, mainly on the Riverside and Bluenote labels; the Bluenote album covers have long been elevated to iconic status within the history of graphic design and have been well documented . The explosion of pop and rock music in the Uk during that same decade was closely followed by the explosion of designers from the art schools ; the covers for the Beatles ' Revolver ' and ' Sgt pepper ' LPs could never have been created for any other medium other than the album cover , and reduced to the CD format they are just ridiculous ; the whole dynamic of listening to the album whilst gazing at the sleeve has been lost. Simon Garfield in his book  'Just My Type ' equally makes the point that the Cooper Black used for the Beach Boys 'Pet Sounds ' becomes almost illegible as a text font when reduced to the CD format.

Artists too seized the opportunity to design , in sixties terms, a ' multiple ' ; Peter Blake with 'Sgt Pepper ' and ' Stanley Road ' for Paul Weller ,  Andy Warhol with both the Velvet Underground and the Rolling Stones - the peelable banana and the Sticky Fingers 'zip' cover , Richard Hamilton with the ' White Album' , S. Neil Fujita with ' Time out ' and ' Mingus Ah Um '. Further, album cover design allowed for creative inspiration - the Small Faces' ' Ogden's Nut Gone Flake ' and Bob Marley and the Wailers ' Catch a Fire ' zippo lighter cover, and more than one designer built if not their career then at least their reputation on designing album sleeves. Roger Dean's style became synonymous with ' Prog Rock ' in the seventies ; Vaughan Oliver establishing his own niche with his work for record label 4AD on classic designs for The Pixies, the Breeders and the Cocteau Twins , Peter Saville establishing the house style for Tony Wilson and Factory records . I mentioned my thoughts on this subject to Jonathan @ Artistic Type, who noted that within the last couple of weeks or so he had seen Vaughan Oliver give a talk at Manchester Metropolitan University where he indeed commented on this very subject , saying that the advent of the CD was killing sleeve artwork , and the ' jewel ' box was hardly befitting of the name. 

The  ' boxed set ' CD phenomena , such as the recent Neil Young ' Archives Vol 1 ' or Springsteen's ' Darkness on the Edge of Town / The Promise ' gives designers a chance,I suppose, but it feels very much to me like railing at the dying of the light, and with the advent of downloads then the visual association is lost forever.........listening to a new album whist looking at the gate-fold sleeve becomes something that happened long long ago in a universe far away - and no-one's career model these days is going to be based on designing liners for CD cases.......................

CODA - I suppose you realise that you are getting old when your cultural references become the subject of someone else's PhD thesis. This happened to me as long ago as 1986 when I went to an exhibition at the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester entitled ' 1966 And All That ' - an exhibition on design in the sixties. I was quite enjoying it until I came across a showcase containing album sleeves , most of which I had ; they looked exactly like dead butterflies pinned out on mounting blocks - historically acurate but devoid of life , artifacts now for academic consideration . I am still playing a lot of those albums and they are not ready to die just yet........

" Listening to you, I get the music; Gazing at you, I get the heat "

 Pete Townshend, The Who

OH, WHAT A LOVELY WAR...

November 11th - Armistice Day... not quite the day perhaps to be thinking of end-of-the-pier shows and the English music hall. This is, however, precisely how the film 'Oh What a Lovely War' is presented, an interpretation of the Great War as it turns from carnival to tragedy, the greatest loss of life in a single conflict that this country has ever experienced. Rarely shown on T.V. it has only been made available on DVD for the last three years or so... although, much to my surprise, there are now a number of clips on YouTube.



The producer Joan Littlewood's left wing credentials were never in doubt; a member in the 1930's of the communist party and an associate of Ewan MColl, she was central to the establishment of the Theatre Workshop in the late forties ( the foundation of modern theatre in the UK) and apart from her collaboration with Cedric Price on the 'Fun Palace' in the early sixties, went on to produce stage productions of 'A Taste of Honey' and - more importantly here - 'Oh What a Lovely War', filmed in the late sixties with Richard Attenborough as director.

I have no idea what today's - or even yesterday's - generation would make of the film, in a culture where war and ersatz violence seem to be the mainstay of the burgeoning gaming industry; a charming period piece? I can only see it in social context... I was at art college in the late 60's, and the film seems to me to capture perfectly the zeitgeist of the times; the swinging sixties, the explosion of pop-art (particularly via its exponent of 'Englishness' - Peter Blake) the growth of satire and an irreverence for authority, all set against the rise of the CND movement, the rumblings of Vietnam from across the water, and the continuing cold-war stand-off between the US and Russia. The music hall / end of the pier settings for the initial jubilation certainly act as a counterpoint to the final scenes, increasing the feeling of waste and despair as the cameras pan back and back to reveal the increasing enormity and futility of it all. I have never really seen any other film like it; very much of its time, yet managing to show its subject matter in an absurdist light that few other anti-war films manage to achieve. An almost exact contemporary though , is the following clip of Country Joe and ' Fixin to Die Rag '-  filmed within a few months of the release of ' Oh What a lovely war ', certainly in the same year - 1969. The immediacy of Vietnam is again dealt with with the same joyous sense of absurdity - the bouncing ball says it all. Music Hall as protest.



The last word should remain with the film however -  it finally leaves us with one of the most enduring images, signs, symbols of the 20th century; not a sign of peace but - more importantly - a sign of remembrance... " for those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it "