Classic album cover designs as postage stamps

Just love these classic album covers set out as a set of postage stamps. Particularly delighted at the inclusion of New Order’s Power, Corruption and Lies which was designed by the great Peter Saville. Inevitably there’s some great covers missing. At least two odd choices too: the inclusion of both Pink Floyd’s the Division Bell and Led Zeppelin IV (top left and bottom centre respectively). To my mind, neither sleeve is a classic while Dark Side of the Moon and Led Zeppelin would seem much better choices. It’s still a nice set, mind. Sure to be as successful as last year’s British Design Classics when it’s released in early January.

According to the Royal Mail:

This issue celebrates the work of the album sleeve designer, not the music. Royal Mail began with very extensive research of existing lists and polls of ‘Greatest Album Covers’ in books, music press and the web. This trawl of literally thousands of albums uncovered many that were common to most lists.

The editors of three of the UK’s most influential music publications together with a number of graphic designers and design writers were asked to independently list the most significant album sleeve artwork used on records by British artists.

Royal Mail reviewed all the research to assemble a shortlist of albums that spanned the decades from the 1960s. Some albums could not be included for operational reasons (for instance, designs that were too dark), after final deliberation the ten albums were arrived at.

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Joy Division: Unknown Pleasures at 30

Joy Division: Unknown Pleasures

Originally uploaded by Littlepixel™

This week see the 30th anniversary of the release of Joy Division’s debut album, Unknown Pleasures. Somewhat surprisingly, to me at least, the New Musical Express has published an anniversary “special” featuring interviews with the surviving members (sadly not online), which we can probably take as a sign that the nation’s 16/17 year olds still think Joy Division matter an awful lot. Which is amazing for an album that peaked at number 71 in the album charts on its initial release.

The album was recorded in the winter of 1979 in an unheated studio in Stockport and it captures the mood of imposing decay of Northern Britain with its austere and dark production. Unknown Pleasures is firmly fixed in a time and place: the Manchester of the late seventies, and yet its appeal endures.

At the time Jon Savage, writing in Melody Maker in 1979, praised, ” Joy Division’s spatial, circular themes and Martin Hannett’s shiny, waking-dream production gloss. …. [a] perfect reflection of Manchester’s dark spaces and empty places: endless sodium lights and hidden semis seen from a speeding car, vacant industrial sites – the endless detritus of the 19th century – seen gaping like rotten teeth from an orange bus.”

In remains, to my mind, one of the greatest albums of all time. From the deliciously minimalist cover designed by Peter Saville (which was recently parodied as a Pelican Classic, above right) to the equally minimal, and haunting, production by Martin Hannett, to the ten beautifully crafted songs which simply refuse to date. We are still in its axis, musically at least. Think of this way, we are as far away in time from Unknown Pleasures as Joy Division were from the music of Perry Cormo and Frankie Laine and yet still it features on the front cover of the music press.

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Back to the future: Futurism at 100

Have enjoyed the New Statesman’s Owen Hatherley recent essay on the Futurist art momement, which celebrates its 100th anniversary this February. He writes:

“Peter Saville borrowed a Depero design for the cover for New Order’s debut album, Movement, and in many respects futurism’s legacy has been more visible in pop music than in fine art. The 1980s group the Art of Noise took their name from Luigi Russolo’s 1913 manifesto of futurist noise-music, “The Art of Noises”, which proposed the harnessing of industrial and electronic sounds, and their percussive mesh of samples and stabs in turn had a huge effect on 1980s hip- hop acts such as Public Enemy.”

• Futurism 100! is at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London N1, until 19 April. Exhibition includes Luigi Rusulo’s Music (see left).

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Peter Saville: On the designing of Unknown Pleasures and other great moments in 20th century design

on my desk # 25

Originally uploaded by japanese forms

Arkitip has a new video interview with Peter Saville, the great Mancunian designer. It shows the mock-ups of Unknown Pleasures, the first Joy Division album, where the famous diagram of an image of a pulsar, taken from the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy, had originally been rendered as a three-dimensional model (see right). Moreover, the a couple of versions of the said model still exist.

(via)

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The deification of Tony Wilson

Tony Wilson RIP. Manchester. So much to answer for…

Originally uploaded by Jason Slack

It’s a year since Tony Wilson, the cofounder of Factory Records, died of cancer in Manchester.

Fellow Mancunian Mike Garry has written this poem dedicated to him. An ode to St Tony of Manchester. I won’t republish the whole thing here – but please click through as it’s an excellent poem. The first six verses give you a good flavour. You can also watch a spoken word performance of the poem here, it’s from the end of the recent Tony Wilson Experience. Factory’s design guru, Peter Saville, gives a little speech; Wilson’s son gets on the stage in for an emotional moment and then Garry comes on.

A poem for Anthony H Wilson

Saint Anthony
Saint Anthony
Please come round
Something is lost that can’t be found

Talk to me of Albion Anderton
Albrecht and art
The Arndale
Alan Turin
Acid House
Alexandra Park

Bez the Buzzcocks bouncing bombs
The beautiful Busby Babes
Curtis
Cancer Christies Catholicism
Crack and Curt Cocaine

Talk to me of all these things and one thing is for certain
I’ll see the face I’ll hear the voice of Anthony H Wilson

Dance Design Devotto Durrutti
Development of an industrial dirty Northern City
De La Salle
Dignity
And how in the end you hated the pity

Elvis Engels ecstasy
A girl called Emmeline
The hours I spent watching you on my black and white TV.
From So It Goes To Sunday Roast
Enchanting
Endearing
Extreme
Elephants washed by dwarves on 1970’s TV

Factory fame financial fuck ups
Poetic Form
The Fall
4 June 1976 at the Lesser Free Trade Hall

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The Tony Wilson Experience: a 24-hour intelligent conversation live from Manchester

Just been listening to the Tony Wilson Experience, a 24-hour long conversation celebrating the late, great music Tony Wilson, musical Svengali and proud Mancunian. Wilson died of cancer last year and today would have been his 58th birthday. Loads of good people on the bill: John Cooper Clarke, Clint Boon, Irvine Welsh, Paul Morley, Peter Hook et al. You can tune in to the live stream over here.

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Update: I’ve been enjoying a curmudgeonly Kevin Cummins bemoan the fate of the rock photographer. Cummings thinks that user-generated content is just a way for newspapers to “get a load of free content”. He’s dismissive of the generation of photographers coming out of sites like Flickr. He said: the newspapers “don’t care about quality. It’s quantity that they want.” He also said that blogs were mostly “just middle class letters pages.”

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Even later: It is nearly 1PM and it’s getting really belligerent. The Manc poet John Cooper Clarke is on stage. He just recited his famous haiku:

To convey one’s mood,
in seventeen syllables,
is very diffic…

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The intelligence finally ran out about 3am. The Happy Mondays were on a panel and someone in the audience mentioned Stella Grundy, who I assume is Shaun Ryder’s ex-partner from the way he reacted. The guy in the audience was being provocative, but the reaction of the Monday’s, particularly Bez, was somewhat stereotypical. The guy was threatened from the stage (“you are fucking dead”, was the precise quote and worst was said after that) and for a moment I thought that it was all about to kick off. And then, the security intervened and started escorting the bloke out of the venue. Brilliantly, the Mondays then changed their tune and started berating the bouncers to let the man stay in the building. It was all rather touching and probably what Tony would have wanted.

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Thankfully, after a sleep, I awake to find the conversation has got much more intelligent again. This is much more like a more belligerent (I keep using that word) version of Radio 4. For the final conversation we’ve got Steven Morris, Peter Saville and physicist Brian Cox discussing the secrets of the universe. He reminded us how important Manchester has been to our understanding of the universe, and that the atomic nucleus had been discovered up on Oxford Road by Ernest Rutherford.

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That’s it. The poet Mike Garry has just read his poem Saint Anthony, and there’s talk of another one next year. I hope so. It was really good an pretty intelligent all the way through.

New Dawn Fades: Microsoft’s Zune appropriates the spirit of Joy Division

First sight of the limited edition Joy Division Zune. Only available in the US. Obviously not good in the rain. Designed by Factory’s Peter Saville.