Album Covers Wot Looks A Bit Simular

This was an occasional series of pictures I put up on Facebook a few years back, when I actually used to use Facebook. It's a theme that has been covered many times in books about album covers, but these are examples that I've observed, either in my own collection or otherwise.

#1:  Belong by The Pains of Being Pure At Heart, and Journal For Plague Lovers by Manic Street Preachers

Those who know me on The Twitter may recognise this as my wallpaper.  Essentially simular concepts of badly painted, rather sad faced boys.

#2: Forever Changes by Love, and The Best Of 1974/1979 by David Bowie

One of the finest albums ever made, and a Bowie comp.  Are five old heads better than one?

#3: Teenage Dream by Katy Perry, and Lemonade & Brownies by Sugar Ray

Barenaked ladies on fluffy stuff.  Even the writing is the same.  The blonde on the Sugar Ray album is Nicole Eggert off of The Baywatch.

#4: Fisherman's Blues by the Waterboys, and Morris On by Morris On

A pound to a penny that a certain Mr Scott owned a copy of this particular monsters of 1970s folk masterpiece.

#5: Spare Time Machine by Pepe Deluxe, and Relics by Pink Floyd

Insofar as they both depict Heath Robinsonesque contraptions, I'd say there's a certain simularity to these.

#6: Version by Mark Ronson, and The Wild, The Innocent and the E-Street Shuffle by Bruce Springsteen

There's more than a hint of knowingness about Re-Hash Ronson's almost exact replication of the Boss's off-to-the-left stare.

#7: Love Over Gold by Dire Straits, and Burns Like A Star by Stone Fury

I could have picked one of many moody lightning based covers.  Stone Fury were precursors to the Led Zep plagiarism of Kingdom Come.

#8: Paul's Boutique by the Beastie Boys, and Ziggy Stardust by David Bowie

Another outing for Bowie, but this time he is the one being aped, particularly in the composition of the streetscape shot.

#9: In Search Of The Lost Chord by the Moody Blues, and Blue Matter by Savoy Brown

Two artists on Decca in the late 60s, both rocking the 'beast rising from the depths' look.

#10: Sophie by The Wave Pictures, and Letting Off the Happiness by Bright Eyes

David Tattersall and Conor Oberst: separated at birth?  I think we should be told.

#11: The Music by The Music, and In Silico by Pendulum

Another style that can be found on a variety of album covers is the swirly circle motif, especially among rock/dance crossover acts.

#12: Solar Fire by Manfred Mann's Earth Band, and Islands by King Crimson

Space was the place for prog-rock bands in the early 70s.  Still is really.

#13: II by Follakzoid, and The Planets by Gustav Holst

Sacred Bones covers often remind me of old classical album covers.  Especially the Chilean space rockers' sophomore album.

#14: Apostrophe by Frank Zappa, and Sheikh Yerbouti by, er, Frank Zappa

Okay, it's a bit of a sneaky one is this, but who said Zappa never repeated himself?  And he only has the one face after all.

#15: Hospice by The Antlers, and a customer information poster by South West Trains

Another cheaty one I guess, but it at least suggests that someone at SWT is a fan of Peter Silberman's death-obsessed concept classic.

That's all I've got for now.  Maybe in another five years I'll have found another 15 and do a second issue of this.  Or another blog about anything.

Harkive: A Look Back

You know what Harkive is. That's why you're reading this, unless you clicked on my blog link out of random curiosity, in which case welcome anyway.  But I'm not going to explain what it is, just expound a bit on my experiences of the day.

Normally I start the working day with 5-10 mins of a CD in my car.  Usually this will be either newly bought CDs or those on the "listen again" pile, to decide whether to keep or get rid.  Having bought a huge amount of CDs lately the need to prune is starting to outweigh my natural tendency to keep everything, you know, just in case I want to listen to it again in five years' time.

On Harkive morning, however, logistics dictated that I got a lift with @drelfy.   She had Meadowlands by The Wrens on rotation. This album had been recommended and supplied by @realearthmother, one of many people that we have made contact with via Twitter over the last few years.  If we're talking how and why we listen to music, the influence of Twitter on my listening habits cannot be understated, but more of that later.

Having been dropped off at the station I transferred to the iPod Nano while waiting for the train.  These days I have a 1.5 hour commute to work and therefore have a large amount of time to fill. I tend to rotate between reading a book and listening to music. As I had just finished my latest book (Mike Barnes's biography of Captain Beefheart, in case you were interested) I'm in a listening phase right now.

At times like this, when I've not used it for a while, I hit "Now Playing" on the Nano.  This acts as a random album selector, as whatever song comes up, I will select that album to listen to. As a child of the 70s I still think in album-length chunks and don't very often go totally random.  Thanks to this, my commute to work was soundtracked by The Notorious Byrd Brothers and {Awayland} by Villagers.

Having a few minutes to spare at the end of the train journey i decided to try hitting the Radio button on the Nano. I rarely listen to the radio and always forget it's on there. It was tuned to some horrendous "classic hits" station and I suffered You're The Voice followed by Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now before giving up.  On removing the headphones I had a few seconds of the tinny, leaked sounds of a fellow traveller's - in this case inaccurately named - personal stereo.

I don't have music on at work, never have done, so it was lunchtime before I was exposed to further sounds. Possibly inspired by the whole Harkive experience I ventured out to the record shops of Croydon to see what was available. It appeared to be Play Sixties Classics in Record Shops Day, and in two shops I variously heard the Byrds (again), Scott MacKenzie and the Mamas and the Papas.  I didn't feel sufficiently inspired to buy anything though.

Cut to Quittin' Time, and out comes the Nano again.  This time it's my turn to choose, and I'm in the mood to hear some recent favourites, so I play the extraordinary (whether it's genuine or not) Kosmischer Läufer, and Beefheart's  Clear Spot.

Perhaps another word here about social media. Both of those albums came to my attention via this method, as does the majority of what has been new to me over the past few years.  The former appeared on my Twitter timeline through various sources, the latter via an online album listening group.  Discussing music with people online, getting to meet those people, forming friendships, sharing music and experiences, gaining and offering recommendations, has rapidly and sometimes scarily expanded not only my collection but my musical horizons.

Those logistics I mentioned earlier meant that I drove home from the station (a different one as well, but we won't go into that) in my own car, with Disc 2 of Bruce Springsteen's The Promise for company.

Dinner (or supper, as they like to call it down here) is normally eaten in the TV room, but as I was home alone and clearly determined to work some vinyl playing into the day, I sat in the front room with a pizza and Prelude's After The Goldrush album.  Unlike many of my ken I didn't go for the wholesale ditching of the vinyl collection in favour of the shiny beast of CD, but neither was I a digital-eschewing Luddite. I just got out of the habit of buying vinyl, but since I acquired a Spillers Records turntable from this year's Record Store Day shebang, I've fallen in love with the format all over again.

Dinner done, I retire to the study to do some of those boring-but-necessary tasks on the computer.  While doing so, I  catch up on some YouTube links I've had favourited on Twitter for a while, tonight it's Popol Vuh's Aguirre album and a Frank Zappa/Shuggie Otis acoustic jam.

Having said I rarely listen to random (apart from the iPod player in the kitchen which is nearly always in shuffle mode), I decide to stick iTunes on random, to see what comes up.  This is in the knowledge that I have to pop out to pick @drelfy up from station and I probably won't have time to listen to a whole album.  I get a blast of White Denim, The Clash, Iron Maiden, Stray, The Blue Nile, The Decemberists, Shed Seven, Yuck, Mogwai, Best Coast, Tenacious D, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Duckworth Lewis Method, before it's time to get back into the car and be reunited with The Boss.

So that was my Harkive day. A thoroughly enjoyable experience.  As with all snapshot research, there is a sense in which the event itself affects what you do on the day, and while some of my listening decisions may have been influenced, I hope I didn't do anything wildly different to what I might do over the course of a typical week.  Let's do it again some time.