AN ANATOMY OF LISTS

My 70s LP and gig lists.

1973-74 and LP covers on stamps (featuring Mike Oldfield, Led Zeppelin).

1975 (featuring Tangerine Dream).

1976-78 and the world of work (featuring Magazine, the Clash).

1979 and mods.

1980 and mods, rockers, science fiction and motorbikes (featuring Michael Moorcock, Hawkwind).

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…its strange surrealist cover…

The cover image was by Trevor Key. It’s a length of steel tubing that has been bent and chromed, then photographed. A possible influence is Magritte’s ‘The Castle Of The Pyrenees’, which includes a seascape.

Nobody pays much attention to the back of the album, so nobody notices the equally surreal and far more disturbing burning bones lying strewn across the seashore. Why are they even there?

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…its cover a horrendous montage of new-agey Cultural Icons…

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        …“Tubular Brass”…

…a blue kazoo with the bell logo on it…   

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…“Classic Album Covers”…

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…what might work as 144 square inches of LP, or even 144 square centimetres of CD, is lost on a square inch of gummed paper…

Here you can see the stamp, the CD and the LP together. My least favourite cover of all the great Bowie albums. It doesn’t really work at any size.

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…“Ziggy Stardust”? You can’t see anything. It should have been “Aladdin Sane”, ““Heroes”” or “Hunky Dory”…

Four Bowie cover images to compare. Three of them work on any scale, from LP to CD to stamp.

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…a gatefold cover… two square feet in size, big enough to make out the details… it only made sense when opened out…

A gatefold album cover is two square feet in area. Although its size alone makes it dramatic, the drama of this particular album is also revealed dynamically as the LP cover and its meaning unfold together.

Compare the size and impact of the LP cover with that of the stamp when the two are placed together.

Released in 1982, ten years after the Led Zeppelin album, the Heaven 17 LP The Luxury Gap plays a similar game using a hoarding and a demolition site. Although it’s not a gatefold cover, it still surprises when you turn it over and work out the story.

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…the Hermit from the ninth trump card in the traditional tarot deck…

The LP image of the hermit comes from what is probably the most familiar tarot deck, published in 1909. Drawn by Pamela Coleman Smith to the specifications of Arthur Edward Waite and published by the Rider Company, the deck is referred to by various combinations of these names. Unlike earlier versions, all 78 cards are illustrated and not just the 22 trump cards.

Another widely-used deck is the Thoth tarot, which was co-designed by Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris, and painted by Harris. Intended as an artistic and philosophical advance on previous versions, it incorporates ideas and influences from an eclectic range of disciplines. Although developed between 1938 and 1943, it wasn’t published in 1969.

Aside from its use as tarot cards, the Thoth deck can be admired as a rich, ambitious complex of proto-psychedelic art. Offered these 78 views of a strange luminous elsewhere viewed as if through windows of dream, vision and hallucination, the viewer becomes unsure if they are looking out or looking in.

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…a tiny supplicant kneeling far below…

Barely there in the lower left-hand corner of the hermit image above, way down at the foot of the craggy mountain, is a minute, ragged figure, his gaze fixed on the distant summit where the hermit stands.

Punctuating the dismal concert movie The Song Remains The Same are five dismal fantasy sequences, plucked from the imaginations of each band member and their manager Peter Grant. Jimmy Page’s choice was to act out the role of this supplicant, scaling a slope in search of enlightenment from an old bloke wrapped in a big grey blanket.

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...you could pick another five stamps from the likes of...

Of course, there are of course plenty more to consider if you don't like any of these.

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…what I experienced in Liverpool Cathedral, at ridiculously high volume, immersed in throbbing bass and lit by cold blue light…

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…three German longhairs…a bit like the cover of "Piledriver", only sitting down with keyboards and a single white guitar…

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…in a slowly shifting dune of cornflakes I once found a screwdriver buried… I’ve also still got a piece of a drive chain from one of the big machines…

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…I photographed the sparrows eating our sandwich crumbs next to my work boots with their cornflake encrustations…

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…by Christmas I looked pale, thin and unhealthy…

Self, Sten, Furb and Radar photographed while loading Furb’s car before he and I drove back north. In the back of the car to the right you can see some of my LPs in a cardboard box. The yellow album cover you can just about see a corner of is Two Sevens Clash by Culture.

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