Sleeve Talk

Every now and then when I'm flipping through the racks at a second-hand record shop I'll come across an album I used to own that I'd completely forgotten about, often by a band I'd also completely forgotten. The late 70s-early 80s era is a particularly rich one for lost bands (there's a whole blog devoted to them) who came along in the punk and post-punk flurry, managed a single or album before vanishing forever, to be discovered years later buried in dusty piles of ancient vinyl. East London rockers Bethnal managed two albums before they split up in 1980 but neither of them sold at all and the band don't even rate a footnote in rock histories these days, they came and went without leaving a trace except in the memories of sad old gits like me, and I would probably have forgotten all about them too if I hadn't liked the sleeve of their 1978 album "Crash Landing" so much.

This is another Hipgnosis design with their trademark photographic surrealism which could often look a bit over the top but the black and white gives it a striking class. These days you could knock this image together in a jiffy using Photoshop but in the olden days (gather 'round, children) the image would have been put together by a mix of manual cutting and pasting of the individual photos (the bandaged figures, the band, the crashed plane, and probably the landscape and sky too), with a lot of airbrush retouching and some darkroom trickery to make the whole thing look seamless. Time consuming stuff and one of the many graphic production skills that have been lost in the digital age. I used to be able to do stuff like that, now I can barely draw a straight line as I do all my work on a keyboard.

Bethnal were most often compared the The Who and Pete Townsend actually had some production input on "Crash Landing" which at the time I thought was a terrific album, but listening to it now it sounds mostly like dull and ordinary stadium rock. Hipgnosis usually designed for dinosaur acts like Pink Floyd and Led Zep and I wonder if using them was conscious attempt to sell the band to that market — in 1978 you couldn't get much more un-punk than a Hipgnosis sleeve. But with the exception of a couple of tracks the sleeve is the most memorable thing about the record, the title track still sounds pretty ace, the synths are a bit cheesy now but that crashing drum riff is great and the last track "Nothing New" has a rough, fist-pumping quality I still quite like. Though I liked it a lot more when I was 16.

Download: Crash Landing - Bethnal (mp3)
Download: Nothing New - Bethnal (mp3)