In 1978, Mike Oldfield released his fourth album: 'Incantations'.
Incantations was a double album with four pieces spread across the 4 sides of the vinyl.
It was mostly instrumental.
I remember hearing a fragment of this for the first time while in the car with my family coming back from a trip out to a village pub in Firbeck, South Yorkshire. The radio programme played part of Side 1 as a trail for the album - not sure what channel or show that would have been, but I instantly knew I would need to get this album and that I would love it. At this point, the idea of seeing him was not something that seemed possible. I was yet to see my first live gig and I didn't know how one would go about seeing someone so famous anyway.
The album remains one of my favourites, particularly Side 3 which is basically an extended guitar solo for most of it.
The front cover features Mike on a beach with a distinctively shaped rock behind him.
This is a place called Cap Pregonda on the Spanish island of Menorca.
It is one of those places that I've always wanted to try to get to... I'll get there one day.
Are there any places that you have always particularly wanted to go to which were inspired by an album cover or a piece of music.
Sgt. Pepper - The Beatles, due to its fusion of fantastic music and the pop art of Peter Blake
Tool - Aenima. The limited edition CD from the 1990s has this weird 3D thing going on!
Raye - My 21st Century Blues
My dad had Supertramp's Crisis? What Crisis? on LP and I enjoyed looking at that when I was younger. Still a relevant image today.
Rum, Sodomy and the Lash by the Pogues - the wreck of the Medusa encapsulates the chaos of their music
Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy.
I was fascinated when I would fold it out as a child trying to work out everything in there it was so weird and surreal.
Ned's Atomic Dustbin - God Fodder. I had the record and it brings back good memories. I think kids nowadays miss out on album covers - they were great!
Public Service Broadcasting - The Race for Space
Thanks to all those who have contributed so far... still time for you to suggest your own... the Google Form is at the top of the right hand column on the blog page.
This is a much copied image. The article mentions some other bands which have created their own versions for album covers.
For locals it is also a source of frustration as they are held up by lots of tourists recreating the scene for a picture. Caveat: I've done that myself...
Abbey Road is my son's favourite Beatles album. We listened to it recently while on a Kent road trip.
A close friend used to have all four-album covers of Brian Eno’s ambient music series framed reverentially in smooth beech and hung as art in his living room.
Music for Airports (1979), The Plateaux of Mirror (with Harold Budd 1980), Day of Radiance (with Laraaji 1980), and On Land (1982) all share a cover art theme of partial map representations with a topographically knowing nod to pop art.
Hung in sequence on a wall the album covers were as striking and as artistic as the music they represent.
It is probably not possible for a single recording to be acknowledged as the starting point for a whole musical genre but ‘Ambient 1 Music For Airports’ comes some way to achieving that feat. Although it certainly was not the first ‘ambient music’, it was the first record to specifically adopt the label ‘ambient music’. Brian Eno had started exploring abstract electronica in his 1975 album ‘Discreet Music’ before moving onto work with Talking Heads and producing their ground breaking albums ‘More Songs about Buildings and Food (1978), ‘Fear of Music (1979) and ‘Remain in Light’ (1980)’’, a trilogy that sound-tracked my late teenage years.
As a teenager, ambient music was as unfathomable as penguins trying to grasp jazz, it simply was not on my radar until I got an ‘in’ with the Brian Eno/David Byrne genre busting, or is that genre defining, I’m not quite sure which even now, ‘My Life in The Bush of Ghosts’ (1981).
Here's the track 'Regiment':
Producer, Associated Performer, Composer: Brian Eno
Producer, Associated Performer, Composer: David Byrne
Drums, Associated Performer: Chris Frantz
Bass Guitar, Associated Performer: Busta Cherry Jones
Associated Performer, Drums: David van Tieghem
Associated Performer, Voice: Dunya Yusin
This was an album that employed samples of radio shows, sermons, an exorcism, chanting of the Qu’ran, cawing rooks and the voice of Lebanese singer Samira Tewfik. Few albums have had to fend off so many lawsuits, offending as it did both some Christians and some Muslims. Its initial critical reception was mixed but not from me - now I had to explore everything that Eno had made, and that included his ambient work.
It was whilst in Berlin producing David Bowie’s Low album in 1977 that Eno started work on ‘Music for Airports’ and he added parts that were looped from Robert Wyatt on piano and the avant-garde jazz guitarist Fred Frith, who I once saw in the 1980s in an upstairs room of a pub in Sheffield with three men and a dog.
Wyatt and Frith were both involved with Mike Oldfield early in his career too... more on Oldfield throughout the blog.
Although musicians contributed, Eno stated that machines predominantly made the album. In this it was a precursor for a whole direction for the creation of music to go in and this found further expression in the manic chop and paste rhythmic assemblage that ‘My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts’ became.
Music for Airports is a wandering, rather aimless piece of music whose tone is set by piano motifs that are arrhythmic and with melody barely hinted at.
Eno describes his ambient music as something that “is intended to induce calm and a space to think”, he has also referred to it as “music to resign you to the possibility of death” which doesn’t appear to be the ideal music to listen to in an airport waiting room.
What ‘Music for Airports’ does not do is demand active attention and in that it has a lineage back to ‘Musique d’ameublement’ (Furniture Music), the phrase given by French composer and pianist Erik Satie (1866-1925) to his sparse piano motif led minimalist compositions.
Satie’s work, instantly recognizable, a century after his death, were an influence on the young Brian Eno and that is both acknowledged by Eno himself and is straight-forward to recognize when listened to side by side. Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1 is perhaps the most widely known of his short works.
Which brings us back to the cover-art of Eno’s quartet of ambient albums.
A representation of the abstract landscapes that the music inside conjures with.
A melancholic air of beauty is all round, a grey day of scudding clouds and intermittent drizzle is evoked, a beauty that is sometimes so under-stated that it is hard to see, something that the cartographic suggestions give possibility to.
Or maybe that’s just the geographer in me.
And quite striking on a living room wall.
Carl Lee is retired but was a lecturer at The University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University, taught A level Geography for 20 years at Sheffield College, is the author of five books about geography and has a PhD in economic geography. He has been nuts about music since buying his first single in 1973: 10cc’s 'Rubber Bullets' if you were wondering.
I teach at King's Ely in Cambridgeshire. I've been there for 13 years now. Lots of trips to and from my home in Breckland across the Fens to Ely in all weathers.
Some years ago, in the Sixth Form centre of the school, which is housed in the old Bishop's Palace opposite the west door of Ely Cathedral, there was an exhibition of photographs that he had taken, with some original prints of classic album covers. It was wonderful to see these close up, just sitting in the corridor with students walking past them - often paying them no notice at all.
Amongst the album covers he worked on were covers for Peter Gabriel and Led Zeppelin.
I have an excellent book which I bought from the shop at the Pink Floyd exhibition at the V&A. This features album covers they designed as well as details of their creation.
He has also directed music videos, and been the creative director of music tours for artists such as Paul McCartney.
He directed a video of Yes's Magnification concert - complete with an orchestra.
One of the other links with Hipgnosis and Ely is the album cover for 'The Division Bell' by Pink Floyd. I'll post more about that in a separate post...
This is a chunky book and a great endeavour from the cartographer Damien Saunder.
It is clothed in black cloth and with an embossed LP with cartographic meridians.
It features a wealth of album covers, quite a few of which are familiar but many of which are new to me.
I have been discovering some new bands from this book, which is always a good sign.
Publishers' description:
Presenting 415 album covers – beautifully reproduced, expertly laid out and accompanied by deeply researched text – Maps on Vinyl will especially appeal to map enthusiasts, vinyl junkies, music fans, graphic designers and artists.
The book is the brainchild of renowned Australian cartographer Damien Saunder, whose expertise has been utilised by Apple, National Geographic, Earth (the world’s largest atlas) and even Roger Federer. A keen crate-digger, he has amassed possibly the world’s most extensive private collection of records featuring maps on their covers, resulting in this one-of-a-kind book.
Records by artists including Madonna, Oasis, Coldplay, Grateful Dead, Bob Marley, XTC, MC5, Queen, New Order, James Brown, Brian Eno and Weezer are featured, with cover art created by many giants of the design world, including Peter Saville, Curtis McNair, Richard Gray, Alton Kelly, Stanley Mouse, Neville Garrick, Roger Dean and Pedro Bell.
The records headlined span music from 1939 to today, and the book is divided into eight chapters highlighting different aspects of the collection – ‘C(art)ography’, ‘We Built This City’, ‘On the Road’, ‘African Beats’, ‘Astroworlds’, ‘Ocean Whispers’, ‘Maps with Attitude’ and ‘Music from Here’.
Maps on Vinyl is a beautiful artefact, but it’s also an important historical and cultural document, revealing how maps have been used in album cover design to reinforce a lyrical story, share a political view, express concern for the state of the world or creatively identify the origins of the music and the people who make it.
My copy was was purchased from Stanford's in London and is a signed first edition, and was also purchased with my RGS discount.
It's definitely a coffee table kind of book. One to browse and point out - "oh yes, I had that on vinyl" or "one of my favourites"...
How about a song that mentions loads of place names?
Lemon Jelly's album 'Lost Horizons' is beautifully designed.
A long list of place names is mentioned in the song... narrated by the distinctive voice of John Standing.
And the band?
Lemon Jelly are a British electronic music duo from London that formed in 1998 and went on hiatus starting in 2008. Since its inception, the band members have always been Fred Deakin and Nick Franglen. Lemon Jelly has been nominated for awards like the Mercury Music Prize and BRIT Awards. The bright colourful artwork featured in the albums and music videos, and the Lemon Jelly typeface, became part of the "brand". (Wikipedia)
And here's the track itself and the first few place names that get a mention.
Paris Tibet Sydney Naxos Rangu Rotterdam Runcton The Cayman Islands Malawi Mauritius Haight-ashbury Patagonia
The album covers are also fantastical landscapes by themselves.
Feel free to map the places mentioned... someone probably has already....
The fourth guest post from Brendan Conway - scheduled to post during the GA Conference.
Brendan Conway will be at the GA Conference sharing something he's been working on for some time. He is co-presenting with Alistair Hamill.
The indie dance band St Etienne, formed in 1990, have regularly signalled a strong geographical affinity with albums steeped in sense of place such as ‘Finisterre’ (2002) and ‘Home Counties’ (2017) which included tracks inspired by local knowledge of places in the rural-urban fringe of London such as ‘Whyteleafe’, ‘Breakneck Hill’ and ‘Angel of Woodhatch’.
Their album cover for ‘Words and Music’ (2012) is an incredible piece of map art based on Croydon town centre, redesigned by Manchester art collective Dorothy to change all of the road names to songs. Bob Stanley of the band explained the psychogeographical concept.
‘The general theme of the album is marking a route in your life through music—the idea is that you can follow roads on the map and end up with a playlist of different journeys. There are 312 song titles on the map—it's our hometown.’
Can you spot all 312?!
In a similar cartographic vein, in 2023 Bob Stanley, created a compilation album called ‘London A to Z’ for Ace Records.
The selection features places in London, recorded in the 1960s and 1970s. Such compilations can sometimes be disappointing, but not this one. Many of the artists are very well-known although their tracks are usually more obscure. There are many forgotten gems, providing interesting windows back in time. Nick Drake departs from his typical melancholy to deliver the upbeat ‘Mayfair’ (1968) and Norma Tanega celebrates ‘Clapham Junction’(1971) with her characteristic guitar licks. The prolific 1960s hit maker Cat Stevens (now Yusuf Islam) sings about ‘Portobello Road’ which is close to where he grew up in London’s West End.
‘Hampstead Way’ sung by Linda Lewis sounds well ahead of its time. She famously had a five-octave vocal range and had cameo roles in 1960s classic movies ‘A Taste Of Honey’ and ‘A Hard Day’s Night’.
Several songs have intriguing back stories to explore. For example, ‘London Social Degree’ (1968), covered here by long-time associate of David Bowie, Dana Gillespie. It was written by British singer, songwriter, composer, record producer, and musical director Billy Nicholls. Its naive inverted snobbery vibe and anti-intellectual lyrics sound a bit annoying now (a bit like Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick In The Wall’ a decade later), but it's an interesting period piece, originally recorded by Billy Nicholls himself in 1968 on his classic baroque pop album ‘Would You Believe’.
Perhaps the greatest rediscovery on the compilation is ‘Euston Station’(1967), written and sung by the less-well-known and much underrated Barbara Ruskin, which should have been a big hit but failed to chart.
As Bob Stanley suggests in his ‘sleeve notes’, the original A to Z of London ‘invited you to create your own personal map of London’.
Now we can do a similar thing for his compilation using geographical information systems (GIS), so I used Geo Mapper 2D to geo-reference and visualise the locations of all the tracks, demonstrating the capacity of Geo Mapper to ‘Spotimapify’ such data.
Clicking on each location shows a relevant image (usually the record sleeve) and an opportunity to hear an extract from the track by linking through to the Ace Records web page about the compilation.
Brendan Conway is a geography teacher with over thirty years’ experience and led his current school to the GA Centre of Excellence. He has authored a range of learning materials for Oak National Academy, Tutor2U, Collins, BBC Bitesize and has expertise in GIS. Brendan is very interested in the links between geography and music and has written far too many story maps on this theme.
An A-Z of bands suggested by the Spotify algorithm.
Coming to the end now... still chance to share yours.
I've been listening to YES's music since the late 1970s.
I've had the pleasure of seeing them play live quite a few times over the years too in various line-ups, and also seen some of the various incarnations of the band, and also some of the spin offs including Anderson, Wakeman, Bruford and Howe (with Tony Levin), the Buggles version, and solo sets as well, such as Steve Howe in a church in York and Rick Wakeman in a theatre in King's Lynn where Shakespeare also performed.
YES has had a number of line-ups over the years, but the classic line-up featured Steve Howe, Alan White, Chris Squire, Rick Wakeman and Jon Anderson.
The last time I saw the band live was in Nottingham and it featured everyone apart from Rick Wakeman, who was replaced by Igor Khoroshev. I have my ticket stub from the gig which will feature on the blog too.
His parts are now played by Geoff Downes - which continues the Buggles influence.
The early albums included Tony Kaye and Bill Bruford.
For me, the classic album is 'Close to the Edge'. It features the most interesting musical arrangements of tracks, with real power and emotion.
Another great track is 'Soundchaser' from the album 'Relayer'. A great busy proggy song...
I'm a fan of the Rabin era albums with an 80s' feel... '90125' and 'Talk' (1994) - some good moments there. I remember playing it loud ...
Plus I like the fact that Eddie Jobson joined Yes. recorded the video for 'Owner of a Lonely Heart' and then left... and had to be edited out... although he can still be seen... Eddie will appear several times in the blog, as he's one of my favourite musicians.
One of their later albums which divides opinion with fans is 'Union', particularly as some of the playing was done by session musicians and not the band, and it had a lot of different producers and messing around, plus a lot of session musicians augmenting the sound. Rick Wakeman apparently referred to the album as 'Onion' because it made him cry.
Having said that, the tour they did to support the album was excellent. I remember their circular stage at Wembley - which is a bit of a shed. I had a decent seat and the sound wasn't too terrible - that was the only time I saw Trevor Rabin shredding - missing out on the later tour with Anderson and Wakeman.
Mid-song in fact. A chicken vindaloo, pilau rice, poppadoms, a stuffed paratha, Bombay aloo and a bhindi bhaji to be precise. All laid out atop the Hammond, keyboards and Mellotron in front of the audience and a band of vegetarians…
The central inspiration for Tales From Topographic Oceans was Paramahansa Yogananda’s (1893-1952) book Autobiography Of A Yogi.
Jon Anderson was deeply impressed by Yogi’s biography, which also inspired Apple’s Steve Jobs apparently.
This album was one of many that had Roger Dean's logo and artwork on the cover - often featuring 'impossible' topography, such as the classic cover for possibly their finest album - I played my vinyl copy of this album a lot:'Close to the Edge'. This was released in 1972.
They have had their geographical moments as well.
The album 'Tormato' , released in 1978, had an image of Yes Tor on its cover, and a map of the Tor and other landscapes nearby printed on the inner liner.
There's a disputed story about the creation of the cover:
Howe pitched the album's original title of Yes Tor, referring to Yes Tor, the second highest hill on Dartmoor, an area of moorland in Devon, England. During the development of the album, a tomato was thrown at the artwork resulting in its title and cover being changed accordingly. RickWakeman claimed to have done this as he recalled the band were disappointed with the initial artwork despite finding it expensive. Steve Howe claimed it was a Hipgnosis employee who threw the tomato, which insulted him. This was corroborated by Alan White, who stated that the band was unable to decide on a cover and the tomato was thrown by Hipgnosis designer Aubrey Powell - who I've already mentioned:
"I think Po ... put a picture of a guy with divining sticks on the front. Po took the artwork home one night and decided it wasn't working. So he threw a tomato at it".
More Yes-related posts to come as the year progresses.... such as the Trevor Horn / 'Buggles' era...
I remember when albums came on vinyl and inside a large 12" square cardboard sleeve, perhaps with additional liners, booklets and other designs which opened out in different ways. The cover design was important as were all the notes, lyrics and other elements of the packaging.
CDs don't have the same magic, and of course many people now stream music rather than owning physical products.
Some album covers have geographical features on them, and there used to be a collection of these which I blogged about some time ago on my old Geography and all that Jazz blog. It's an idea that comes back from time to time.
Do you have ideas for examples of album covers which were quite geographical in their imagery.
This would make a good challenge for students - to find a suitable image and then label it with the feature, although you may need to provide them with some.
Here's an example.
Houses of the Holy (1973) - Led Zeppelin
This was designed by Aubrey Powell, an Old Elean (which means he was a pupil at the school where I currently teach in Ely) and features the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland.
More on his work with Hipgnosis later on the blog.
Here's one closer to home for me.
The Stranglers had an album in 2004 called 'Norfolk Coast' and the cover photo by Harrison Funk was taken on the Norfolk coast... at Hunstanton. It was mostly written by their bass player who retreated to Holme-next-the-Sea on the coast in 1999 when feeling disillusioned and wrote a lot of music which became the album.
The cover is shot on the carstone boulders revealed when the tide goes out at Hunstanton near to its famous stripy cliffs.
Sadly, the seaweed which used to cloak the boulders has largely disappeared over the years...
Maps also feature on lots of albums of course, and I shall certainly be sharing examples from the wonderful book 'Maps on Vinyl' by cartographer Damien Saunder which I have on the shelves of my GeoLibrary. More on this to come.
Can you share your favourite examples of geographical features on album covers?
Visit the Google Form here to make your suggestions and I'll add some of them in a later update post.
