Records, design and thoughts. Simon Minter is a freelance designer from Oxford, UK.
I believe that this is the first box set that my random number generator has selected for writing about on here. What a good choice! Even though Nick Drake albums are akin to The Catcher in the Rye in terms of items that every self-regarding young fellow has to hand to demonstrate his sensitivity, that […]
I bought this 12″ pretty much when it came out, from a shop in Shrewsbury that I forget the name of now. It was upstairs, and just around the corner from the entrance to Shrewsbury Castle, I think. I bought the record because Jellyfish – at the time – seemed to represent a combination of […]
The Smiths are, for me, an odd band. I’ve got a few of their records, but I’d never really describe myself as a fan. Whenever I hear any of the vast majority of their songs, I’m reminded that I like them, and ‘This Charming Man’ and ‘How Soon Is Now’, in particular, I really like. Yet […]
I have quite a number of these ‘demonstration’-type records, no end of them were released through the 1960s and 1970s to show off the worlds/galaxies/spectra/etc of new stereophonic (or, in some cases quadraphonic) capabilities of, at the time, modern music-playing equipment. Most of the ones that I own were bought in the 1990s, during a […]
My random number generator, before picking this record for me, suggested five or six 7″ singles – problematic, as my 7″s are still not in an easy-to-handle order, meaning that I can’t quickly track down any of them in particular. Note to self: sort this out. Anyway, to the first record picked that I can easily locate. […]
I’m not the biggest fan of Lou Reed, although I was sad when he passed away. I did quite enjoy his notoriously confrontational and prickly persona in interviews – or maybe it wasn’t a persona, maybe he just was that grumpy; rock stars should be different to ‘norms’, through being either unpleasant, or remarkably nice, or out-there […]
I must admit, I (recently) bought this record purely because I’m a huge fan of the American band Unrest – they covered ‘When It All Comes Down’ and held a strange obsession with Miaow singer and guitarist Cath Carroll, naming a (fantastic) song for her and using a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph of her as the […]
MIE is a UK record label with a pretty impressive back catalogue of releases. Their early releases tended toward exquisite packaging, with no end of hand-stitched, screenprinted and hand-assembled artwork being on offer. More recently they’ve toned down the (labour-intensive) hand-finished stuff, but retain an eye for a good-looking sleeve. This record is a 12″ […]
Not a huge amount to say about this record musically – to me it represents a very mainstream and slick side to the whole C86/indie-pop scene that was flourishing at the time of its release. Songs like ‘Happy Hour’ are super-jaunty and great fun, of course, but the more ‘deep’ tunes like ‘Think For A […]
The concept of ‘perfect pop’ is a long-standing one amongst indie kids. It’s a term often thrown back at critics of songs, almost a defense mechanism: ‘yes, it’s very badly-recorded, but it’s perfect pop!’, ‘I know it’s Girls Aloud, and they’re completely manufactured, but it’s just a perfect pop song!’, and so forth. It’s a […]