Music + Art = Love

This Music as Product brief is gonna kick so much tooshie (I’m trying to be more professional by not swearing in my blogs… let’s see how long it’ll last…)!

Seriously, I’m very excited; I’ve already unconsciously been preparing for it, as I’ve been aiming to design an album cover for Taste the Blood for a while now. But also because I have so much free reign to be myself, discover new art and get really creative in the process.

The project is simple: create a vinyl cover for a band album, whether real or fake. Make the album cover as interesting as possible, with added gifts and collectables, whilst also making sure the product can be batch produced five times or more. That works out great for me, as I’ll then have one copy for myself, and one each for the members of Taste the Blood.

I love a good album, but I love an album even more when there’s something super special about it. These are the ones I usually go out and buy. For example, every Gorillaz album and, my most recent purchase, Paramore’s Brand New Eyes Deluxe Edition, which I picked up for a cool £34.99. These are both great examples of well packaged music for the major fans. The Gorillaz D-sides album included pin badges, stickers, a sew-on fabric badge, and sketches by Jamie Hewlett, whilst Brand New Eyes had a DVD, a 7” vinyl with acoustic versions of two songs, Hayley Williams' journal, a double-sided poster and photo-cards, not to mention a certificate of authenticity.


It’s amazing what more they can do with music, and there’s nothing better than opening a brand new album, especially if it includes loads of freebies.

So I will be working with Taste the Blood, a Wrexham-based Metal Band in which my boyfriend plays bass, to produce something they can be proud of. They very kindly gave me a list of things that influence and inspire their music and their look, which threw up some very interesting concepts: German expressionist cinema, Bauhaus, cubism, Hammer Horror, 1950’s pop art and B-Movies were but a few of them.



When I mentioned their influences to Dan Berry, he pointed me in the direction of Charles Burns and told me to have a look at Black Hole, a comic about mutated teenagers. I've seen some of the pages online, but what really intrigued me about the story was that a photographer called Max Oppenheim has taken stills of some of the comic's mutated characters and used prosthetics to turn them into realistic, horrific year book photos. It's really disturbing, but ultimately brilliant, and works for an idea my boyfriend had of doing each of the band members as famous monsters (Dracula, Frankenstein, etc). Will have to look into this more, but you can check out the rest of those creepy photos here.



I love the idea of exploring old-school horror cinema and advertising. It gives me the chance to steer away from the typical Metal album cover ideas, which usually feature big hairy guys who look like they’re going to murder you. I’ve been looking into album cover design for a while now and I’ve come across some great, and sometimes controversial, pieces of work.

The Scorpions – Virgin Killer: Do I even need to mention why this is one of the most controversial album covers of all time? And yet it does what the title says. I think the glass effect is fantastic, but I’d be much more careful working with kids like this.


Iron Maiden – Killers: Iron Maiden are known for their awesome album covers, featuring their mascot, Eddie. This album cover is my personal favourite, drawn by Derek Riggs. I love the grungy cityscape, the bright, morbid colouring and Eddie’s cheerfully psychotic smile. Classic.


The Used – In Love and Death: The album artwork here is done by Alex Pardee. I love how simplistic his use of line and colour is. It’s creepy and yet still whimsical. Very Tim Burton.


Gorillaz – Plastic Beach: I couldn’t go on about album covers without throwing them in somewhere. The album cover for their latest album is the most extensive in terms of artwork, and also the most colourful.


I have, of course, more influences than this but I’m trying to save space!

So, not only do I have to do an amazing album cover, I also have to create some collectables to go with it. My initial ideas were your typical album collectables: stickers, badges, posters, etc. But I’ve also come up with the humorous idea of creating some comic trump cards of each of the band members. I think they’d find it quite funny, they all have a good sense of humour.



Also, I will be aiming to make a small single cover for a CD as well as a DVD cover for them to use when they eventually distribute them.

But for now, I’m going to experiment and play about a bit!

And if that wasn’t enough, I have managed to manipulate the Negotiated brief to suit me as well! It’s a self-written brief that interprets Liverpool in some way. I am going to create an audio-plus-map tour of Liverpool, using only the music of The Beatles. Dan suggested I call it The Musical Mystery Tour, which I really liked.

So the full title is: The Beatles' Musical Mystery Tour of Liverpool!

I’m off to the great city tonight for my usual helping of Liverpool One (to see Iron Man 2), Worlds Apart, Quiggins and the Tea House Cafe for my Udon Noodle soup with pork dumplings. But more importantly, for research, to snuff out the most notable, inspiring and fun locations for my musical map idea. I’ll be taking my dictaphone to record any thoughts I have along the way, and a camera to snap some photos.

My plan is to create a quirky mini-map of Liverpool that corresponds to a compilation of Beatles tracks that I will put together on a CD and my iPod. Obviously because of copyright issues I may not be able to stream the track listing online, but I will post it in a blog, along with my downloadable map in case anyone wants to give the tour a go.

Dan Berry showed me a funky piece of work by a student last year who created a pocket book of band names, which folded out like a map and was screen printed onto newsprint. I thought it looked great and it was really simply put together, so I’m going to use it as my main inspiration for the finished piece, but with major changes. I like the idea of screen printing the map, it’s a quick and re-usable process. However, I wouldn’t do it on newsprint as it could tear easily. What I’m thinking is perhaps doing an A3/A2 map that will either be laminated for protection, or can be packaged with the CD in something fancy.

But first, it’s super-research-weekend-fun-time!