Seeing as Fred liked my design for the Laurie Anderson concert I was talking about yesterday, I thought I’d have a root around in the archive and see if I could find anymore examples of my design skills. Unfortunately, a lot of the King Crimson designs are in a format I can no longer read (anyone got a copy of Easy CD 3 or 3.5 they could lend me?) but I did find these three Genesis sleeves for your enjoyment.
I think I am a frustrated graphic designer! But I remember really enjoying coming up with designs for those albums using existing elements I’d scanned it or grabbed from video stills.
With my own CD designs, I tend to keep the concept fairly lightweight because the more colour you use, the more ink you use and if you are printing a large run on a crappy inkjet printer, it is going to cost you money. So I tend to make sure there is plenty of white space on my sleeves and don’t get too clever with it!!!
Category: Diary
I’ve been having a right royal sort out here at StudioLock and I found a box of old CDs that I’d burnt in the year 2000. These were mainly “bootlegs” or music I’d recorded from the radio or Internet sources, but despite looking perfect, none of these CDs would play back or could be accessed by computer or audio CD player. I suspect that these CD-Rs were from the same batch that rendered me losing half-an-album’s worth of masters (“Touched by the King” recorded in 2000 – where I lost most of the master recordings due to CD-R failure).
I remember at the time the media saying how reliable CD-R were compared to hard drives and other recordable media, but this appear to be untrue – well at least for this particular batch. Nowadays I put my failth in a NAS (network attached server) with two terabyte hard drives that duplicate each other automatically and a 1.5TB backup drive on my main PC, so effectively there are three copies of any music/document/picture/video file existing anyone time.
As time goes on and the propagation of self-created digital media expands exponentially with the amount of digital devices you have, you soon find yourself becoming a keeper of a massive digital archive. Especially if you are creative, like myself, and have your own music archive too.
But as I was going through the discs that were lost, I found a concert that I had genuine love for and wanted to keep desperately. It was Laurie Anderson performing at the Barbican the 24 May 2000, where she took part in her “Songs and Stories from Moby Dick” – a show that was never ever put out via commercial channels. So with no official release, I was pretty upset that my only copy, a pretty decent recording from the radio, lovingly put on CD-R was no longer playable.
So I went online and searching on Google and – lo-and-behold – I found a copy of the concert via a trading forum and downloaded it pronto. When I played back the recording, I quickly realised that I was actually listening to the recording I had made all those years ago.
You see, at the time, I was in touch with a fellow on the net who had a King Crimson concert at the Royal Albert Hall that I’d attended in 1995, which was notable because it fell on the same day as KC-drummer Bill Bruford’s birthday and one of the songs “Indiscipline” was altered to take in this fact. Don’t think I am some great bootlegger, because I am not. I have made a handful of recordings in my time and have only traded about six or seven discs for similar concerts.
So I traded one copy of my Laurie Anderson CD-R to this guy in the US for a copy of this King Crimson concert, and he must of traded it onwards until it because the only source of the concert.
In a weird way, by sending my CD-R across the ocean, I’d actually preserved it forever…strange virtual world, innit?
And this is the CD sleeve I designed for the concert.
OK – whoever it is from the BBC who is doing a thorough sweep of my site might want to introduce themselves or make themselves known. We could have a chat about old times or make a new friendship? I mean, to go through nearly all my pages in a 24 hour period is getting a little creepy for my liking.
(Oi, Braithwaite! Get back to work – I don’t pay my licence fee so you can sit there searching my website. Haven’t you got some sports results to write up, boy?)
At the beginning of the week, I made arrangements for a business agent to make a viewing today. The appointment was set for 11am and of course, yesterday I busied myself with preparations for the day, making the place look a little presentable, getting paperwork together, etc.
At 9am, the MIssus received a call from said agent saying that he couldn’t make the appointment because he was on the M11 and his car alarm kept going off and he’d need to go to a garage. The fact that The Missus could hear no evidence of an alarm or a car or motorway left her non-plussed, but she was annoyed that this fellow explained how he would reschedule with us next week but be able to meet his other appointments this afternoon.
I am a bit of an appointment fascist and have a “zero tolerance” towards lateness or flakery of this nature. I wouldn’t have cared if his trousers were on fire or if he drove all the way here with the alarm going, as long as he met the appointment. If he’d called 24 hours earlier, I would forgive, but this Johnny-come-lately approach riles me considerably.
Those who are afflicted with religion ask “What Would Jesus Do?” whereas those of us who are involved in business ask “What would Duncan Bannatyne do?”. So I emailed the company telling them that this man missed his appointment and to send someone else if they wanted to do business with me. If this fellow does turn up, it will be hard for me not to call him Mr Bullshit, instead of his proper name.
So after lunch, the phone rings and it is Mr Bullshit. He got the email, he isn’t happy. But I don’t give him enough time to weave another weft of bullshit in my ear and I just tell him: “It’s very serious that you’ve missed this appointment. I don’t like it when people waste my time. And I don’t want to hear what you have to say. Goodbye”.
Like I said, they created a monster in me…
A miserable seven days is compounded with the news that Jim has got cancer. The weight loss and other issues didn’t make it obvious as his medical condition can be described as “complicated”. It’s pretty rotten. I’ve always tried to talk him up and tell him the positives and now I feel quite upset by it all. Tear for a man I never got on with, until recently. How does that work?
Seeing as the net has become so fluid in terms of data exchange and I can squirt my updates from one site to another from a centralised point and there have been searches come up via Google Analytics that people do look for a “Darren Lock” page on MySpace, I have decided to set up an account there again.
http://www.myspace.com/darrenlock
It’s looking lonely over there as I only have two friends and those are the automated ones you get when you open an account!!!
The Guitar Center in Hollywood has a special place in my heart, mainly because it completely blew my mind when I went their the first time and the second time, I was truly impressed that I could pick up really expensive guitars and play them without a shop assistant jumping on my back and beating me to the ground.
My guitar shopping experience in the UK has always been a negative one where you either get the sniffy muso shop assistant who looks down their nose at you and deliberately tries to undermine you or banjax you in equal measure. I always remember phoning up Holiday Music in Leytonstone in the late 90s and asking if they had a VG-8 in stock. “No,” said the snotty assistant on the end of the phone, “That’s a guitar synthesiser (wrong!) and we don’t stock those”. Meanwhile, I’ve got a copy of Guitarist magazine open in front of me with their advert telling me they had the units in stock and that’s how I got their phone number!
But the Guitar Center is such a laid back place and the staff are friendly and helpful and there are so many different guitars to drool over, it really is Guitar Heaven.
Guitar Heaven 2004
Outside the massive shop front, there is a walk of fame where famous guitar players have left their hand prints. I snapped this picture of Tony Levin’s entry because it made me laugh so much – don’t worry, he’s not deformed or a space alien, he was wearing his funk fingers.
Tony Levin’s Hand Print on Guitar Center Walk of Fame
So where are we going with this? Well this is a stream of consciousness post because my attention was brought to Peter Gabriel’s recent performance at the self-same Guitar Center, and Tony Levin is his long-term bass playing chum and I have good memories of the place. So I thought I’d combine all these elements into one gooey mess.
Enjoy!