Comsat Angels – The Glamour CD album
A frustrating project in a couple of ways, The Glamour was an album I was pleased to be involved with, having admired the band for so long. But having done comprehensive reissues of their back catalogue for RPM Records and signed the band for our spin off label Thunderbird, none of us had anticipated the indifference of the music press to what was (and remains) a great psych rock indie album. Today the music world cannot get enough of reformed rock bands doing this or that album in full, but in 1995 it simply wasn’t hip (and in any case The Comsat Angels had never really gone away – perhaps they should have had a gap year or three!).
The cover was very simple in concept; singer Steve Fellows had been working on some almost 3D paintings based on star shapes layered with paint. I put this on the scanner and we did some enlargements which brought out astonishing details of the brush strokes, and I made one of those the central image.
Lettering was kept very simple, a bold sans serif compressed name and then a vintage font for the title which I photocopied from an old 1950s typeface book. Further images from the star scans were used elsewhere on the CD inlay. Annoyingly this went awry between leaving my desktop and hitting the production plant, and turned out much redder than was intended, so the text was quite hard to read (we should have added a sticker to the case). I have a feeling we were working alongside a Dutch label on pressing this CD, so not sure where the issue arose.
We also worked up a limited edition CD which happily turned out much more as intended. And we did add a sticker! I changed the colour cast to make it darker, and this was part of a clam shell card digipak. Steve gave us his hand-written lyric sheets and we turned those into CD size cards inside. I had also met up with the UK’s biggest antique paper collector here in Sheffield, and she kindly invited us over to look at her archive. I spotted some remarkable oil pattern sheets once made for vintage book bindings, and borrowed some of these to scan, making a nice set of cards to also go inside.
The limited edition CD front is shown above. If the band’s profile had been higher it might have been worth risking it without any titles as it is such a great image (Steve has a good visual eye and the Comsat covers were always important to him as part of the project).
There was no hint of vinyl, this was 1995 remember and the appetite for the format at a retail level was then at its lowest level ever, although it would have been great to see it at LP size.
Once the rights left Thunderbird, the CD was later reissued in a slightly tweaked format with changes made to the running order (including bizarrely chopping the album’s longest track in two!) and some extra bits and bobs but I was not involved in that – and indeed have never seen it! I like the CD as it was in any case and it still gets regular airplay. I did hear that the recording studio later reused the 2” multi-track masters for another project. Insanity.
Note – these are my recollections of the project, others my differ! Simon Robinson. Note : there is more information on the group on the Sheffield Music Archive website.
easyontheeye2.wordpress.com 