Yes, I’m vintage enough to have done VHS video artwork! This project was put together in 1999 from a concert filmed at Deep Purple‘s show in Melbourne in April that year. Having done a fair amount of work for EMI the producer wanted me to do the same sort of job for this, sleeve notes, art and design, but the band’s manager did not. So I did the job but went under the name of Vincent Van Gopher on the credits (check your old American cartoons to find the name!)…
I had done a few video tape jackets before so knew the specs and as I had also done the CD artwork it was a case of adapting this as best I could. The cover art was fun to do; I collect “found” photos and snaps and remembered some I had from a tourist’s trip to Australia. So that formed the main basis. In keeping with the sacred nature of the location in the photo, I decided to have the group photo faded back in the sky. The group’s name I kept in a simple classic sans serif font, but for the actual title I tried to locate the font which the band had used on their last studio CD so I could provide some continuity, as this tour showcased some of the tracks. In the end I couldn’t find a digital version to buy so had to use samples taken from screen grabs, make up the titling by hand in photoshop, then use that as an image. I used a small white shadow offset to help it stand out more.
I kept the back white so the text, of necessity quite small, stood out as much as possible. This still being the era where people would look at titles in a hop and read the blurb. It’s nice to slip in the occasional snippet for real fans, so I messed with the title of the first track because the singer often allocated a different trade to “the mechanic” as the mood took him on the night.
Although produced in Australia the package was widely used around the world on a number of different versions. However when it was later reissued the new label didn’t want to pay me to use it again and did (what I felt was) a fairly grotty replacement cover (and then a third version with a better but very dull one) – see below.
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