This was one of my favourite sleeves from my time working with RPM Records. The Spencer Davis Group had been huge in the Sixties but this short lived line-up from the early Seventies had very little profile, forming in 1973 and only lasting a couple of years. Like a lot of established groups at the time playing heavier music they struggled to overcome the popular image of them as a hit 60s singles outfit, certainly in England, but were better received in Europe.
As a result there was not much to go on by way of images or memorabilia, despite us working with two of the band on the project. What photographs we had were not really cover material, or the quality was poor. So I made a virtue of this by using a scan out of a German magazine, and tinting it up in a fairly pop art style (I always like this sort of image, probably being a far of Warhol! It was done in Photoshop by this time, though I had done it by hand on a couple of earlier CDs). The rest was a strong sans serif type, similar to that used on German tour posters, to reflect the fact it was a live recording. I always tried to take my time doing this to balance the letters out nicely, (lessons remembered from art college days!). I borrowed a bit of German text off a ticket back to help reinforce that feel and added the rules as German ticket designs often featured these. In the middle, the little can of Brasso is actually a tin of Gluggo, from one of their later rock albums of the same name, with which they had quite a bit of success in Europe (and were including some tracks from in this set) so I hoped might jog memories for those who knew.
It came out in 1996 and was then reused on a 2002 edition when the album switched labels. It was all CD at the time of course. For the CD back I had developed a regular layout for the label, designed to help buyers in shops find out all they needed to know, these were after all archive releases. So the bar across the top had catalogue number, titles, the all important barcode and a one sentence strapline. Then the track listing in full with times, a couple of more detailed paragraphs and the copyright details. The picture here came off a very folded up gig poster one of the band found which I cleaned up! The CD came with a 12 page colour booklet with a full history and more memorabilia and hopefully still shows the care and attention the label paid to the release. I think I used Pagemaker for the design layout, I was very fluent with this and never bothered with the rival Quark.
Guitarist Ray Fenwick had found the recording in his collection which we arranged for him to mix when he suggested the idea to us. Musically it is a strong performance and the older material works well in a rockier environment, they certainly wrote some great tracks.
Link • There are some nice Spencer Davis photographs from the Sixties in a book of blues pics from Manchester which I am working on.
Link • Copies of the CD here are available via our ebay page as I got a few copies returned from a warehouse recently.
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