The Wizard’s Convention is one of those long forgotten (by most people) Seventies session albums from the days when musicians figured they could sell records on the back of the guest list. And it often worked. Eddie Hardin’s solo career after the duo Hardin & York had begun to drop off, but they had been massive in Germany so he invited a lot of people he had worked with over to London to cut this in 1976.
The original album on RCA (above) had a dull cover; tiny contact prints from the studio which were very hard to make out and just a long list of guests. It had since been reissued on vinyl by the notoriously cheapskate label President with a cheesy stock image cover (and a new title) which nobody liked (shown below).
So what to do? Reducing the original RCA cover to CD size wasn’t going to work, nobody would know what the images were at that size. However the original German label had felt the UK sleeve was a bit dull back in 1976 and added an illustration of a wizard, which I picked up on (see below) for the CD reissue.
This was scanned off a sleeve and the wizard image masked off. I then added elements of the painting either side of this to make up to a square illustration. These I blurred back slightly to put the emphasis on the central character. I saved the progress stages (below) to show what was involved.
As with the original album it was important to include the name of the guests as they would hopefully attract interest from collectors who were not aware of the original but I did cut this down a little. I added the original cover design on another booklet panel so people could swop over if they wanted.
The photographs from the original front were a struggle. All the colour slides had been lost (though remarkably a few have recently turned up during a studio clear out in London!), but one of the managers found a roll of grainy negatives which he sent up. I was able to do a few prints off these (I still had a darkroom at the time) and then these were scanned for the booklet.
While building the cover image up I used the cursive looking Typo Upright for the title (see above) which I felt matched the feel of the illustration nicely (and still do!) but it was perhaps too subtle and would not be very visible in the racks of a CD shop. In the end I reluctantly dropped that in favour of Blippo as a font for the album title, a sort of Seventies looking type which stood out well and was of the time. At that stage Eddie Hardin who was a huge help on the project, and had dug out a couple of unissued tracks for this, did point out that he was not credited as the originator on the original sleeve and could we rectify this some 25 years on? So I did!
I’m fairly sure the label – Purple Records (which I was by this time running for the ex Deep Purple managers Tony Edwards and John Coletta) – would have added a sticker (my file copy doesn’t have one), more to ensure record shop staff would know where to rack it up so it would be seen by fans of Deep Purple, who were the main target audience for this by the time it came out (2002 I think).
So overall far too much time and effort spent on a relatively minor release (my trademark) but it was enjoyable and I’m still pleased with the end result. Just a shame it couldn’t have been issued on vinyl as well.
As always these are my recollections of the project. Feel free to argue! All the images are from my original digital artwork folders.
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