Sleeve Notes – New Writing & Music To Celebrate Record Store Day is a project where artists were asked to create a brand new composition that combined music and words on the theme of “how records have shaped their lives and thinking”. There is also a live event at International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, on Saturday 12 April to coincide with Record Store Day.
In preparing to write this I found excellent articles from the Poetry Foundation and Music Gateway about the history of combining words and music. It dates back to the early lyric poems performed in early Greece through to spoken, or chanted, words in Renaissance hymns and canticles, right up to our Sir John Cooper Clarke with the Invisible Girls and rap/hip-hop. When you sing your words it mostly conforms to the cat-mat, moon-June rhyming convention and this often dilutes meaning in favour of simplicity, like politicians delivering soundbites. Spoken word allows for more depth as it weaves everything from the time travel of our memories to the conceptual ideas that get the grey cells jumping.
Compilations are like a parade of floats moving passed with each track offering a different set of musical influences with the spoken word and on Sleeve Notes each one studies how that 7” or 12” sliver of polyvinyl chloride can have so much emotional resonance. There are tracks that look back on early, pre-streaming, experiences of obsessional crate digging in long-gone record shops, how an Annie Lennox song led to an obsession with ‘original versions’, the history of HMV’s Nipper mascot, and even a track about the sound and data gold records launched with the Voyager spacecrafts in 1977.
Musically, the styles range from the icy bass and keyboard opening of Vik Shirley and Billy Fuller’s ‘Schoenberg Express’ which bites like Berlin in winter, the underwater-Debussy feel of John Foxx and Nicholas Royle’s ‘The Passages’, the galactic swirl of ‘Hint of Wild Ghost’ from Minimums and David Gaffney, alongside the beat-generation, jazz-vibe of Sarah-Clare Conlon and Jez Dolan’s ‘Breathe Silence’ and the angular grind of ‘Miracle’ by Rosie Garland, Mat Thorpe & Tom Ashton of The March Violets.
Some of the Sleeve Notes artists were kind enough to give Joyzine a little more information on their contributions:
“We’re all shaped by the music we listen to, so I jumped at the chance to be involved when I was approached about a commission for Record Store Day.
I loved collaborating with writer David Gaffney on our piece Hint of Wild Ghost. It was great to bounce ideas off each other – David having thoughts on the music early on while I thought about how the words might flow in the track. The end result is a labour of love, taking the listener on a journey to reclaim a very special record.”
“My story is called Hint of Wild Ghost. I wanted to explore inside the head of an obsessive record collector who has an epiphany when he visits a large vintage record shop and discovers that ultimate happiness might lie in spending more time with the things he loves the most – records – not less, and playing on the Japan ‘lyric the ghosts of my life/ blow wilder than before’.”
“I’d had an idea to write something about the Voyager Golden Record and thought it would work well with Andy Hodson’s Distance Listening project – which uses a modular synth set up, and so is suitably spacey. He brought his set up round my house on a Friday afternoon, and I’d just finished the first draft of my story, and we did it in a single session, recording around fifteen minutes of music, that I extemporised the story over. I then sent him a much shorter version that he could edit together into the final piece. I like the additional echo he added to my vocal on the second half of the story, it really, increases the drama.”
“When I was asked to be one of the contributing writers to Sleeve Notes, I began by nailing down a narrative, which led me to think about the ritual of selecting and playing records, especially in the context of growing up and going round to friends’ houses to listen to music.
My jumping-off point then was messing about with the sounds of words – my aim is to imbue my poetry with an aural quality, for example through assonance and alliteration, percussion and sibilance, to create an evocative soundscape.
I invited artist and musician Jez Dolan to work with me, as I thought his double bass would provide the perfect back drop to my words, and, after an initial chat about influences and ideas, I spent an evening riffling through my vinyl collection, picking out artists I listened to as a teenager – Talking Heads, OMD, Prince, Kate Bush – and making notes on the noises of putting on a record, not just the songs themselves. I have a Pro-Ject deck and it doesn’t have an automatic arm lift, so the stylus just goes round and round at the end of a side, and it turned out each LP had a different kind of rhythmic quality.”
David Gaffney and Adrian Slatcher, who put this compilation together, should be very proud of their achievement. Collaborations should bring out the best in people as each ego is parked for a common goal, and Sleeve Notes is a great exemplar of how music and spoken word alliances can be extremely rewarding.
The SLEEVE NOTES event takes place on the Saturday 12 April 2025 (doors 6.30pm) at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation on Cambridge Street, Manchester. General entry is £5 (plus booking fee) or £10 (plus booking fee) to also receive a copy of the limited-edition cassette (£8 on its own).
Tickets HERE.
Review by Paul F Cook
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