Filling in the Blanks: The World of Homemade Album Covers

To celebrate the publication of her new book, Sleeve Notes, photographer Dominique Russell takes us into the weird world of the many handmade record sleeves that have turned over the years at the record shop where her dad works

For the last few years, I’ve been photographing a sizable collection of fan-made record sleeves that have washed up at the second-hand record store Crazy Beat in Upminster, Essex. My dad works in the shop, and this venture began when he brought me two handmade 45 sleeves – one for Sex Pistols, another for T.Rex – that at some point in the 1970s had been decorated with newspaper clippings stuck to the inner sleeves with crispy, yellowing Sellotape. Both are rough and ready,

as are most of the fan-made sleeves in the collection. But the things they seem to say about music fandom are often nuanced and profound.

Since that first pair, my dad has supplied me with more and more of these sleeves, all of which have been handmade by different individuals for myriad reasons and across several decades. Three years later, the collection stands at over 200. Though the aesthetic tends to be reliably scrappy,  they have often been used to express teenage fandom or infatuation. Most display extensive creativity, using original design in felt tip, paint, pencil, biro and typewritten text. Some are elaborate, painstaking acts of devotion, multi-coloured frescos that sprawl out across the full expanse of the inner sleeve. Others are tossed-off fragments of past lives lost to the ebb and flow of time: phone numbers, shopping lists, grovelling love letters.

The post Filling in the Blanks: The World of Homemade Album Covers appeared first on The Quietus.