Here Comes the Summertime
My personal least favourite of all of them is Here Comes the Summertime - the ideas are fairly clear. The circle of caterpillars somehow seemed appropriate, the lyrics are handwritten, there's some kelp, and the weird seashore shape going diagonally across the image. The earliest attempts were blue:
The weather symbol in the middle - loosely styled on the BBC's symbols - doesn't entirely work unfortunately - we probably should have chosen either a cloud or a sun. But instead we were concentrating on making everything go a murky green colour:
The final result is definitely better than that green one, but ultimately compared to all the other singles it just seems a little bit of a mess:
Blood, Sweat and Tears
As you saw last week, many of the elements that worked their way into the fourth single actually came from the Remission remix EP. Even this had a couple of false starts though - here's the working version:
Which obviously still needed a bit of fine tuning (although if you're looking for trivia, that isn't actually a sad face - it's a character from one of the Inuit fonts I found on my computer).
This mimics the album sleeve very closely: the floppy disc has been replaced with a View-Master reel; the interference pattern has been replaced with a picture of our Korg Prophecy in the background (playing the patch "Lovely Noise") and the waveform has been replaced with the semaphore version of the song's lyrics. Finally, the icon in the centre is a droplet (although it hasn't been confirmed whether this is in fact blood, sweat, or a tear).
You can listen to Blood, Sweat and Tears here.
Intermission
For the final sleeve on the Transmission project, we had a lot of elements to combine. We did have a couple of leftover sleeve ideas, one of which we had vaguely been considering for Golden Wheel, if it had ever been a single:
I had also at one point considered wasting some money and getting an actual 7" single pressed for Distant Moon, for which this might have been the artwork:
Note the image of Simon playing his synths, which sadly still didn't make it onto the final release. I particularly liked the moon icon on this one, which sadly never saw the light of day on an actual release. For the final version, we toned down the colour slightly, and combined our favourite bits of both the sleeves:
I think the waveform on the right hand side may still actually be from the vocals for Distant Moon, but it didn't seem to matter hugely with this release. The spider icon, web, and vinyl are there from the Golden Wheel sleeve, and most of the elements are there from Distant Moon too.
You can listen to Intermission here.
So that concludes our little journey through the artwork of the Transmission era. Hopefully you've enjoyed the trip!
