It’s surely no coincidence that Athena relaunched during Wimbledon week. For younger readers, this was a high street store back in the day, marketing framed posters to a generation for whom flat screen tellies were as much a dream as a Scotsman reaching the semi-finals.
Instead, to save us staring at the four bare walls, your student bedsit could be adorned with Tennis Girl, Man Trying Not To Drop Baby, or Woman With Weirdly Blue Face.
Now, you can instead adorn your wall with album covers – ‘classic’ sleeves blown up to twice their normal size (and 10 times their cost). Despite the first announcements leaning heavily towards metal, there’s an odd lack of bare bottoms, the Queen and Hendrix collections perhaps abridged for reasons of decency. The ever-expanding catalogue runs from tasteful to downright ugly, from Lady Gaga to Green Day via Justin Bieber and Slipknot. The description of Black Sabbath’s ‘Paranoid’ is almost apologetic, and rightly so, for the image of a bloke running through a forest with a crash helmet and a dayglo sword, like he’s part of a Sealed Knot re-enactment of a 70s sci-fi B-movie.
Personally I’d like to see some designs by the great album cover designers. Factory Records’ Peter Saville was a genius, though flawed, often turning in posters after the gig they advertised had taken place. And there was ‘Return of the Durutti Column’ – encased in heavy duty sandpaper, and surely ideal for sliding in between your Rush and Guns N’Roses album sleeves. There are other designers worthy of a place above your mantlepiece, in case anyone from Athena is reading. Malcolm Garrett (who did many of Simple Minds, Magazine, Duran Duran and Peter Gabriel’s covers) is a rich source for new material, although Roger Dean’s incredibly elaborate prog rock sleeves for Yes, Uriah Heep and Gentle Giant could still fill a gap (especially the triple gatefolds). There’s also a slightly smaller portfolio by Jamie Reid who created the Sex Pistols cut-out lettering and infamous ‘Bollocks’ album art, which could still offend any visiting grandparents. So while the art of skimming through a record collection at a house party might be dying due to digital, now you can display your favourites on the wall.
But nothing says “I am cooler than you can ever hope to be” than a T shirt. Of course, like that nightmare scenario when two women show up a party in the same dress, nothing says conformity like matching tees. Even Primark and Sainsburys stock the Ramones’ classic ‘Presidential Seal’ shirt, the band now having made more from merchandise than record sales – or, would have were any of them still alive. Their legacy lives on however, through third-generation fans who may one day purchase a record player, and discover there’s an album inside that sleeve on their living room wall…

Mission of Burma
Signals, Calls and Marches
(Fire)
Step back in time to 1979 and you can find plenty of bands counted as ‘seminal’, influencing their bigger-selling successors. This Minneapolis four-piece are cited more than most, with Nirvana and Pearl Jam among their admirers. Their early material was castigated for sounding too ‘clean’, but despite their punk roots, production was important with the use of tape loops being what set them aside from their peers – and why the likes of Blur, REM and Moby were moved to cover their tunes. Now remastered (first album ‘Vs.’ also gets a reissue) their debut EP comes bundled with early singles, including the much covered ‘That’s When I Reach for My Revolver’, and debut single ‘Academy Fight Song’ (an REM live favourite) . The 10 tunes here form a short but exhilarating collection – indeed, fans of Husker Du, Wire and even XTC will hear where the Boston quartet took their inspiration from.
HHHH

(This piece initially appeared in the Doncaster Star)