Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake

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More psychedelia (there’s always more psychedelia). Listening to this Small Faces album this week I couldn’t remember whether my vinyl reissue from the 1980s had survived the vinyl purge I instituted a few years ago. It turns out I do still have the vinyl copy, a facsimile of the original circular sleeve. Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake was released in 1968. Despite the innovative sleeve design and the generally tripped-out atmosphere (especially on side two) it seldom gets included in retrospectives of psychedelic album art. This is surprising since for design and execution it’s far better than the sleeves for Their Satanic Majesties Request and Magical Mystery Tour, the latter a great album with a really awful cover. I suspect the Small Faces’ album gets overlooked because the most typically psychedelic aspect of the artwork—the drawing/collage below—is hidden inside, the rest of the cover being a careful imitation of an “Ogdens’ Nut-brown Flake” tobacco tin. XTC borrowed the circular sleeve idea for their 1984 album The Big Express.

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Interior panel. Illustration by P. Brown.

The drawing is credited to one “P. Brown”; the sleeve design, we’re told, was the work of Mick Swan who did nothing else in this area. If I’m vague about the details it’s because my copies of the album (CD and vinyl) contain no information other than the label copy. I imagine recent reissues which have had booklet notes will are more enlightening. This page has some comments from the band as to how the tobacco tin idea came about.

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The opened-out sleeve.

Original copies of this album used to command high prices (so to speak) since the fragile nature of the hinges holding together each part of the sleeve meant they rapidly wore out. Subsequent editions tended to be in regular square sleeves. My CD edition from 1989 was the first to make the most of the tobacco tin concept by packaging the whole thing in a tin. Inside you get a small reproduction of the fold-out sleeve and six somewhat redundant beer mats or coasters.

The band played two-thirds of the album on the BBC’s Colour Me Pop in 1968, complete with an appearance by Stan “The Man” Unwin who provides the “loony links” on the second side of Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake. Most editions of Colour Me Pop are lost but that episode survived, and may be watched here.

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The opened-out sleeve (obverse).

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The Dukes declare it’s 25 O’Clock!

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25 O’Clock (1985). Andy Partridge’s great cover design.

The DUKES say it’s time…it’s time to visit the planet smile…it’s time the love bomb was dropped…it’s time to eat music…it’s time to kiss the sun…it’s time to drown yourself in SOUNDGASM and it’s time to dance through the mirror. The DUKES declare it’s 25 O’CLOCK.

It was twenty-five years today—April 1st, 1985—that Virgin Records released what was supposed to be a reissue of a lost psychedelic album from the late 1960s, 25 O’Clock by The Dukes of Stratosphear. The catalogue number was WOW 1 and the vinyl label was printed with the old black-and-white Virgin logo by Roger Dean even though Virgin Records wasn’t founded until 1972. No one was supposed to know that the album was really a pastiche project by XTC but I don’t recall anyone actually being fooled by this, all the reviews acknowledged XTC as the originators, and band members Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding were happy to give interviews enthusing about their musical obsessions. As well as being incredibly successful artistically the album was a surprising commercial success which led the bemused record label to ask for a sequel. Psonic Psunspot followed two years later, and the Dukes’ vibe infected XTC’s own work for a while, with their 1988 album, Oranges & Lemons, pitched somewhere between the pastiches and XTC’s more usual sound .

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Psonic Psunspot (1987). Design by Dave Dragon and Ken Ansell.

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