Monochrome Monday covers

Down By The Jetty and Horses
I‘m back to great album covers, and in both instances here, ground breaking records.

Down By The Jetty was the debut album by Dr Feelgood, and if you read the NME in 1974, as I did, you knew all about them. The cover shot is iconic, being in monchrome (the disc was also in mono), and shot at Canvey Island in a strong wind. The music was not completely revolutionary – ramped up R&B, but it was delivered with a kind of ‘don’t mess with us’ attitude. The singer growled and the guitarist shot back and  forth, looking to mow you down with his black and red Telecaster.

Then at the end of 1975, someone else appeared on a monochrome cover; Patti Smith. By this time the NME had told us that there was a new scene in New York featuring Tom Verlaine’s Television and the New York Dolls. There she is in a white shirt and a skinny black tie. By 1977, that was almost the uniform of choice for us born again punkers. And if you were in a club with U/V lights, it looked great. Smith’s debut, Horses, drew on R&B too, but was also poetic. She was the Dylan of the New Wave movement, and much of her poetry was better than his.

 In both cases, this was music without artefact or pretension, stripped down songs that you could dance to, but music that also made you think.