Today we look at the album art of two essential artists who continue the North West post punk tradition. Today we look at the front covers of LoneLady’s Hinterland and Total Victory’s English Martyrs and what messages and themes they may convey. What’s in a cover?
LoneLady (Julie Campbell) makes post punk and dance music made from the very DNA of Manchester. Hinterland is her most recent full length album.
On Hinterland (close-by to an ‘Interzone’?), an image of factory decay and abandonment is used to represent Manchester’s industrial heritage; the damp spaces, resonant halls and sodium strips. More so than previous Manchester bands, LoneLady is an artist obsessed with concrete. She’s Ballard with a guitar. Puressence may have touched upon living in a post industrial landscape, but their heart was with people trying to find a way ahead (“take another pill to make me feel better”), Julie sides with the bricks and mortar.
The sky, bleached white to represent the creeping anodyne of gentrification. The chimneys disappear into that white, disappearing into the smog/ past.
The << rewind symbol, an emblem of the HiFi / VCR age reminds us that all technology, like industry, has a shelf life. Analogue passed to digital and at some stage digital too will fade away (“fade away, fade away”). For a city that revels in progress, rewinding/returning seems a strange choice. “Which brings us back to zero” sang The Chameleons, which is a key MCR lyric for life repeating, returning. Here the <<‘s represent “what went before”, the classic function of history to consider today as a product of yesterday. Each relic stands as a record.
The <<‘s give the album a large of slice of Peter Saville style, positioning Hinterland among the back catalogue of New Order, her pagan idols. Hinterland fits in between Low Life and Brotherhood as neatly as Tetris blocks.
Julie herself floats ghost-like amidst the cover / amidst the ruins. A physical part of the world she portrays though, not some idle spectre. Giving life to the harsh environment, just as her warm voice does to the music. She cuts a Romantic figure, the Bryon of brutalism.
Finally, between the chevrons of the rewind symbol, the leaves on the branches seem to form a pair of eyes, gazing at us, looking at Hinterland. See if you can spot them…
Julie Campbell is her city’s finest exponent of psycho-geography and effortlessly, the album art of Hinterland works to support her passions, world view and head space.
https://lonelady.bandcamp.com/album/hinterland-2
We’ve paired LoneLady’s Hinterland with Total Victory’s English Martyrs, partly due to if you love one, chances are you’ll love the other. In a bit of lazy shorthand the band will hate, with their blend of social commentary and humour, fans of The Fall and Half Man Half Biscuit should enjoy Total Victory. Their earlier keystone song ‘Conservative Girls’ features the chorus “so you bring your new girl home, you say you’ve fallen in love, with traffic islands and supermarkets and shopping centres, that go on forever” acts as a linking point between LoneLady and Total Victory.
Their most recent album, English Martyrs is a thrilling exploration of identity, patriotism and nationality. What makes a national identity? The central song is ‘Once In Every Century’ which has the key chorus:
“Every culture started from nothing / And develops until it’s full of the hubris / That comes from revering itself / And it’s sick from the myth / It breaks down in a ditch and it forms into silt.”
The front cover of English Martyrs shows King Penda, from the Alan Clarke movie Penda’s Fen. This ties English Martyrs with the folk horror tradition, especially when we consider nationality as something spawned from mud and silt. “This hilltop corresponds with every single last moment in time”, as geography and history become one, one reflects the other, one tells the story of the other. We live surrounded by history, Total Victory read it in hills and mud, LoneLady reads it in factories and waste land.
King Penda, surveys the land below him, just as Total Victory survey England. Identity and nationality, formed from the mud below, is viewed and dissected. Like The Fall’s Grotesque, a set of representative characters inhabit the songs. Both English Martyrs and Grotesque are Hogarth prints made with guitars.
https://totalvictory.bandcamp.com/album/english-martyrs
So from Ballard with guitars to Hogarth with guitars, LoneLady and Total Victory offer the best in modern music, and the best insights into the world around them, and the world around us. All life contained here…
More stuff to read!
What’s In A Cover? John Cale’s Vintage Violence and Jennie Vee’s Spying
What’s In A Cover? Johnny Thunders’ So Alone and Television’s Marquee Moon
“Full, if hyperbolic” review of English Martyrs *
The Real New Manchester: LoneLady
*(“if hyperbolic” refers to the nice person who shared the review on the HMHB message board!)
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