Do you want the Slaughter And The Dogs one in a plain sleeve, mate? Might be best ...

 ... or, to put it another way, I wax lyrical (ahem) about what surrounds the vinyl ...

It's hardly revolutionary to point out that people often care about the artwork that music comes wrapped up in. Though I can remember the days when 7" singles often came in plain-white or black paper sleeves (boring), for most of the last 40 years your little bit of new music (single, LP, cassette, CD) has almost certainly been delivered to you in something colourful, powerful or clever, or at least something that isn't white paper. Even MP3s have artwork to go with them and so do streaming services. To your average music obsessive this certainly matters. Back in 1981, as a 17-year-old purchaser of (for example) Dead Kennedys records, I spent time poring over the sleeves looking for any scrap of information and design feature which would in some way "elucidate" the music. Yes, you had Jello Biafra's warbly-weirdo voice and the ominous pile-driver hardcore-y sounds of the band, but … what on earth was that incredibly scary looking photo on the cover of Holiday In Cambodia? And what was that photo of the cars on fire on their Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables LP? (Fun fact: when I watched the YouTube video of Holiday In Cambodia just now I had to wait for an ad from … lowcostholidays.com! And naturally all the on-the-page ads on the Google page were about luxury holidays in Cambodia. Truly, irony died with automated digital advertising). Back in those pre-internet days every detail mattered. I recall looking at the super-dense John Heartfield-like Gee Vaucher collages on Crass records and feeling as if I was trying to decode a secret, highly-charged language. We were post-punk teenagers deciphering anarcho-punk hieroglyphs! And, of course, there was just the pure pleasure of seeing things like Malcolm Garrett's fluttering hearts Buzzcocks sleeve ("After Marcel Duchamp") to Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've) or the always-interesting Peter Saville designs for Factory records. I should even add that the record companies' own sleeves were sometimes reasonably well designed - the Phonogram one on the left-handside in the photo to this post for example.

No records were harmed in the creation of this photograph 

It goes without saying that music can mean a lot to people (just a few notes never mind a whole song), and so can the images that are attached to the music in question. In my own flat, frustrated librarian that I am, I've got quite a lot of tapes (TDK C90s mostly) onto which I’ve recorded about a thousand albums down the years. They're on neat white shelves, looking vaguely like one of Damien Hirst's "pharmacy-period" installation things. There's no artwork (these are plain white cassette inlay cards) so the "neatness" somehow matters - it's the de facto "art". By contrast, though, I've got my records arranged with some sleeves facing outwards so I can see them every day. Let that art hit me straight in the face, right? Recalling again those plain-white 7" record sleeves of the seventies, I wonder now why I didn't draw something on them. ​It would have been kind of ... creative. I was too reverential - thinking "this is how they're sold, this is how I should keep them". Instead, in an act which would come to define my approach to life, I just neatly wrote the artist and song title in the top-right corner in my best block-caps ...