“There are plenty more gems out there”: How to reissue a record in 8 steps with Mr Bongo

Step 5: Nail the artwork

Dave: The other big problem is finding vinyl covers that are good quality enough to make a copy, and if you’re trying to replicate that for vinyl you’ve got to get an original that’s good. Andy probably spent a year doing this one because the original one has this pigmented paper so it’s is all broken, which means when you scan it, you can’t get a scan of it. I’m not sure how he did it. And a lot of old records will all be damaged in the same way or they’ll have a light problem, it’s gone green here on all of them, so you might have to get four or five copies and then you’re still not happy.

A lot of our sleeves now we’re doing in Japan. We managed to find a really good guy. So this Labi Siffre record, you can feel the thickness of it, they make this thick card. And to do that in the UK it’d be like £6. You can see there’s a fold. In the UK that would have to be hand-stuck, but in Japan they’ve got machines because they’ve always made them like this. Because the Yen’s pretty weak it makes sense for us to do them there.

So there’s a lot of attention to this detail. Even to the extent that even in this album there’s a couple of typos originally so we kept them in and things like that. What we try and do is give you the album as original, with all the text, and then you’ve got the wrap with the barcode but you can take that off and then effectively you’re left with what was originally there.

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