9.00 am. A trip to town to buy equipment storage boxes from Charlie’s — our cheap and cheerful, have everything, nearest you get to a, hardware store in Aberystwyth. 10.00 am. I set about designing the cover for R B V E Ǝ T N Ƨ O A. When I was 14 to 16 years of age, I created cover art for my experimental music bands: Hunter (1972-3) and Orange (1975-6). (I really should have copyrighted the title of the second. Who’d have thought):

Then, the artwork was hand made. In the days before the domestication of graphics software, ‘cut and paste’ was not a metaphor, and the only means of reproducing an image, non-professionally, was a black and white, too high-contrast photocopier, at 5p a time. The original cassette covers have either been lost or deteriorated with time. The only residue is the album notes, clumsily hand-typed but retaining a period charm:

My homespun experience in graphic design, which I furthered even while studying for a BA Fine Art degree, secured me my first job on graduation. Nothing is ever wasted.

By lunchtime, I’d complete a draft of the front cover:

2.00 pm. I began work on the back cover while updating elements of my website. 4.15 pm. The back cover draft was complete. It’s a beginning, and I now have a clear sense of the design character for the interior:

4.30 pm. I returned to an album by Hunter entitled Undulate, which I recorded with Robert Atkins and Andrew price in August 1973, when I was 14 years of age. I isolated (as far as it was possible) and extracted the sound of my circuit bending sounds from the three-part track in order to rework them into redux/mashup version.

Jack Bruce died today, aged 71.

An evening with the family.