Showing posts with label WESTMINSTER GOLD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WESTMINSTER GOLD. Show all posts

Thursday, May 4, 2023

classical eye candy - Westminster Gold


No doubt everyone is familiar with this Zardozzy cover.

Hadn't really clocked that there was a whole discography of releases from Westminster Gold with a similar visual pitch presumably aimed at the younger, "with it" generation. The work of a designer called Christopher Whorf

Lots of cheesecake imagery

That one made me think of Metal Box, of course.

Also visual puns and japes that are vaguely in the vicinity of what Hipgnosis would do, or the Island samplers like El Pea.  I'm not totally sure what the joke is with the one below

Most of the Westminster Gold are not illustrations or designs but photographs of objects or assemblages


Or it will be a photograph of a person or group of people posed in an absurd or quasi-erotic scantily glad posture or tableau. 

That one combines the cheesecake and the visual pun - "phwooar, take a look at her bust(s)"

Mostly the covers are notable for the well-lit clarity of the photograph, but some go in for a vaseline-on-the-lens blurriness that seems quite modish to the era.  This one looks like it could be from an advert for condoms, or perhaps an Emmanuelle-type softcore skinflick.


Even the labels are snazzy and un-classical


Mostly the releases are middlebrow, well-known classical composers and works (I have no idea how well regarded these versions are by cognoscenti). But there's a few oddball and avant inclusions. e.g. 


This one below by Professor Emerson Myers of the Catholic University of America (!) was considered sufficiently avant to be Creel Poned. (The vinyl is the only Westminster Gold album I own, I think).





Below you will find an immense number of Westminster Gold sleeves, but it falls a little short of the full set - on Discogs, often I'd click on the promising looking image only to end up with a different, more standard-classical sleeve. 

 























































































































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They also tried a different tack with these colorful abstract patterns








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