14 Jun 2018

In celebration of South African musical heritage and music expert, Rob Allingham, took musical enthusiasts on a guided tour of his exhibition of 150 selected sleeve covers, which represents the most interesting, important and beautiful South African musical history.

The exhibition themed, ‘September Jive’, pays tribute to some of the best South African sleeve covers with a special focus on truly South African designs. The selection of the sleeves went as far back as from the 1970s, made by Allingham and three other collectors and designers.

Allingham, who had been serving as an archive manager for over 10 years, said he fell in love with South African music in the 70s, where his archive work into African township and Afrikaans music helped to revive its commercial mainstream and made it more profitable.

Taking a trip down memory lane on South African music history, he explained that the make and design of sleeve covers were designed as a form of advertisement meant to entice customers to buy the records, which most times were not reflective of what the records were about.

“As some of these sleeve covers show, designers mostly used beautiful African art to adorn the sleeves and this was a deliberate method to make the music appeal to a certain group of audience and make the records appeal to them,” he added. Record labels were the ones that decided on what to put on the sleeve covers, he added. As years went on, he said there was a significant change in how the sleeve covers were designed as people now started to become creative in their designs as demonstrated through the sophistication of images on the covers which were brilliantly made.“It was early in the 1990s, when we started noticing these changes.This was mainly because record labels were no longer exclusive abattoirs of the record sleeve designs, as artists were now starting to have an input in how their sleeve covers were to be designed,” he noted.

Allingham has however raised a concern over the way it had now become difficult for people to access disks because record labels were now doing away with CD’s and downloads as they want people to stream music direct from the internet. He said that presented an uncertain future for album sleeve covers, which were now becoming defunct artworks ENDS