IAN PEEL‘S A TO Z POP of
LIS FOR… LINER NOTES
LAST ISSUE, I PONDERED THE SHORT-LIVED AND HIGHLY-INFLUENTIAL WORLD OF NEW POP. AND ONE FACET IN PARTICULAR BEGGED FURTHER INVESTIGATION: THE LINER NOTES.
AsI said at the time, New Pop set out to glamorise the business of music, rather than leaving the music business to glamorise it. ABC with The Lexicon Of Love, for example, presented an album and its singles on their own record label, with their own advertising, catalogue numbers and liner notes.
All these trappings made it more than ‘just’ an LP, and the story starts before you take the vinyl out of the cover with those notes: “A to Z affectionately, 1 to 10 alphabetically. From here to eternity without in-betweens…”