New Wave Vinyls : Du Post Punk à la New Pop

I'm spending a pleasant Sunday morning leafing thru a book I found washed up on a French beach last summer... well not exactly washed up - I found this book, a coffee-tabled sized tome which collects together a couple of hundred album covers from the post-punk, new wave years, on the shelf of a discount book store located by the French seaside. Quite a find considering the store was teeming with the worst kind of bargain-bin books, but near the rear of the shop, my eye was drawn to a book sporting the unmistakable sleeve art from Unknown Pleasures

Like similar graphics collections, this one has contextual notes running throughout the book and while I can't comment on that given it's entirely in French, the choice of album covers reproduced in the book is surprisingly comprehensive, from UK post-punk, (Gang of Four, Magazine) US art-rock (Pere Ubu, The Residents) new wave electro-pop (Depeche Mode, New Order), Industrial (Throbbing Gristle, Current 93) and various pop and rock artifacts from the 80's. More than anything else this book makes me miss my years of collecting vinyl when album art came in 12 inches and albums had two distinct sides. I got my first record player in 1989 and quickly amassed a pretty decent collection of death metal LPs, which I later sold off when I fell out of love with the metal scene (every metaller eventially does). My second great record collection thankfully had more longevity and to this day I still have most of those records bought in my late-teens/early twenties - I say most, because I seem to have lost a few items over the years, like my vinyl copy of My Life In the Bush of Ghosts, bought at a car booth sale one drizzly Sunday afternoon in the car park of a church in Greystones, Wicklow. Where is it now I wonder ? But back to the book and I'll round out this post with some favourite album covers featured among the pages...