Daimh - Tuneship - Album Cover Design
Daimh are pretty legendary on the Folk scene and so they should be! Their sleeves rolled up, straight in your eye tune playing is universally accepted as some of the finest in the country and with their genuine west highland / east atlantic grounding, I think it's fair to say that they are one of the most connected bands to the genuine root of folk. So when the guys came calling with ideas of viking long ships, demented stag heads and tea towels I whole heartedly jumped on board.So the boys rolled into Glasgow, we sat in the office mulling over all kinds of ingenious craic. Some highlights from my notes of this meeting run a little something like this.• Commemorative Tea Towel• Signal Flags / Morse Code• Gillies arm wrestling• Stags - 5 years - Cabrách - 6 years - Laán• Mast Heads• Goats (explicit sexual content)• Seagulls in a bag• Trawlers• Long shipsSo aye, I was certainly not left short on inspiration after that meeting.When bands come to me, with so many cool and off the wall ideas as this. It opens my creativity up into something which is hard to quantify, it's fair to say that when I have such wild and mental ideas concepts to begin with I will often end up rambling of into cloud cuckoo land and create something which is just plain weird. Fair Play to Daimh, they weren't feart to let me loose and go with the chaos I might create. In fact they totally endorsed it, which I sincerely thank them for because in this case I am decidedly pleased with what we came up with.So the 'Tuneship' was born, inspired by a viking long ship bearing the same name. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tune_ship.So with such a fine visual reference as the wreck of this boat and the crazy imagery floating around my head the concept quickly took shape by hand at first, then cleaned up and tweaked in Adobe Illustrator. The cover also featured a bespoke logotype and the whole look of the illustration was dictated by the un negotiable fact that the design had to work on a tea towel. Now basing your whole design round a tea towel for an album cover might seem counter intuitive and that's because it is. Ross Martins genius merchandising concept of getting tea towels made is just totally excellent, it's a bit like a tote bag but 10 times more practical, will likely hang on folks stoves for a good 10 years and in a classic west coast mind set has a better chance of being bought by tourists than a CD.So aye, as far as I can tell you can't actually buy the CD unless you go and see the band play. Which I recommend you do.www.daimh.net