The Inner Sleeve: Graham Dolphin

Sonic Youth – Daydream Nation (Blast First 2xLP 1988)
Cover paintings by Gerhard Richter

As is often the case, an older sibling guided my early musical tastes. From pooling our pocket money to buy our first single (which I’d like to think was Tubeway Army’s “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” but was more likely The Force’s disco version of the Star Wars theme) to forever recording songs from the radio and trying, in vain, to edit out the inane chatter of the DJ. It wasn’t until my brother left home for university and started to send tapes back that music became something more than simple, cheery, singalong pop sounds.

I can remember, in minute detail, the moment I first heard one of those tapes. In the back seat of my parents’ car, dad driving mum and me home after the big food shop. Dusk outside, the familiarity of the A518 barely registering in my mind, and me, 16, listening on a pair of cheap headphones to his new tape. Track one was “Budd” by Rapeman, track two, “Teenage Riot” by Sonic Youth.

What I don’t recall is the cover he had made for the tape. We seemed to spend most of our childhoods making collaged covers for the D90s we had recorded from vinyl borrowed from our local record library, the floor of our bedrooms filled with minuscule fragments of magazine clippings. These obsessively crafted covers attempted to create a feeling of the music they housed, the inside covers crammed with every possible detail from the records – recording date, group members, producer, recording engineer... I didn’t get to see the cover for either Budd or Daydream Nation until he brought the records home at Christmas, and although Budd was great, with its clear typography and die-cut sleeve, it was Daydream Nation that intrigued me more.

I recognised the cover paintings. I was taking A Level art in school and one teacher had a stack of Artforum magazines in which I had seen these paintings. I didn’t know they were by Gerhard Richter, or even who he was, but here was an image from an artwork on a record. This meant the group knew about art and that fact alone felt important to me.

Art, until this point, had been rather grey – literally in most cases, as all the art books in school were of 1960s vintage, with tiny black and white reproductions surrounded by a sea of theoretical text. They all had an unloved, dusty smell to them. Art smelt old. I hadn’t seen much art in the flesh. Living in a provincial English town, there wasn’t any to be seen, but I had heard lots of music and, in comparison, art just wasn’t competing.

But this cover broke that barrier between artforms. The paintings had been appropriated by the group and not commissioned or designed for the cover in the way, for example, Warhol had worked with The Velvet Underground. The album sounds better, somehow, for using those paintings, and Richter is cooler for the association. For me, it suddenly felt like art could possibly generate the same urgency and excitement as the noise I was hearing in the playing of Thurston, Lee, Kim and Steve.

I learnt later that Sonic Youth were old hands at referencing and working with artists. Through them I suddenly had a library of living artists I could look to: Dan Graham, Richard Kern, Mike Kelley, Raymond Pettibon, Richard Prince and Christopher Wool. This ceaseless championing of peers from all artforms became as important a guide for me as my brother.

Artist Graham Dolphin’s work includes reappropriating iconic objects from music and fashion. 117 Sonic Youth Songs (2007) features 117 Sonic Youth lyrics scratched in miniature on the sleeve of Daydream Nation. In January 2010, Dolphin’s recent films were screened in English Journey Reimagined (Chapter One) at Aldeburgh Music. His solo exhibition opened at Seventeen Gallery, London, in February. seventeengallery.com