Green Sleeves: In Their Own Words: Printers and Designers

“In the 1970s postcards for bands like the Miami Showband, Dickie Rock, Eileen Reid and the Cadets and others were printed as promotional materials by Abbey Printers on Corporation Street. The postcards were high quality five colour productions in runs of 1,000 or more. These were not sold but given away.”

Michael Murphy  |  Printer

“I was pleased with the finished work in most cases.  Designing the format of a record sleeve was a particular kind of design challenge, so the artwork was conceived specifically to work in that format.”

Pat Musick  |  Illustrator

“In the 1960s and 1970s records were the big thing. In the 1980s cassettes came in and they actually matched and exceeded record sales by the mid-1980s. Cassettes were much easier to do.”

Billy Ryan  |  Printer

“Punk brought about a real change. The attitude was that this might be the only record you would release so that made people less inclined to put photographs on the cover – they were keen to try to put the best, most striking printed imagery on the records. There was a fusion of ideas between musicians, printers and designers / artists / illustrators who went through art colleges. Suddenly it was possible to do 200 singles and make it work. could sell, get airplay, hold well-attended gigs, sell T-shirts. But there was no great plan – stuff happened. Punk had to have a printed sleeve, had to have a good image.”

Hugo McGuinness  |  Photographer

“I cannot remember dealing with any printing house involved in printing album covers in hot metal days. However I was aware of the record industry through my involvement with Claddagh Records and the other company in Glasnevin. My own opinion is that the old record sleeves printed from letterpress and hot metal were always better as they were produced where there was more skill involved.”

Michael Lynam  |  Typographer and Printer

“At Harlequin Bindings in Baldoyle orders would come in for record sleeves to be assembled. These would see women brought in on short term contracts. They could easily fold and glue up to 500 sleeves an hour.”

Alf McCormack  |  Printer

“I often worked closely with the printers, particularly if the artwork proved to have any problems. I can’t remember any specific problems. Claddagh were careful to use professional photographers to give the printer a choice of high quality material for production. The large format of double LPs always gave a striking impression to the cover material.”

Peter Wildbur  |  Designer

“In terms of output Task, where I worked, might have 1000 print runs on an album. Dakota by contrast, as the largest outfit printing albums, would easily have 20,000 runs depending on the job. And jobbing printers wouldn’t know or do die cut whereas Dakota did.”

Billy Ryan  |  Printer

“For the most part sleeve printing was a commercial entity and not considered fine art, so one had to largely take pot luck on the way a sleeve might ultimately appear when printed. Another factor related to this that the same artwork file could look quite different it terms of overall colour, depending on where in the print run it was printed or indeed on a subsequent reprint. The process aside from the physical manufacture varied from project to project as sometimes the brief came from the label, sometimes from the band or artist management and, on occasion, from the artist directly.”

Steve Averill  |  Designer

“Import tariffs, VAT and point of entry taxes made it cheaper to print a lot of albums by international artists in Ireland. Jim Reeves etc. would be typical of artists we worked on. All work and film and master die was sent to Dublin (from London or US) and in two weeks they’d be up and running.”

Billy Ryan  |  Printer