Wales has given the world some strange things. There are love spoons, the
sport of bog-snorkelling, the Sinclair C5, and the Mosquito teen repeller —
a machine that emits a frightening noise to keep young hoodies away. And now
Cardiff has become the official cradle for one of the oddest and most
comical art forms ever devised.
Even if you haven’t heard the word “Sleeveface”, you may know what it
signifies. You may have caught adverts in which people are having fun with
the covers of LP records, using them as modern-day masks to impersonate
George Michael, Mick Hucknall or Blondie. You may have seen websites devoted
to Sleevefaces, or glimpsed people larking about with covers in a record
shop while the staff aren’t looking.
You may even be one of the many Britons who have attended a Sleeveface party,
in which revellers bring a new dimension to familiar 12-inch-square
photographs of Madonna’s head, Bruce Springsteen’s bottom or Tina Turner’s
egs. Very soon, you will be able to buy a book packed with choice examples
of the Sleeveface genre from around the world.
A small minority have probably been messing around with LP covers in this way,
in private, ever since the dawn of the gramophone. Folks do get up to all
sorts behind closed doors. But not until last year did the activity acquire
a universal name and catch on like wildfire. And it all began at the Buffalo
Bar in central Cardiff.
It is hard to imagine this inconspicuous drinking hole as the seedbed for a
side-splitting international craze, plonked as it is in a sober street
dominated by a grey gothic church and the red-brick offices of surveyors,
solicitors, planning consultants and estate agents. But it was at the
Buffalo that, one evening early in 2007, a locally based Englishman called
Carl Morris was fatefully spinning records as a DJ. “I was playing this
eclectic mix of tunes,” remembers Morris, 27, as he sits in the bar a
year and a half later. It may have been the hand of destiny that decreed he
was limited to playing old vinyl records, as there was no facility here for
playing CDs.
One of the discs he had with him was McCartney II, whose cover has a
particularly quizzical head-and-shoulders shot of the ex-Beatle. “I was just
goofing around with the sleeve, pretending to be Paul McCartney.
I probably attempted a Liverpudlian accent. People tell me I’d done things
like that before — only this time, I had a picture taken of me with the
sleeve. Later I started experimenting to see what other sleeves worked.”
Beside Morris today is his friend and fellow Cardiff-based Englishman John
Rostron, 36, who says he quickly caught on to the new trend, bringing piles
of album sleeves to the Buffalo for further fun photography. Rostron
co-founded the My Kung Fu record label with Morris; he also promotes pop
concerts, and like Morris has the sort of formidable record collection that
comes in handy for such antics. “To start with, we put the pictures up on a
web page for the record label,” says Rostron. “But then we started putting
them on Facebook, and that’s when it really took off. It was Carl who came
up with the name ‘Sleeveface’.”
“I remember trying to think of a name before I went to sleep one night,” says
Morris. It can’t be long before it’s in the OED: Google “Sleeveface” and
you’ll get hundreds of thousands of matches.
By the time Morris and Rostron had set up a dedicated Sleeveface website, they
had Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all fishing through their vinyl, making their own
illusions and sharing them on the net.
It helps that, like pornography and Mr Bean, Sleevefacing speaks a visual
language and is thus instantly international. “It’s interesting when people
from another country get into it,” says Morris. “We had a spike of South
American people doing it with all these covers that were totally new to us.”
Rostron describes a visit to France when he met, by chance, some pochette de
disque enthusiasts who held Sleeveface parties. “They treated me like a
famous person.”
For those who are still confused by the mechanics of the phenomenon, Morris
and Rostron have laboured to produce a careful verbal definition. So
Sleevefacing is officially “one or more persons obscuring or augmenting any
part of their body with record sleeve(s) causing an illusion”. But in fact,
the rules of the game have grown empirically and organically rather than
being laid down from the start. Dressing up and using props and unusual
locations are allowed — even encouraged. “Now and again someone would use
image manipulation, and it just didn’t feel right,” says Morris. “It just
seemed natural to have a rule that you shouldn’t Photoshop.” The “one or
more persons” stipulation has already been widely broken, with family pets
entering into the Sleeveface spirit — a fine example being Barbra
Streisand’s fluffy head, courtesy of her Greatest Hits Volume 2, on a black
labrador. “But I find it quite odd when people use babies,” says Morris.
“There’s a Johnny Mathis one with a child’s body, and it’s a little bit
disturbing.”
“But we like the way it’s become an activity for whole families,” adds
Rostron. “Rather than saying ‘Let’s go to Center Parcs,’ they Sleeveface.”
Apart from anything else, Sleevefacing is a new way to meet people, claim its
inventors. “We know this woman who’s got into it,” explains Rostron, “and
she used to do flash-mobbing. But she says you’d just turn up, do something
funny and leave, so she didn’t get to meet anybody. But Sleevefacing is more
social.”
If these pictures weren’t so funny, you could call them “conceptual art” and
enter them for the Turner prize. And it’s curious that this new branch of
silent comedy has emerged from the world of audio. David Bowie, whose
frequent self-depiction on his albums has made him a popular Sleeveface
subject, has called it “just the best sight gag in ages”. But why, exactly,
is it funny?
One reason may be that it subverts familiar celebrity images that were
originally intended to be admired, respected and taken seriously. Even John
Travolta, so broad-minded that he subscribes to an alien-fixated religion,
probably never imagined that we would one day be laughing at his head
positioned on a woman’s body. Some of the humour may also derive from what
the philosopher Henri Bergson, dissecting comedy a century ago, called “the
momentary transformation of a person into a thing”. Other cultural phenomena
that have strayed into this territory include those cheesy life-size
cartoons you used to find on British seaside piers, with holes for people to
pop their heads through.
There may still be the odd soul in the world, even in the place where it
began, who isn’t aware of Sleevefacing. During the interview at the Buffalo
Bar, Morris explained that when he was deejaying the night before, he was
fooling around with a 12-inch single by one of Britain’s best-loved female
talents. “I was Sleevefacing with Kate Bush last night,” he announced,
drawing confused and envious glances.
Sleeveface: Be the Vinyl, by Carl Morris and John Rostron (published by
Artisan, December 1, price £8.99), is available at the offer price of £8.54,
inc p&p, from BooksFirst, tel: 0870 165 8585
