One of the fun things (for me, at least) about reading music/design books is gaining more insight into the entire process of recording music, from start to finish. And along the way, discovering new / forgotten artists and groups as well!
Although Barney Bubbles’ Wild World lacks a list of all the sleeves he designed or was involved in, it still showed me a few names I had never heard of…
One of those was Roger Béchirian, for whom Barney had come with a wonderful cover design based on Alex Steinweiss’ sleeves from the 1950s.
This graced a promo album called The Art of Roger Béchirian Vol. 1, released by F-Beat in 1982, which apparently was given away as a special Christmas present that year!
It contained 35 ‘snippets’ of songs on which Roger had a part in…
A quick search revealed that Roger is a well-known producer who has worked with several key artists that keep popping up here on Jokonky, plus quite a few obscure ones!
The liner notes of the album read as follows:
Although Barney Bubbles’ Wild World lacks a list of all the sleeves he designed or was involved in, it still showed me a few names I had never heard of…
One of those was Roger Béchirian, for whom Barney had come with a wonderful cover design based on Alex Steinweiss’ sleeves from the 1950s.
This graced a promo album called The Art of Roger Béchirian Vol. 1, released by F-Beat in 1982, which apparently was given away as a special Christmas present that year!
It contained 35 ‘snippets’ of songs on which Roger had a part in…
A quick search revealed that Roger is a well-known producer who has worked with several key artists that keep popping up here on Jokonky, plus quite a few obscure ones!
The liner notes of the album read as follows:
Welcome to the art of Roger Bechirian, a track-by-track guided tour through his career as producer of countless commercial successes and musically satisfying moments. All the artistes represented on this record have benefitted from Roger's deft hand at the controls, as on hits by Lene Lovich, The Undertones, The Photos, The Rumour, Squeeze, a.o.
Side two contains a varied selection of Roger's work, demonstrating his ability to produce top results over a wide and diverse range of musical styles: Elvis Costello, The dB’s, Dirty Looks, The Blues Band, Shakin’ Pyramids, a.o.
We trust that you will enjoy listening to this brief sampling of Roger's work. We would like to thank all the record companies involved for the loan of these snippets.
Yup, 15 different record companies were involved in this project!
Unnecessary to say that this album was never re-released in any form...
A bit of background, Roger was born in India but moved with his family to England when he was ten. He started developing his skills by editing music recorded from the TV! After taking college classes in electronics, he began working at a four-track recording studio in 1972.
Roger met Stiff Records founders Jake Rivera and Dave Robinson in 1974 and began mixing songs for the label. He slowly evolved into a producer, but also performed as a musician, being a member of Blanket of Secrecy!
This enabled me to include some later songs as well, from after 1982.
The resulting compilation includes 24 songs ranging from 1979 to 1987, focusing on singles releases only.
By the way, in case you’re wondering, Roger is still active as a producer and a fun interviewee, check it out here. He has some great stories to tell about his work with Elvis, Nick, Dave, The Monkees, and even The Sex Pistols!
