The Evening Echo

Life would not be the same without my friend, Joe Egg's, carefully crafted compilations gliding through my letterbox every month, which I have received whether based in Berlin, Bielefeld or in Edinburgh. I was given my first compilation in tape form in 1997 which I took on my travels to South East Asia. He has opened my ears to bands I would have never heard of and I have gone on to buy many records and CDs by those artists because of him. I always love his approach to design, so I was very flattered to be commissioned to take the cover photo for the latest one. Unusually for Joe, this title doesn't relate to the music featured but is inspired by the name of the local paper where he grew up in Bournemouth, The Evening Echo. Apparently, I fulfilled Joe's stringent stipulations for cover artwork quite unconsciously. It was only after I had seen the finished CD cover on Facebook that I read in the comments that my brief had been "to evoke a lonely twilight of longing, the older gaze over the young oblivious athletes." Lucky then that I had been eyeing up my local tennis courts for some time, enamoured by the newly installed floodlights, and seduced by the romance of demarcated white painted lines on tarmac.