The age of CD bootleg sleeves is mostly dead, but fascinating artifacts from its heyday remain. While ROIOs are nowadays distributed almost exclusively by mp3 or similar formats, some fans remain nostalgic for the work made by amateur designers and distributors over the span of a few short years, from 1998 to about 2004. Some folk, it turns out, still make CD artwork, and good ones at that.

Thousands of artists had fandoms who crafted loving tributes to the musicians in the form of bootleg CD artwork, as well as companies that looked to make a quick buck. As CD-Rs became common, the price of "for sale" boots dropped to about $10 apiece. If you were to find any these days, any store would probably just sell them the same as any other used album. Most stores, however, even the ones that used to sell boots, don't buy 'em from customers.

This is a fun-loving archive of bootleg images from illegitimate Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry albums that you were never supposed to buy. Some of them because they shouldn't have been sold in the first place and some of them because the fans who made the artwork did it to wrap around CDs that they were trading for love. The images are presented quasi-randomly and have a few thoughts provided by the mysterious Mr. Monopoly, who designed nearly two hundred bootleg sleeves for dozens of artists, sometimes on commission, sometimes out of love and sometimes out of boredom.

If you would like to contribute details on the existing sleeves, or provide more imagery for use here, it's probably not very hard at all to track the keeper of this blog down. Your information will be kept strictly confidential and used only to entertain, amuse and pay tribute to an incredibly fun hobby that no reasonable person should have been doing in the first place, and not at all anymore.

But wasn't it so damn fun at the time?!

Fjord Pleasure

Here is an album with the single worst pun in the universe as a title. GROAN!

From Roxy Art

From Roxy Art

This is an interesting compilation. It combines ten tracks from an (edited) radio broadcast with nine audience-recorded tracks from an earlier concert, both in Oslo in 2000. The design is by "opd" and this was traded and treed on the Avalon mailing list and, ideally, would never be sold. I do like the way that opd used the inside of the front to provide a translation of the announcer's opening chat and interstitials. Unfortunately, this is an old, low-quality scan of my printout of this CD-R, and I do not have original artwork files to share.

Flesh + Blood Live

From Roxy Art

From Roxy Art

More very interesting work from Strimpldisc, taking a crop from the Flesh + Blood cover art and turning it into something quite odd and different. Despite a flaw in the track list ("Love is A Drug"?), I like the layout and wouldn't mind hearing this one. I don't think that Roxy did "Over You" all that often.

Edizioni di Milano

From Roxy Art

From Roxy Art

Hmmmm. Good eye, awkward hands? I assume this was assembled for private trading. I do like the layout, but there's a lot of image stretching and artifact issues with the images, making this something of a well-intentioned failure. Nice choice of fonts, anyway.

Birthday

From Roxy Art

From Roxy Art

I think that whomever designed this got bored halfway through. It looks like they had a good idea for the front cover (it's from the "Kiss and Tell" video) and a notion that they should credit the musicians and... they petered out. Was somebody screaming on the telephone at them to get finished because the mailing list tree wouldn't wait one more second?

Live at Crystal Palace

From Roxy Art

From Roxy Art

One of just a handful of audience tapes from that first tour to circulate, this wasn't designed by anybody who had any sense of design or skills at PhotoShop. Just plain awful.

Cry in Your Cognac

From Roxy Art

I love how this one says that it was recorded on May 2nd or May 3rd. It was one or the other, anyway. Distributed by Ennui Records around 2001, I don't have a back cover for it.