Do it yourself.

Do it yourself.

When I started Men And Flies, even before that song was written I made up my mind to release the album on another label and not spend hundreds of hours putting the whole package together navigating the treacherous waters of manufacturing, keeping my mind churning and losing nights of sleep trying to keep the production on keel.

No such luck, maybe I’m stubborn. The demos were played to a few people most notably the honorable Terje Pedersen of Warner, but after a song and a dance and a lot of reading the fine print, a talk with the bank, a talk with my brother, thanks John, and long discussions with myself, Thom Hell and other colleagues, I made up my mind to breathe life back into Me Records at Home Groan Productions’ World Headquarters and DIY.

The benefits and curse of DIY is ideally, the product can be just like you want it be, total control. I decided to go for a Digifile cardboard cover for the cd and I wanted it to be a perfect square. I also wanted the cover to be folded like a vinyl gatefold and not have a slice off the inside cover for folding purposes as was done on a couple of the Home Groan releases. This was not an easy product to find. The Vinyl cover was also hard to come by. I looked for someone who could print them like they were printed in the US back in the 70’s but no such luck.

The long and the short of it is and a great argument not to DIY is that the first batch of CD covers were wrong and were sent back, they were 12.5 cm x 13 cm, not 13 cm x 13 cm as ordered causing the cd and booklet hard to pull out and ruining the initial effect of releasing a perfect square, yeah and the shrink wrap made the cd look like a bag of bananas. The vinyl was another story, the great dynamic mastering done by Bob Katz in Florida did not sound good on the first test pressings and telephones and emails were bounced back and forth before I got the right sound on the vinyl master. Needless to say after sending a packaging dummy with detailed instructions on how to pack the two inserts in the vinyl gatefold cover they packed them wrong, shrink wrapped them and sent them up to Norway. If you happen to be the proud owner of these insanely expensive beautiful 180 gr. vinyl double albums then open the gatefold cover, flowers facing up and place the inserts in the following fashion. To your left the picture of me and my bike, to your right the urban photo. This will cause the text on the respective front and back cover of the inserts to be what greets you when the gatefold cover is shut. Get it? This was the intention of Talleiv Taro Manum when he designed the cover.

Am I happy with the product? Very much so!! Would I do it again? Never!! But then again, maybe.

Martin Hagfors