In the 1970s did a gospel soul band called Milky Edwards & The Chamberlings record an album of cover versions of all the songs on David Bowie's Starman? Apparently not. However, on YouTube you can find three videos of someone playing songs from this non-existent album on a record player.
The videos were uploaded over a year and a half ago (and there's an accompanying, minimalist website —
milkyedwards.com), but they've only started to attract attention recently. And now people are wondering who created these videos and why? Because whoever created them, did them very well. The recordings don't sound like the work of an amateur.
The Guardian reviews what people have uncovered so far about this mystery. First, the album cover that can be seen behind the record player is definitely not from the 1970s because it uses a modern font, Mojo Standard, that is "squished and pulled" (as graphic designer Brian Borrows puts it) in a way that can only be easily done on a computer.
Second, although the singer sounds like Tom Jones, it's not him, according to Jones's management.
Beyond that, nothing more is currently known. We'll just have to wait and see how this plays out.
Comments
I didn't, no. But I've listened to them about five times now, and love them. It's tragic that these three songs are probably the only ones from the album they've really recorded. Damn, I'd so buy that album!
Then, while stretching a font like that is only easy to do for an amateur using a computer, any typographer worth his salt would've been able to do so even in the 1970 - in fact, many did do so over half a century before, as part of Art Nouveau. The simplest, although perhaps not the most time-effective, trick I can think of to manage this is to print the letters normally over a regular grid (cheaper with those plastic applique letters so popular in the seventies); draw a transformed grid on the object surface; and then transfer the letters, point by point and line by line, from the straight grid to the stretched one. Laborious, but effective.
None of which proves that this is a 1970s work, of course. But it could easily have been.
(also @