WildScreW: A Graphical Revelation

By Andrew Robert Chapman

Documentation of the various trials and tribulations which led to the WildScreW band name logo, the CD cover and booklet art and even the graffito tag which also adorns this eBOOK's cover illustration.
For this eBOOK I have drawn heavily on the relevant blog entries which have not only jogged a few of my memories concerning the process, but have also, effectively, meant that the chonological detail is accurate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andrew Robert Chapman
• Release date: Mar 31, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463844366

Andrew Robert Chapman

Having earned an upper-second-class BSc Honours Degree in Computing Science from Stafford University (the then Staffordshire Polytechnic), I worked for several English manufacturing companies before accepting an offer of work in Germany in 1991, where I have been living and working for several blue chip financial institutions based in Frankfurt am Main till this day. As a result of my career I wrote and self-published “Cobol: Optimised and Maintainable Application Programming” in 2003 and “JCL – STEP by STEP” in 2008. In 2012 I was asked to write lyrics for several rock band projects, an adventure which led to the role of singer/songwriter in WildScreW and the composition of several hundred lyrics, the majority of which are patiently waiting to be put to music or self-published.

Book preview

WildScreW: A Graphical Revelation

Copyright 2019 Andrew Robert Chapman

Published by Andrew Robert Chapman at Smashwords

Edition 2020.1.20

This book is available in print at most online retailers.

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Disclaimer

Blog background information

A lesson in orthography

The band

The band’s name

The band’s logo

The Writing On The Wall cover art

The birth of the album title

Provisional Front cover artwork

Searching for copyright permission

Painkiller Jane

Back to the drawing board

Song order and website

The birth of the band name logo

Back to the booklet art

A concept

Cover doubts

Graffito tag

Song title graffiti

The best laid plans

The finished booklet

In retrospect and hindsight

About the author

Other books by the author

Contacts and Links

QR-CODE Links

Disclaimer

This eBOOK, by its very nature, contains coloured illustrations which may not adapt themselves well to a black and white electronic reading device. The book was viewed satisfactorily with an AMAZON FIRE 10 device.

In the words of a late, great Australian poet: The following is a true story, only the names have been changed, to protect the guilty.

As I have neither the time, energy or wherewithal to keep track of even a single name change, then I’ll assert my standard disclaimer, which I lifted from A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers:

Any resemblance to persons living or dead should be plainly apparent to them and all those who know them, especially when the author has been kind enough to have provided their real names, addresses and, in some cases, their phone numbers.

All events described herein actually happened, though, on occasion, the author has taken certain liberties, sometimes small and sometimes not so small, with artistic license because that is his right as an English man!

Blog background information

In March 2015 I started a blog which was primarily intended to document my experience with the band WildScreW in the months running up to and during the recording studio. Despite WildScreW’s breakup, at the start of 2017, I continued with regular blog entries, documenting F.A.T.E., which formed from the splintered WildScreW, the ArztHosen, a cover band in which I was asked to play bass guitar and my death-defying adventures in the local village choir.

Although I intended that the blog solely document my musical escapades, I discovered that these were inextricably entwined with my real-life thoughts and experiences and so decided to document those too (as far as humanly possible) so that the progression of thought to action can be better comprehended. As a result, and fortuitously for this endeavour, I also used the blog to document my work on the album graphics. It is these specific blog diary events from which I have selected relevant background information included here, with the addition of dynamic links to the original articles.

(Paperback readers must search the main blog for the relevant entries which have been used in this book).

I decided to keep the blog’s (incorrect) spelling and grammar for this book.

Maintaining a diary/blog is an incredibly time consuming affair and, once I realized how time intensive it was, made an early decision to concentrate on quantity (of text) rather than quality (grammar, spelling and vocabulary). If my time is tight, and it usually is, then I don’t even proof read a blog entry and that is, unfortunately, obvious from the upcoming entries. But better a rough and ready draft covering almost all subject matter, than a grammatically perfect paragraph which hardly scratches the surface of the blog’s topic.

For this eBOOK I have drawn heavily on the relevant blog entries which have not only jogged a few of my memories concerning the process, but have also resulted in an accurate chronological order of events.

A lesson in orthography

Believe me, I am the last person in the world to be discussing the German language but a book about a band which has its roots firmly planted in Germany, inevitably means there will be a need to employ German letters, so I’ll give it my best shot and direct you to helpful WIKIPEDIA links for more background and detailed discourse.

The problem for this eBOOK is the German alphabet which has the same 26 letters of the English alphabet plus an addition four special characters. These special characters run the danger of being electronically displayed as an unintelligible graphic (a question mark, box or even Chinese hieroglyphic!) on all electronic devices which aren’t set up for the German alphabet, i.e. pretty much the whole of the world.

As a result umlauted words are frequently written as two letters, with the second letter always an e:

Ä = ae

Ö = oe

Ü = ue

This is effectively a reversion to their original spelling, before the umlaut was introduced with the printing press.

ß represents the German letter (pedantically a grapheme) called Eszett which is translated to sharp s and is mainly substituted with the letters ss and occasionally sz.

WildScreW, as can be clearly seen from this book’s cover illustration, is correctly spelled using a stylized German capital sharp s but, for international readers, an internationally readable form of the band name had to be decided upon. Using the official German language substitution letters for a sharp s (SS or SZ) would create a readable WildSScreW and an unpronounceable WildszcreW.

However in Germany the letters SS are still to this day primarily associated with the NaZi SchutzStaffel and the band rejected the combination out of hand. Therefore the spelling WildScreW is common in my blog and used throughout this book.

*The English WIKIPEDIA entry for the letter hints at the intensity of the discussion about the use and shape of the (capital) sharp s and, believe me as someone who has spent the majority of their life in Germany, the Germans take discussions of their language, syntax, grammar and shape of the letters to a whole new dimension.

I decided to remove my personal experience and dissertation from this eBOOK, as it was threatening to become longer than the book’s intended content, but, for those brave and curious souls, who feel the need to dig further, then take a look at the "German orthography reform of 1996".

The band

The graphical work in this book was for a band project called WildScreW. The project culminated in the production of a studio album titled Writing On The Wall, which was released at the beginning of February 2017, but the story of the band began several years before.

The band’s members were:

Thomas Wild (guitar)

Frank Suss (drums)*

Tobi Muff (bass)

Erich May (guitar)

Andy Chapman (vocals)

In 2012 Thomas Wild, the Wild in WildScreW, asked me if I’d be interested in writing song lyrics for a couple of guitar melodies which he had floating around in his head. The reason he asked me was not because I was a renowned lyricist, but because I was the only native English speaker he knew and he wished for the lyrics to be written in the international language which English is.

Of course, having English as your mother tongue does not automatically qualify you as being as literally capable