Late Night Tales is a UK-based compilation series with a unique but clever twist: for each album, a musician or band is given the opportunity to delve deep into their own record collection and curate a very personal playlist of songs that they would enjoy during a late night listening session. But it’s not just about meticulously picking their favorites, no, the respective artist(s) also create a mix, with the individual tracks blending into each other in handcrafted and sometimes very creative segues. The result is a musical journey with highs and lows and an actual arc of suspense unlike any other compilation of its kind.
Late Night Tales offers a unique and personal perspective on the musical tastes of an eclectic roster of artists. Another highlight of the series is the inclusion of an exclusive cover version, which has not only been recorded specifically by the curating artist of each volume, but is also made available separately as a limited single release.
Furthermore, in later editions, there’s also spoken word content in the form of continuous, album-spanning short stories, which are usually recorded for the album by well-known actors or other renowned artists. Literally, late night tales!
Due to its concept, the LNT series offers a wide range of music genres. Usually, however, you can expect a “late night” mix of vintage Pop, Folk, Soul and smooth Jazz, but also all kinds of mesmerizing electronic genres. I discovered sooo many incredibly fascinating songs by artists I’d never heard of before. If you were to ask me to pick three favourite volumes, I’d probably go with Snow Patrol, Bonobo and At The Movies, but really folks, you could try pretty much any of them!
In a way, I see it as the musical yin to my yang called FM4 Sunny Side Up, another compilation series for which I published an extensive blog post some time ago. I consider Late Night Tales to be their nocturnal pendant and both are my favourite compilations by far! In this blog post, I would like to give you a rundown of all available volumes. Also, I’m giving the whole series a uniform look by creating a few variations and custom covers of my own here and there, as the official designs have changed slightly over the years.
Another Late Night
The series started in 2001 under the slightly different name Another Late Night. After two years though, the record label had to change it to Late Night Tales for legal reasons. On this occasion, they also revised the entire look and feel, including a new, modernized design and different typography, using different weights of the “Helvetica Neue” font to give the entire series its own visual identity.
I really like the overall concept! Each issue has an individual cover photo taken by someone from the label somewhere around the studio building. These photos have become more and more professional and elaborate over the years, as you’ll see further below. This idea has given each album its own unique touch.
Each album came with a 7-inch vinyl single release, usually housed in cardboard slipcases. I recreated most of them using upscaling tools, added new or updated type treatments and other digital enhancements to end up with high resolution versions. But I also came up with some entirely self-made custom covers and a few disc labels as well.
The Photoshop mockup gallery below shows all Another Late Night albums with their respective singles as they would look as physical objects. For these handmade renderings, I have invested a lot of time in the correct depiction of the different proportions, as well as the tactile qualities of the various textures such as cardboard, transparent plastic sleeves or reflective CD surfaces, so that the end result looks as authentic as possible.
Late Night Tales
In 2003 the series found its own distinct voice and was relaunched under its current name Late Night Tales. And from then on things really started to take off. Several volumes were produced each year and the label collaborated with big name artists such as Jamiroquai, Belle and Sebastian or Fatboy Slim. It was this phase in particular that established LNT as one of the most exciting compilations which had artists around the globe queuing up to curate their own mixes. QC magazine praised it as „The Rolls Royce of Compilations“ for a reason.
Once the series had found its new name, the same process took place with the design. After a few different issues, in-house photographer Peter Ashworth and designer Matt Hughes managed to give their Late Night Tales its own identity, with each issue featuring a beautiful photograph of a rather unique type of light source, which of course makes sense for a compilation revolving around night-time music. Apparently they’ve been able to find some of the most obscure and unique lamp designs out there. I’ve heard, they sold them through their webshop later, which is a neat touch.
The following picture gallery shows the individually released singles from this phase; some of them as custom covers, others as originals or remakes that I recreated to have them in high resolution (see captions for details) – plus, the occasional disc label again, for which I used the original artwork as a basis. For three of them I designed a custom cover since they didn’t originally receive a dedicated single release, such as AIR (#39), Snow Patrol (#46) or The Cinematic Orchestra (#47).
The mockups below that I created for these releases illustrate very well how the series has evolved over this period. The original cardboard slipcases gave way for new, more graphically elaborate designs. It is also noticeable that there were a number of compilations during this phase that were initially only released on CD with accompanying 10-inch and even some 12-inch singles. Only since 2020 have these editions been gradually re-released as audiophile heavyweight vinyl LPs.
By the way, I put together all the mockups in this gallery (and all others in this blog post) by hand, including the sleeves, disc labels, and even the stickers, which I rebuilt from scratch for better legibility.
In the 2010s, the label’s design team really brought their A-game to the table. The beautifully lit photographs show the various types of lamps in the midst of lush, green nature scenery in the studio backlot. This resulted in some of the most iconic cover artworks the series has seen so far.
All of the album covers below are originals, with me only editing the typography treatment from David Holmes‘ 2016 compilation (#61) and onwards, because I like my media library to look consistent and I just prefer the older “Helvetica Neue” design rather than the updated centered layout, where the artist’s name is written in “Brandon Grotesque Regular“.
The batch of singles you see below is again composed of original and custom designs, however, this time I expanded on my initial idea for the disc labels and came up with a monochrome design specifically built to fit a silver reflective CD surface. Each of the discs depicts the lamp design from the main album front cover, albeit as a very elaborate and at times complicated composition consisting of numerous different Photoshop layers. Various filters with gradient- and lens-effects give the impression of a life-like yet surreal appearance.
I deliberately wanted to create a stark contrast to the vibrant and vivid front covers of the promo singles, which – except for one cover (#74) – were all based straight off a single page taken from the digital PDF booklet of the respective album.
I purchased several albums in digital form from the LNT online shop just to get the original PDF booklets and the images they contained. I was so obsessed with them that the lossless FLAC download of the music almost became something of an attachment to the booklet for me. Bonkers… I know. But once you get going… That’s also the reason why I made variations for some singles, since the PDF booklet simply provided several good source images. Why stop when you can carry on?
The mockups below are among the most complex in this entire collection. As you have probably noticed, they are all based on the same template. This template consisted of all available physical formats, organized in Photoshop layers, and I simply toggled the visibility of the layers that I needed and hid all the others. The available formats were 12“, 10” and 7” vinyl sleeves, each with and without the record, as well as CD digipack and jewel case, both with the disc. I have carefully arranged all the elements within the canvas to maintain a balanced image composition. Some mockups required a little more attention than others, for example the semi-transparent record sleeves of Röyksopp (#76) and Django Django (#83), or the rather crowded arrangements of Bonobo or Jon Hopkins, to name but a few.
The stickers in particular were a real joy to create. The big album stickers were mostly just replicas of the original ones (apart from Metronomy, which I gave an awesome reflective finish), but for the promo digipacks I went a bit wild and added lots of custom artist logos, created torn up patches like the one for MGMT or tried my hand at font design as in the Metronomy track ‘Hypnose’.
I can’t emphasize enough how much I recommend you to view these mockups in full size, because that’s the only way you can see all the little details I’ve invested so much time in. Just right-click on an image within the slideshow and open it in a new tab.
LateNightTales presents
Over the years the Late Night Tales series has received critical acclaim for its innovative concept and consistently high-quality releases. After a substantial number of artist-curated albums, the record label expanded their catalogue with new and slightly different releases. They published their first very own original compilation titled At the Movies (#103), an album consisting entirely of soundtracks (and now we’re finally in familiar territory).
This incredible collection of themes and tracks brings together 60 years of film history into one single, continuous mix of music, tastefully compiled by English DJ, author and musical connoisseur Bill Brewster. The album spans a wide range of styles, from orchestral classical, jazz and soul-influenced compositions to electronic and avant-garde pop, all wrapped up in a surprisingly coherent listening experience.
I’ll go into detail about At the Movies in a moment, but first let me take a quick look at the other compilations in this section, all of which are firmly seated in the electronic corner. To give you a haptic impression of the official releases, I designed the mockups below. While At The Movies was initially released as a CD only, I’ve added the recently revised vinyl edition in this gallery, which was reissued as a limited “Glow-in-the-Dark” Fluorescent Edition in late 2021 – although with a slightly modified tracklist, probably for licensing reasons.
At the Movies
This collection is the real reason for this extensive blog post. If you listen to the Mixcloud link mentioned above, you will notice how thoughtful and smooth the transitions between the individual score cues are, and I can only imagine what a challenge it must have been to put together a retrospective of the last 60 years of film history into a single compilation, let alone shaping it into a track sequence that seems so effortless and natural, as if it had always been this way. I’ve listened to At The Movies so many times now that some of the tracks just feel like they belong together, even though they’re actually from entirely different film soundtracks with decades in between. It really speaks for the quality of Late Night Tales and their craft, and that was exactly the level of attention I wanted to bring to my custom covers as well.
Each track got its own cover, designed using key art from the corresponding film or soundtrack. Staying true to the nocturnal mood that defines the Late Night Tales series, I gravitated towards darker, moodier, and often deliberately old-fashioned imagery, without any distracting text or modern embellishments. What you’ll see in the gallery below is the outcome of several days of digging, restoring, and assembling. Some of the images are wonderfully obscure, the kind of material that has all but vanished from the internet, and tracking them down in a resolution that meets today’s standards was a challenge of its own, but that’s part of the charm. The result is a curated visual journey covering many film history classics, brought back into the light — just enough to be seen.
The Late Night Tales series has been around for 25 years now, and in that time it has changed and evolved time and again. Whether it’s major overhauls of the brand identity or subtle revisions to the typeface design. But what has always remained the same with the people behind it, is their love of discovering and sharing new music and their obsession with vinyl. A Late Night Tales record isn’t “just” a personal mix of wonderful music, it’s also a celebration of the physical media – something I’ve tried to emphasize with my blog post here. With the advent of Spotify and Co., the series was put to test and was about to be swallowed up by the popular playlist format. But they have prevailed and are more present than ever on today’s digital streaming platforms, with regular updates and playlists of mixes, highlights and deep cuts. And even if the physical releases in recent years have been mainly limited to reissues of previous volumes, it’s still good to know that the Late Night Tales are alive and kicking. And after five years of waiting, a completely new volume is just around the bend!
This was a really extensive, time-consuming blog post with custom covers made over a period of more than three years, and I’m really glad and relieved that I can now draw a line under it.
Maybe I’m going to update it sometime soon, as I’m currently sitting on even more custom covers for additional At the Movies mixes, which are available out there in the digital ether. Or, who knows, maybe I’ll come up with my very own compilation, fully mixed and graced with individual custom covers of course. In any case, I’ll be the first to let you know, here on HQCovers.
HQCovers 