A multi-object OBJ snapshot of the scene as it stands - the lamp, the fridge, the Hoover, the wall socket, the ground. Each mesh is written as its own o block so you can isolate parts in your modeller. No materials, no normals, no UVs. The Hoover's cable is excluded - remodel it your way.
Positions are in world space at the moment of export - if the Hoover is mid-roll or the fridge door is open, that's what gets baked.
The album was released in 1979. It's the band's debut, their first record, and the only one in their long catalogue where the cover was decided for them.
The concept came from the cover's designer, working with the label's distributor; the photograph was made by a photographer working for the label. Three ageing household objects were staged on a hot saturated pink ground - a standard lamp, a refrigerator, a Hoover. No band members. No band name on the sleeve. No song titles on the rear; the back cover used pictograms.
The label's owner had decided the artwork, the running order, and even which songs went on the album, all without the band's input. The band's singer was, by his own later admission, mortified.
1979 · DEBUT ALBUMThe three objects on the cover stand in for the three band members:
The standard lamp is the singer, guitar and voice. Tall, lit, the orange shade glowing. The thing in the room you keep on.
The refrigerator is the drummer. Square, cold, white. In his 2016 memoir, he notes simply that nobody wanted to be the fridge.
The Hoover is the bassist, bass and voice. Upright, ungainly, mechanical. He would leave the band by year's end, replaced by another player; the cover stands as a record of the original trio.
"Nobody wanted to be the fridge." - the drummer, in his 2016 memoir.
Click each object on the screen to surface its small wall-label.
The band's singer has been candid in interviews over the decades about how thoroughly he disliked the cover. The band didn't choose it; they weren't consulted on the track order; some of the songs were deep cuts they would never have picked themselves; the title was a track they'd written but hadn't planned to lead on. They were nineteen, twenty, signed to a label whose owner was used to taking decisions for his groups, and post-punk in 1979 had not yet settled on what the relationship between band and sleeve was supposed to be.
A later deluxe reissue offered a remastered second disc and the singer's own notes, but the famous cover stayed on the front. The 1979 sleeve became, almost despite him, iconic. Every history of the band has to reckon with it; every reissue has had to either honour or work around it. There is no neutral position on a pink lamp.
Twelve tracks, recorded at a studio in North London, late 1978 / early 1979, with the label's producer at the desk and an engineer alongside him. Tight, jangly, post-punk-shaped, mostly in major keys, none of the chamber-gothic register that would arrive within a year on the record that followed it. The band would later disown several tracks (one, in particular, was a cover-song joke the producer kept against the band's wishes).
This trio - singer, drummer, bassist - played their last set together in October 1979. The bassist left in November, replaced by another player; the drummer would later move from drums to keyboards. This debut is the band's only album with this exact lineup.
a North London studio · late 1978 – early 1979Three Imaginary Toys is the fourth piece in BeSides - a small catalog of album-cover lifts. It drops a letter from the album's title, the same trick Lost Word and Monday Decoder play on their own sleeves. The cover's designer stood household objects in for the band; here those objects are also toys you can pick up and shake.
The lamp, fridge, and Hoover were modelled by hand in Rhino, exported as OBJ, then split here by connected component so the parts behave the way each ought to. The fridge door swings out from a hinge on its right edge, with the handle (on its left) and the round badge riding along. The lampshade is translucent with a point light inside, so the bulb actually glows through warm orange. The fridge handle is brushed aluminum; the Hoover's bag, chrome handle, and brown enamel base each read in their own register. Every surface carries a faint procedural grit so nothing looks freshly minted.
This is a band that fought a lot. The trio shuffles around the stage on independent phases, bumping into each other and recoiling; their two cords whip around like microphone leads at a small-club show. The fridge door slams open on its own occasionally, on the beat. The camera circles the stage slowly - you can drag to orbit, scroll to zoom, and the auto-rotate speed and direction shift with the music.
Click each object to surface the small wall-label. Use AUDIO to start the jangly post-punk-shaped loop - the trio's motion is driven by the FFT of the live signal, so the lamp brightens, the Hoover rolls, and the fridge slams open on the beat. DATA cycles four registers the scene listens to instead of (or alongside) the soundtrack: soundtrack, UK bank rate (Bank of England base rate Jan 1979 → Dec 1989, spiking under early-Thatcher monetarism), band activity (album-and-tour intensity year by year), and the drummer's arc (a 1978-2011 curve in his memoir's register - rising through the 80s, peak before he's fired in '89, decade of sobriety, reconciles 2011). A small monospace ticker bottom-right shows what's playing. EXPORT writes the scene out as a multi-object OBJ (cables excluded) for any modeller.
Everyone this piece alludes to is alive. Anything that sounds like one of them is paraphrased from a public interview or memoir, not invented in their voice.
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