With the gradual disappearance of album art, we are losing
far more than a few memorable images.
Even if you didn’t
know who the artist Storm Thorgerson was, you’ll probably recognise his most
iconic creation: a prism refracting white light on to a black background. The
sleeve to Pink Floyd’s 1973 album The Dark Side of The Moon is one of rock
music’s most celebrated images, and its creator Thorgerson, who died last week,
was also responsible for placing that flying pig above Battersea Power Station
for Animals (1977) and naked children climbing over rocks for Led Zeppelin’s
Houses of The Holy (1973).
What did Thorgerson’s
images mean? What was he trying to tell you about the music contained within?
These questions were persistently asked of a man inspired by Dalí and Magritte,
by photographers such as Man Ray and the filmmaker Luis Buñuel. His simple
answer was: ‘I listen to the music, read the lyrics, speak to the musicians as
much as possible. I see myself as a kind of translator, translating an audio
event – the music – into a visual event – the front cover.’
Thorgerson was a remarkable man, but it’s also notable how
album artwork has become a thing of the past. The relationship between visual
and aural art enjoyed a wonderful 20-year symbiosis until cassettes and then
CDs began to diminish its importance in the 1980s. More recently, the download
has made the relationship, sadly, all but redundant.
Rock and art had an association even before Peter Blake
assembled the front cover for The Beatles’ 1967 album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely
Hearts Club Band. As Stephen Bayley noted in The Times, there were precedents,
for example in the 1950s, when the jazz label Blue Note produced a series of
albums with ‘a distinctive graphic language of bold colours, sans-serif fonts
and bold geometrical devices in solid contours [that] made an indelible popular
connection between “cool jazz” and “modern jazz”’.
An album sleeve told you something about what you were about
to listen to. The reason people didn’t understand Pink Floyd’s front covers is
because many, including those who bought the LPs, didn’t even understand their
music. Upon the release of Sergeant Pepper, Queen Elizabeth is said to have
remarked how ‘The Beatles are getting a little strange these days’. But fans
had realised this two years earlier, with the stretched, stupefied photoshot
and psychedelic typeface that adorned Rubber Soul. Richard Hamilton’s artwork
for The Beatles (the so-called ‘White Album’) released in 1968, reflected a
band that had become mired in crisis and narcissism. (Many of the tracks on The
Beatles refer to previous Beatles songs.)
While artsy bands either employed famed artists (the Velvet
Underground used Andy Warhol), imitated them (The Stone Roses paid homage to
Jackson Pollock), or knowingly played with Pop Art’s relationship with
consumerism (The Who Sell Out, 1967), groups that sought to convey the
‘dangerous’ nature of their product festooned their sleeves with ghouls,
monsters and corpses, employing ersatz-gothic typefaces, littered with
nonsensical umlauts – the most famous purveyors of which were Iron Maiden,
Mötorhead, Mötley Crüe and Spinal Tap. It was the latter’s Nigel Tufnel,
parrotting the pretentions of art-school philosophy, who thus admired the black
front sleeve of Smell The Glove: ‘It’s like, “How much more black could this
be?” and the answer is “None. None more black”.’
Whatever you think of art-school rock, we have lost
something significant with Thorgerson, who dissolved his business in 1983 when
CDs first started appearing. This was in a decade when you knew London Calling
(1980) by the Clash was music for ‘rebels’, because the sleeve had someone
smashing a guitar, and that Pornography by the Cure (1980), with its distorted,
blood-red sleeve, wasn’t going to be a barrel of laughs. The polished
nonchalance of Awfully (1987) told you much about the yuppie-pop of the Pet
Shop Boys without having to listen to it.
One of my current guilty pleasures is a song called
‘Pompeii’ by Bastile. My attention was drawn to it because it always seemed to
be playing in shops - it was incidental music on BBC1’s Football Focus only
this weekend. I have never seen Bastile’s CDs because I live in a town without
a record shop, and I don’t watch music television – I had no idea who they were
and what their music might be (electro-indie, since you ask). After tracking
down the provenance of ‘Pompeii’, I went to YouTube to find it. Everyone does
this type of thing, indicating that the music industry is imperiled for the
same reason is journalism: sharing.
The decline of the album sleeve is symptomatic of a deeper
crisis. Things aren’t consumed as they were. Rather, they are increasingly
given away or stolen. And when something’s value is diminished, so is its
worth. As James Heartfield has observed in Mute magazine: ‘The declining value
of music also means that it is of declining value to the consumer, so that they
will tend to fail as goods that enhance the self-esteem of their purchasers.’
When you don’t pay for something, you don’t take the time to enjoy it. That’s
why you come away from a free newspaper website feeling unsatisfied. If you pay
for a newspaper, you are much more like to read it properly.
Objects have character, memories, idiosyncracies, flaws. My
long-dead grandmother’s pencilled ‘arguments’ with Freud in his books remain my
connection with her. A certain skip in ‘Here Comes the Sun’ on my taped copy of
Abbey Road will remind me always of a caravan holiday in 1992. And ‘Eddie’, the
skeletal icon that featured on Iron Maiden album sleeves and t-shirts, will
forever bring me back to a family holiday to Yugoslavia in 1984, where I first
saw it. In the digital age, all these moments will be lost in time, like tears
in rain.
Patrick West is a freelance writer based in the UK and
Ireland and author of Conspicuous Compassion (Civitas, 2004). Read his blog
here.