A JOURNAL OF VISUAL COMMUNICATIONS
THE EDITOR’S PEN The juxtaposition of music and visual communications has always fascinated me.To take something as abstract and opinionated as an album and create a graphical representation of it must encompass the entire feeling the band was striving for. The graphic elements that come with an album create a visual context that completes the listening experience. The differences between different formats of music and the visual elements that accompany them are drastic: while vinyl records and CDs allow some form of graphical representation, cassettes and digital downloads offer almost none. It seems as though the aesthetic form of music is in a decline with the transition into digital music; however, I believe that the music industry is ever changing and graphic design will adapt to meet those changes. I know that I can’t get the same feeling from buying an album online than I do getting a physical CD. The act of reading the booklet while listening to the music is what I most look forward to when I listen to an album for the first time. The two articles that follow show insight to how important graphic design is to
Pressing Issues Tribute to the Beatles Contemporary Album Covers
THE BEATLES
A look back on the most influential album covers of all time NICK DEVILLE
The Beatles, one of the pivotal phenomena in the development of popular culture in the 20th century, instigated fundamental changes in popular music, celebrity and the record industry. The group’s comparatively short existence almost precisely spans the decade. Their album sleeves, many of which now appear deceptively simple, were groundbreaking and extraordinarily influential. Beatles’ sleeves have produced more look-likes, homages and pastiches than those of any other rock group. They set the pace in a revolution in record cover design, which led to the creation of an entirely new visual lexicon to symbolize the emerging rock genre.
(LE F T ) “ W I TH TH E B E ATLE S” PARLOPHONE, 19 62 DESIGN: ROBERT FREEMAN
(R I G H T ) “ R E VO LV E R ” PARLOPHONE, 19 6 6 DESIGN: KLAUS VOORMAN
Early Days The Beatles first breakthrough in album design was the darkly glamourous formalism of their second album With The Beatles (1963). The photographer, Robert Freeman, had previously used a similar composition for Vogue soon after they started work together in 1962. In his subsequent version for the album sleeve the composition is transformed: the Beatles moody androgyny looming out of a uniformly black void making for an entirely different effect. Their image owed a good deal to Astrid Kichherr who had had a powerful influence on their visual style through her association with their original bass guitarist Stuart Sutcliffe during the band’s early sojourn in Hamburg. As George Mealy put it in his 1970 book Revolt Into Style: “Among the vulgar fairground barking of the LP covers of its period, With The Beatles had the dramatic impact of a bomb in a bouquet of multicolored gladioli.
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Beatles’ sleeves have produced more looklikes, homages and pastiches than those of any other rock group.
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Psychadellia in London Growing Popularity With The Beatles was followed by a succession of album sleeves photographed by Robert Freeman. The series culminated in Rubber Soul of 1966 where Freeman’s use of a fish-eye lens effect and the biomorphic distortions of the title lettering gave the first intimations of the group’s psychedelic phase. Their album of the following year, Revolver, was, in terms of its iconography, the full-blown thing, although perversely limited to black and white. The designer, Klaus Vermin, was an art student friend from the group’s days in Hamburg, a boyfriend of Astrid Kichherr before she met Stuart Sutcliffe, and at that time bass guitarist with the successful British band Manfred Mann. On first impression the cover’s black and white drawing seems rather self—effacing, but its combination of sinuous organic linearity and the convolutions of secondary detail are classic hallmarks of the psychedelic style. lt. was a potent embodiment of the “Swinging London” tag, heralding the imminent arrival of “flower power’ and “the beautiful people’
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The Beatles were the undisputed royalty of London’s counterculture scene
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Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released in June 1967 marks the high-water of London’s hippy moment, an unstable mixture of LSD, the psyched-out music of the underground and an exuberant visual style which was a meld of stylistic sources. The Beatles were the undisputed royalty of London’s counter-culture scene and, for a while, they dispensed artistic patronage like renaissance princes. The complex tableau that Pop artist Peter Blake created for the front cover of Sergeant Pepper’s speaks of the time and place in which it was made in a uniquely allegorical way. The Beatles, dressed in the satin uniforms of Sergeant Pepper’s band the pretext for the album’s narrative structure are surrounded by a galaxy of the heroes of popular culture of the type celebrated in Blake’s paintings of the time. Close examination of the photograph reveals many telling details. The flower bed spelling out the Beatles’ name conceals marijuana plants. In the detail of the image can be found a buddha, a doll bearing a sign saying “Welcome Rolling Stones”, an image of the fifth Beatle, Stuart Sutcliffe, and effigies of the band from their “mop top” period, borrowed from Madame Tussaud’s waxworks museum. (LE F T ) “ S E R G E A N T PE PPE R ’S LO N E LY H E A R T S CLU B BA N D” THE BEATLES, PARLOPHONE, 19 67, DESIGN: PETER BLAKE
(R I G H T ) “A B B E Y R OA D” APPLE, 19 6 9 DESIGN: IAIN MACMILLIAN
RADICAL COVER ART ADRAIN SHAUGHNESSY
Album covers used to be radical as a matter of course. But the album covers you see today in stores are rarely radical; they are safe, tidy, usually ‘well-designed’ and usually, weII... bland. Radical album covers still exist, but to find them you have to step outside the mainstream record industry and comb the hidden networks of labels releasing new and experimental music.
The Problem with the Record Industry This is the state of the modern record industry: here we have a multi-billion dollar global business controlled by giant conglomerates who in turn are controlled by cash-hungry shareholders. And to meet the demands of these cash-hungry shareholders, the music business has been forced to abandon its primary role as a finder, developer and publisher of musical talent. As if this wan’t enough, the record industry has other problems: the continually narrowing focus of the big high street retailers; the confusing proliferation of new delivery formats; overproduction; piracy; and poten-
tially the most damaging of all, the illegal downloading of music from the internet. So perhaps it’s hardly surprising that the industry is in a state of entropic collapse.
no longer function as markers or rallying points for sub-cultural activity. In the days when album covers acted as lightning rods for cultural aspiration (60s, 70s, early80s), it was because Sitting between there were scarcely the mainstream the lure of the any other outlets for record industry and the ‘hidden packaging has led the visual aesthetics of pop. There were network’ of unmany more fans gigs if you lived in derground labels. to buy the finished a big city, there was P a r a d o x i c a l l y, this has been releases rather than the occasional movie and fleeting glimpses brought about downloading them on television, but that by the factor that was it. There were no from the internet most threatens 24-hour music chanthe independent nels, no always-on insector: the enternet and no glossy music magademic and illegal downloading zines (only inky newsprint). The from the internet of music. Rather natural habitat for pop aesthetics than throwing up their hands in was the record shop and the teendespair, independent labels are age bedroom, locations where ramping up the quality of their album covers could be fetishistipackaging; and it seems to have cally studied. In this pre-electronworked, suggesting that the lure ic media age, record covers were of the packaging has led many the foremost and often only exmore fans to buy the finished repression of pop’s visual aesthetic, leases rather than downloading and for many, a first exposure to them from the internet. radical imagery.
The End of an Era? Despite the existence of a rich storehouse of graphic innovation, the contemporary radical album cover remains undervalued. It is not taken as seriously by design commentators, music journalists, or music tens in general, as its more celebrated predecessors from the golden age of cover art. Even amongst graphic designers, the contemporary album cover does not seem to carry the emotional heft of the great covers from sleeve design’s glorious past. What does this tell us? Perhaps not much beyond the simple observation that contemporary album covers— even radical ones—
Today, we’re overwhelmed, not only by the imagery of pop, but by the imagery of a mass-media, information culture; and this media all-pervasiveness means that there’s nothing new so we’re desensitized to the power of the image. The wanter and cultural critic Michael Brace well touches on this phenomenon in his brilliant study of the 1990s, When Surface Was Depth: “ TH ERE WAS THE SENSE IN WH ICH TH E CULTUR AL CLIMATE THAT HAD ALLOWED POSTMODERN ISM TO FLOURISH— A SUDDEN E XPLOSIO N O F MEDIA , TECH NO LO GY AND IMAGE MAK ING— WAS AL SO SOMEHOW, MO RE THAN ANY TH ING, WELL... LIKE THE END OF SOMETHING”