Pixies
Doolittle
“It’s the same photograph as the single (Monkey Gone To Heaven), but reduced to one colour and with bronze on there to give it an earthy feel. The grid came from a conversation with Charles, where he was explaining that successful music was a mathematical equation – which kind of broke my heart, because I’d had this very romantic notion about it. I thought, ‘okay, you’re talking about formulas, but we use formulas in painting, like the Golden Section’, so the grid was my response.”
Pixies
Bossanova
“Charles gave me examples of lyrics with UFO references, which gave me the planet idea. We put some blue velvet in the background and had the plastic rods made and, to our eyes, it was blue velvet with this clear planet. Simon [Larbalestier, photographer] set his lights up with red filters, just to catch the edge of things. He didn’t know they would flood the film. It was a complete accident, but it seemed to fit the B-movie aesthetic, so we went with it.”
Clan Of Xymox
Clan Of Xymox
“They were a Dutch electronic band with a grungy feel to them – that’s what led me to create this dirty sleeve. For me, its success is how I arranged the tracklisting. Rather than it being a simple list, it becomes illustration. Here’s something that’s a small formal element normally, and now it’s reversed in the hierarchy. The dirty, rusty look was from a dark-room process where I abused the timing, the chemicals, used wrong exposures, short exposures…”
Cocteau Twins
The Spangle Maker EP
“I think this is the strongest of the ones I did for them. In terms of reflecting the music, the ethereal aspect of their sound and lyrics, it’s there in that image. It’s from the early days of photography. It looks more like a painting. The typography on the back was also a reference to where I had been working previously in mainstream packaging, on perfumes. It was the first time I had tried that very elegant, classical approach.”
Lush
Split
“The images on Split are made by Richard Caldicott, and I loved his graphic division of the colour plains. So in terms of a strong identity, it was already there before you put this mad logo on it. I think it’s very cool if a band are confident enough to present themselves as four lemons, though I don’t know if they got that, to be honest.”
Tarnation
Mirador
“My ultimate aspiration is to reflect the feel and atmosphere of the music and I think this does so beautifully. The photographer is Michele Turriani. Again, it’s an ethereal feeling – I like the way he can take a wind-blasted tree and shoot it in such a dream-like way, so it places it out of reality. The idea for the typography was ‘type becoming image’; I’m wending the lyrics into the image so it becomes as one with it. Like Xymox, it’s elevating type within the hierarchy.”
The Breeders
Mountain Battles
“Kim [Deal] said to me: ‘We don’t want any of your eensy-weensy sepia-tinted cottages in the forest’. She also mentioned ‘machine inspired art‘, so I was looking at the shapes in Futurist paintings, which were all very jagged and angular. I had this idea of broken glass. Marc Atkins is the photographer and to me, there’s a savage beauty, a violence in it. It seems to chime with the title. Marc got a couple of sheets of glass, which he brought to life through Photoshop.”
Ultra Vivid Scene
Ultra Vivid Scene
“Kurt Ralske would give me images to work with. This was from an advert for Dr. West’s toothbrushes, but there’s the syringe that hangs there that has one meaning in its advertising form, but you put it on a record sleeve and it becomes more sinister. The tape is just from a piece of packaging I’d had next to my desk for ages. Post-design analysis: I would qualify it as being the view from a height, looking down on a stage – and all the wires are strapped with silver Gaffa.”