Sleeve Talk

Even though I've been a graphic designer for nearly 20 years now I've never done a record sleeve (magazines are my business) but, as they say, I know what I like. The older I get the less impressed I am with over-cooked typography and trendy effects so I love the clean simplicity and understated beauty of covers like Peter Gabriel's first solo album from 1977. It might just be my favourite sleeve ever.

This is the work of Storm Thorgerson and his studio Hipgnosis who are best known for their high-concept and elaborate sleeves for megabands like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. With their extravagantly-produced photography, shrink wraps, die-cuts, and fancy gatefolds I used to think those were the epitome of everything that was wrong with music pre-punk: bloated and not a little full of themselves. Now I'd kill for the kind of budgets and creative freedom they must have had back then. You won't be able to see it at this small size (nor on the CD probably) but most of those water droplets are fakes, painted in by hand with the highlights created by scraping off the paint with a scalpel blade. One thing some of you kids might not realize is that there was no such thing as Photoshop back in 1977 - in fact, there were no computers in design at all! Imagine that - and designers had to actually create things by hand using paintbrushes, pens, paper and glue. Shockingly primitive I know, but somehow we managed. I can't tell you how many manual skills I've lost in the digital age.

Gabriel had just left his high-profile gig as frontman of Genesis and was clearly desiring a modicum of low-key anonymity, hence the decision to name all his first four solo efforts simply "Peter Gabriel" (very confusing that) and not to have a conventional portrait of himself on a cover until the fifth one. On Solsbury Hill he sang about leaving Genesis – "I was feeling part of the scenery/I walked right out of the machinery" – but the ghost of the band seems to be hanging around the Proggy opening track "Moribund The Burgermeister" which is a rather bizarre song about a medieval plague driving a town to hysteria. It's the sort of eccentric, character-driven thing he used to do a lot and if he had done this with Genesis no doubt there would have been a silly costume to go with it.

Download: Moribund The Burgermeister - Peter Gabriel (mp3)


I'm throwing Gabriel's second album in here just because I wanted an excuse to post the track "White Shadow" which I absolutely adore. Not that the sleeve isn't very good too, it's another powerfully simple idea executed with no fuss (Hipgnosis again.) The ripped paper could be a little reference to punk as the first single from the album "DIY" was seen as a salute to the indie sprit of the times – "When things get so big, I don’t trust them at all/You want some control, you’ve got to keep it small." Unlike some of his Prog Rock peers Gabriel had open ears to what was going on in the late 70s and even got Paul Weller to play guitar on his new wavey third album.

"White Shadow" is a dreamy, floating mini-epic with some particularly obscure lyrics. God knows what it's about but it sounds wonderful. The high point of the track is a fiery guitar solo by the album's producer Robert Fripp who lets loose with the sort of Fripptronics he contributed to Bowie's "Heroes". Great stuff from an underrated album.

Download: White Shadow - Peter Gabriel (mp3)