BRAND X - Moroccan Roll - Rezension online

Die offizielle Brand X-Facebookpage hat etwas zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Albumcovers gepostet:

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The artwork from our second album still generates lots of discussion. To set the record straight, we bring in The Honorable Brian Murray Smith -- former Tour Mgr for BRAND X under the Hit & Run Management umbrella. He was there back in the day, and lived to tell the tale. Here's BMS's recollections on the cover of Moroccan Roll:

I have written about this previously. Tony Stratton Smith at Charisma Records was not really involved with day to day decisions on cover art. In fact, to be honest, I never had any discussions with him about Brand X. Charisma signed the band because Genesis manager Tony Smith wanted them to, Phil Collins already being with them. I tripped upon the title in a telephone conversation with John Goodsall and when I spoke to Storm Thorgerson at Hipgnosis about cover art he suggested a North African location and the invention of a design riddle overlaying the photo based on The Golden Mean. Actually he thought of it as a joke but the resulting picture does have strangely impressive symmetry. Charisma were actually quite mean about the budget and we couldn't, at first, afford to get to North Africa. Then Storm got back to me and told me that another band wanted to photograph sand dunes too so, with a very stripped down crew, we shared the costs with them and got it done for, if memory serves, a charge to us of £10,000. The character on the cover, about to be "rolled" is actually the photographer, Peter Christopherson. Peter is a legendary Hipgnosis character, a quiet, serious designer and photographer, with a wild alter ego as bass player in Genesis P Orridge. Peter went to the Moroccan Roll location with one assistant, found rhe village, got his permission from the elders, changed into his white suit and hat and took his shot on a tripod with a ten second delay before heading off into the desert to shoot the other cover. That, at any rate, is how he told it to me. Back in London I saw the images with Storm and agreed to stop down the exposure to get a deeper blue in the sky than in the actual photo. That was the only re-working necessary and we were very hapoy with what Peter achieved. Storm and Aubrey Powell, I think, did the overlay with the "mean" design. They delayed until the last possible second before coming up with something we were happy with. That was typical of Hipgnosis, they liked to work under maniacal pressure. Storm has now passed away and Peter, too, died, I believe in Vietnam, so those extraordinary talents are remembered through artwork like this. Today the large vinyl format that allowed Hipgnosis to excell has given way to streaming which needs no cover art so, it seems, they don't make 'em like that any more.

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