Robert Mapplethorpe in the UK

The Mapplethorpe Scottish Tour brings works by seminal American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe to Burgh Hall in Dunoon and Linlithgow Burgh Halls in West Lothian, as well as Perth Museum and Art Gallery.


His work is having somewhat of a moment in the UK, with the Scissor Sisters curating an exhibition of his work at the Alison Jaques Gallery earlier in the year and the ARTIST ROOMS tour covering Eastbourne, Sheffield and now Inverness.


I have my very own (sort of) to gaze at from my desk, lucky me. Here's my view!

Hypergallery HQ

You could have your very own Robert Mapplethorpe too. This limited edition giclée was published by Hypergallery and Peter Gabriel last year by permission of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.


I have sung its praises before in this blog but it sure warrants the airspace. What is SO great about this photograph is that it shows off the absolute mastery of Mapplethorpe with such serenity. It sits almost in contrast to the sexually explicit images more commonly associated with his name but is, nevertheless, absolutely representative of his beautiful talent.

Peter Gabriel Shaking the Tree by Robert Mapplethorpe

The cover art for Patty Smith's Horses is another example of his portraiture in our chosen genre of album cover art but Shaking the Tree does it for me.

Check it out HERE you art lovers and photography buffs.

Jim Flora on Peppermint Candy

The Broken Hearts gave us a taste of the music behind Jim Flora's covers yesterday on their Peppermint Candy programme for Jazz FM.

They described Jim Flora's quirky album cover art for Columbia and RCA Victor in the 40s and 50s as having "a cartoonish abstract style [with] an amazing sense of movement" saying "If he wanted to draw people dancing, for example, he's draw them with ten legs showing every single position of the movement."

The Broken Hearts think his works is "really perfect for album artwork as it gives a feel of the music" and we agree. As massive fans of Flora's work we blogged about him only last month and can boast that the art print of his cover for Louis Armstrong's Hot Five is available exclusively from Hypergallery.

You can hear the programme on Jazz FM's listen again feature and plenty of Flora's covers feature on their blog on the Jazz FM website.

If that catches your fancy, you can also see the advert for the Peppermint Candy album below.

You can see Hypergallery's full range of Jim Flora artwork here.
The comprehensive resource for all things Jim Flora is the wonderful JimFlora.com.


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Pink Floyd Animals LP altered by Shop Around... Deface Value

Pink Floyd Animals LP altered by Shop Around... Deface Value

Floyd Extra! How Wish You Were Here Went Up In Flames - News - Mojo

Floyd Extra! How Wish You Were Here Went Up In Flames - News - Mojo: "Speaking non-egocentrically, I still think the design for Wish You Were Here is great," says Thorgerson, whose company Hipgnosis designed almost all of Pink Floyd's album sleeves.

Liberty Rocks some album artwork

Some simply fabulous British rock-inspired prints from Liberty were launched earlier this month including these by Storm Thorgerson, drawn from his work for Pink Floyd and Powderfinger using marbling techniques (see April's 'We've Lost our Marbles' post).

Each comes in four colour ways, but fabrics by Liberty are often only released once so may be hard to find at a later date.

Storm A by
Storm Thorgerson
From his cover for Powderfinger's Golden Rule

Thorgerson A by
Storm Thorgerson
From his silkscreen print based on his cover
for Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon

A Liberty print seems the perfect foil for the Golden Rule bird by Storm and is right at the top of our wish list. John Squire's prints are also great - his watercolours seen recently at the brilliant Idea Generation Gallery and Tate Britain's Watercolour exhibition (you can see John in this TateShots video talking about his work). Not to forget Edwyn Collins' beautiful Ornithology designs.

An all round success for an unusual idea. Bravo Liberty!

The Harrow & The Harvest - Making of the Album Cover - YouTube

The Harrow & The Harvest - Making of the Album Cover - YouTube

20 Years Later: Kirk Weddle's outtakes from Nirvana's iconic Nevermind Album Cover - 2011-Aug-15 - CultureMap Austin

20 Years Later: Kirk Weddle's outtakes from Nirvana's iconic Nevermind Album Cover - 2011-Aug-15 - CultureMap Austin

As Record Sales Shrink, so Does Album Cover Art - NYTimes.com

As Record Sales Shrink, so Does Album Cover Art - NYTimes.com

How do you package Fire Music?

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How do you package Fire Music, the revolutionary jazz of 1960s and 1970s USA? Gilles Peterson and Stuart Baker show us how in Freedom Rhythm and Sound, a book that looks at the sleeve art of often obscure jazz releases from this post heyday period. The album cover art of this period in jazz reflected the change in the music itself, with a move away from the styles established in the previous decades. This book is high on the Hypergallery bookshelf wish-list now, as is Coast to Coast Album Covers by Graham Marsh and Glyn Callingham, a recent publication referenced by Phil Daoust in the Guardian Weekend magazine yesterday (13.08.11, page 8, Big Picture: Jazz Albums of the 1950s and 60s, not to be found online, sadly).


Daoust, reluctantly according to his Twitter comments, writes about the period of great creativity in album cover art that grew around the east coast and west coast jazz of the 50s and 60s. The advent of the LP and the foot-square canvas it provided came just in time for the big jazz era and BOY did the record labels and their musicians make the most of it. The two main schools were able to use album cover art to give the music held within it an aesthetic. The visual identity emphasised the geographic one; as Daoust puts it, "the New York school favouring quirky graphics and bold typography" and the west coast "something more dreamy".


See Richard Williams' review of Freedom Rhythm and Sound for the Guardian here, or Phil Johnson's review for the Independent of the double album curated by Gilles Peterson here.


Coast To Coast Album Covers is also reviewed by Crossed Combs here and available on Amazon here.
We, meanwhile, have our heads stuck in these books and more as we work towards one day publishing some of the great album cover art they celebrate.


Finally, a little nod to Project Thirty-Three, a blog by Seattle's Jive Time Records that, in their own words, a "collection and shrine to circles and dots, squares and rectangles, and triangles, and the brilliant designers that made them come to life on album covers."

Coldplay's album cover adventures for Mylo Xyloto

Coldplay are due to release Mylo Xyloto this October and have the "reversible" cover artwork available to view on their website. The basic album cover may not be anything terribly new but it works and I just love all the thought that has gone into the artwork across every part of this multi-format (digital, CD and vinyl) release. It's another pointer towards the exciting future of album cover art!

Mylo Xyloto image from Coldplay.com

The vinyl version will include a 12" x 36" poster which, since I was first shown a copy of The Beatles' The White Album with its original inserts in a moment of parent to pre-teen reverence building, has seemed to me like the coolest thing on earth. I still think you can't beat the simple excitement of it; the gold ticket in a Wonka Bar vibe.

Nevertheless, designers must try and the limited edition Pop-Up version does sound spectacular. It will include a 12" x 12" hardback book containing graffiti pop-up art designed by David A. Carter, vinyl, CD and exclusive content including photographs, excerpts from the studio diary and the band's personal notebooks.

Not forgetting the CDs, half of the which will be packaged with the full color artwork as the cover while the rest will have the CD booklet flipped, showing the silver initials "M X" via a die-cut sheet placed over the color image.


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To see Hypergallery's range of album cover art prints just visit www.hypergallery.com!

Storm Thorgerson on Magritte

Britain's biggest art institution the Tate, has made the connection between Magritte, subject of Tate Liverpool's current exhibition, and Storm Thorgerson, a master of our times, the subject of a recent TateShot video. It was great to see Storm interviewed by a museum of pictures; the interest in his work usually, naturally, comes through the music he makes it for.

Hypergallery's mission to celebrate album cover art comes from the believe not only that great sleeve design make the listening experience so much richer and vice versa, but that cover art so often stands alone and offers something valuable even when removed from the musical association.

This TateShot interview with Storm Thorgerson is a bit of a riff on that subject and also features an image designed by Storm for album cover art publishers, Rockoptic (pause at about 2.50mins through to see it).




Hypergallery grew out of the ashes of Rockoptic, as it were, and so there was some excitement when we saw that the Tate had featured this print. The role usually taken by a band, in commissioning Storm, was in this case filled by one of us!

A classic bit of Storm, in a Magritte-like vein, to celebrate the very concept of sleeve design. Neat, huh?

You can see the full collection of eyes and ears prints on Hypergallery's walls. They were each published in a very small edition of 25 prints only.

Photo diary: Storm signs Presence

When we were at Storm Thorgerson's studio mucking about with teddy bears last week, we asked him to sign some more prints from the edition of Led Zeppelin's Presence having noticed that our plan chests were empty of all signed copies.

Here is Storm putting his mark on his work:

This is a popular print and that is all down to the artwork; the album wasn't one of the band's biggest or best received. The Grammy nominated artwork, though, is phenomenal. Using one of a series of staged scenes in which the focus is a strange black 'object', it plays on Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and allegedly represents the power and force of Led Zeppelin's music.