Bill Smith has been creating album covers since 1978. As the founder of the titular studio, he has played a role in such works as the cover of Kate Bush – Hounds of Love, Marillion – Brave and No-Man’s own Flowermouth.
Bill was kind enough to send me some reflections of his work with the band.
Bill Smith Studio started working with Tim and No-Man in 1994 when they were signed to One Little Indian Records – a great independent label that knew a lot about music and design Paul White who ran OLI worked with amazing artists like Bjork and used really good design agencies like me company. So, BSS was lucky that Tim found us.
Album cover design is a collaborative process and as Art Director and Studio owner, I had some fantastic designers who worked for me and some great photographers who worked closely with us on most projects. When a new job came in we would discuss titles, quite often I would listen to demos or some of the recordings to get a feel for the music. Within the studio we would then talk ideas and put some visuals together. It’s what we did for every artist/band we worked with. Ideas are the life blood of the creative process, and I don’t mind who comes up with an idea, as long as it’s good. No one person can ever claim the whole idea, a finished cover is a collaboration between artist/band, designer and photographer.
I got into sleeve design because I loved music (and still do), music of all styles. Music moves me much more than money, when an artist has put everything into creating a set of music, I think it both a privilege and a duty to create the best possible cover I can for them, regardless of how much money is involved. I also worked with some great photographers and illustrators who thought the same as me and would give generously of their time and creativity, not least the Douglas Brothers. We’d been working together since 1979/80 on artists like the Jam, Toyah Willcox, Thomas Dolby and King Crimson. Andrew Douglas would often take the kernel of an idea and add to it, bringing something new into the mix, always making the original idea better. I was always keen to get Andrew involved.
At the time of no-man, Andrew and I both loved the work of Guy Bourdin, a French fashion photographer of some repute, whose work featured regularly in photo magazines like Zoom, still a great magazine and one I subscribed to in the 70’s and 80’s. I used my son Will who was 12 at the time (a regular model, Will featured on may BSS covers, through the 80’s and 90’s).
I imagined all this flowery music coming out of the head of the artist. We wanted something painterly, but disturbing, something ‘hidden’ from the viewer, that would be revealed with the music and I remembered Renaissance flower paintings which had philosophical and obscure symbolism, each different flower with a different meaning. The work of Fantin-Latour had been used on the front of Power, Corruption and Lies for New Order in 1983 by Peter Saville. I wanted a photographic interpretation.
We used some ‘outtakes’ from the Flowermouth session for the cover images on Flowermix album, Carl Glover had played a little with no-man logotype and the font was used throughout the packaging.
The subsequent two releases Wild Opera and Dry Cleaning Ray were put together using ‘found’ photographs, Wild Opera had a very Fifties feel with the family holiday snapshot, and Dry Cleaning Ray the shop front of a dry cleaners. These images are much more ‘laid back’ than Flowermouth, maybe wore worldy-wise and bit more grown up, bit more self-absorbed, none the less striking.
A collection of Bill Smith Studios finest works is now out and available to purchase under the name Cover Stories: 5 Decades of Album Art
All The Blue Changes 