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SEPTEMBER 15, 2002
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Source: BBC Music Interviews
http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/classicpop/interviews/int_dean.shtml#interview
Roger Dean Interview with BBC
Roger Dean is a legend in record sleeve design. His work defined cover art in the 70s with his work for Yes, Uriah Heep, Gentle Giant and others and
he continues to design and publish work regularly today. To celebrate the release of Roger's first DVD, Views, for Classic Rock productions BBCi
Music recently met up with him to talk about his career, and why the record sleeve is as important as ever.
What was your earliest sleeve commission and how did it come about?
When I was finishing college I was designing some landscape seating. The first commission I got was this landscape seating for Ronnie Scott's jazz
club and in the process they saw in my sketchbook a painting of a sort of demonic scene from hell which I'd done for my thesis. My thesis was about
producing a sense of tranquillity in domestic architecture and I was looking for an image that would represent the exact opposite of domestic
tranquillity. They saw this painting and said "could we have this as an album cover?" -- they'd just signed a band called Gun who'd just had a hit
single with a record called "Race With The Devil". I said yes and I got much better paid for doing the album cover than I did for doing the seating
at Ronnie Scott's, with much less effort! But the thing that was really fascinating for me was the size of the audience. That was 1968 so it was a
long time ago!
Was sleeve design always a commercial means to an end, i.e. to fund your architecture projects?
It wasn't in that sense. I didn't do it just for the money but I was terribly enthusiastic about its power as a propaganda tool. So I did
actively pursue it as a means of showing people ideas of what might be and
what could be, so quite quickly I got to the point where I was doing the pictures I wanted to do and showing people architectural ideas.
Actually, when I say quickly, one of the problems I had doing the first project for Ronnie Scott was that although Gun were a heavy metal rock
band, most of the band's that he managed were jazz bands and the vertigo label asked me to do a number of jazz covers, one of after the other. They
were very austere exercises with no chance to show off the paintings or images at all. I couldn't get out of that rut until I decided: 'OK I'm not
going to do any more' and from that point until I got a commission doing what I wanted to do was quite a few months of no income at all and that was
really hard; just holding out until I got what I wanted. Strangely enough it was for David Howse who commissioned the Gun cover, but by then he'd
moved to MCA and I did the first cover for Osibisa and that changed everything for me.
From that point on I could do what I wanted. It was great in as much as the Osibisa cover was flying elephants, not architecture. I did what I wanted
and I had a lot of fun, and it's quite addictive having fun! So I didn't put it aside to go back to architecture, although I intended to. Things
never work out quite the way you plan… In 1972 I'd only been doing sleeves for three or four years but I thought "OK that's enough I'm gonna publish a
book about the architecture and move back to that area", and I couldn't get
a publisher. I had 27 formal rejections and a whole lot more who didn't bother to reply. I just couldn't get it done and in the process was
producing the book myself. By then I suppose I was beginning to earn quite big fees and I ploughed it all back into making colour separations for a
book. So I was designing the book on the hoof and by 1974 I'd pretty much got a book but I hadn't got a publisher, so in the end my brother and I did
it ourselves.
Who/What were your early influences?
Well because I never studied art I didn't know. People who might have been influences I discovered long after I set the scene as it were. People I
should have known about, I didn't because I was doing 3 dimensional design, I was doing architecture, furniture design and even silversmithing at the
Royal college but painting was essentially incidental. So I hit the ground running when I started my career without ANY proper
background, so I didn't
have the knowledge to have influences and by the time I came across people who would have been an influence I'd already developed a style. So if I
were to say what my biggest influences are I'd have to say landscape. Landscape is what continually inspires me and to a degree landscape
painters of China because between the ages of 12 to 14 I was in Hong Kong
and beginning to notice and be impressed by things. But by the time I was doing this I was spending practically every holiday hiking in the Scottish
Highlands or, later, in America.
Was any other sleeve design an influence?
There weren't really any, you know. You name another sleeve designer from 1968! I, of course, now DO know of many because it became a subject of
interest to me when with Storm (Thorgerson) I published The Album Cover Album. We looked at a lot of work that had been done, especially in Jazz
like Blue Note and so on, but I wasn't aware of it then. And in rock 'n' roll now the predominant pop phenomena is a pretty face, male or female.
Back then it was mostly individuals, now it's boy or girl groups but when
you had a band that's more about music than what they look like, they didn't always want to put their face on the cover, so that's where people
like me had a chance.
But back in the early seventies I would say that the business of designing sleeves, when it became professional, was driven by artists. I think of
Storm Thorgerson as an artist not really a designer. It was an artist driven thing and nowadays it's very much a designer driven thing. Very much
more professional altogether actually. I mean no record company would think of putting a sleeve out without some kind of
designers' involvement. Back
then they'd never think of doing it. Maybe just a photographer, and the
printer would lay out the text. I had some odd experiences because when we put together one of the more recent covers we worked with Vaughan Oliver of
23 Envelope and I was quite shy about meeting him, because people whose work you admire you tend to build up in your mind. I said "I'm really
impressed by your work" and he said "well it's all your fault because when I was at school I saw an exhibition of yours at the Durham Light Infantry
Museum". And he'd heard me talk at the Museum and that was what made him want to start designing album covers! It's quite funny because his work's
nothing like mine but I think he's hugely clever. But these people weren't influences because they weren't working back then.
Is it problematic being forever linked with the name of Yes?
Well, I don't find it a problem because they've had the common sense occasionally to make really fantastic music so it's actually a nice
association. We don't always see eye to eye, particularly Jon and I. Five times since I first worked with them we've fallen out enough for him to go
and get someone else to do the covers! But that's really Yes. It's happened to everyone in Yes, apart from Chris (Squire).
I think Chris is the only one who's been in every version of Yes. Everyone else has been changed.
I recently heard Rick (Wakeman) say that I'd been the only person in and out of Yes more than him!
I think, by and large, it's been great fun. I've enjoyed working with Steve particularly. We've talked about enormous
projects that we've never done. I love listening to them. It's been beneficial of course, and I hope it's been beneficial to them.
Do you actually like their music?
I DO like their music, some of their albums I find harder work than others. I like the 'easy' stuff. Y'know when they do an encore of "Starship
Trooper" that's always great fun. I listened to Tales From Topographic Oceans about 40 times live, in concert and as a consequence I never
listened to the album. Well, maybe once. It was problematic, but now when they play it...well if you start off being a good musician and you don't
completely rot your brain with inappropriate actions, you get better. 30
years of practice means they're really damn good. If you hear them play now there's a fluidity and grace about how they play a really complicated piece
of music that makes it just a lot more fun to listen to than it probably did in 1974.
Was designing stages for Yes a success?
Yeah, There was nothing really like that afterwards. We were building worlds for Yes and I think we had the
idea that Yes music came from
somewhere else and we would make sure that when people came to see this show, they were entertained and it wasn't fixed. If you're playing to
20,000 people that's too big and you can't see the band and we wanted something that was visible but not specific. Because when you looked at it
you could say "Yes, that's a something" but it had to be purposeful but not easily accessible so that was quite a challenge. The people that came along
later were all about sound and light engineering, and I don't think anyone else has ever tried to do landscape on stage.
Which is your favourite sleeve design (of your own)?
I guess of the early period where I'm drawing and the drawing is evident and I'm colouring the drawings in. 2 or 3 of my favourites are Relayer
(Yes), I like the Badger cover for its simplicity and I like the Asia
pyramid for its complexity. Of the more recent works which I enjoy more because I'm painting instead of drawing that include Rick Wakeman's Return
To The Centre Of The Earth from 1999, I really enjoyed that; very hard work. I really like the Pink Floyd symphonic cover (Us And Them), and I
really enjoyed doing Yes' Keys To Ascension.
How about sleeves other than your own?
The first big visual shock for me was Rick Griffin's Aoxamoxoa by the Grateful Dead and I bought that before I had a record player. I just
thought "My God, this is amazing". It was the sense of freedom. We were coming from a design philosophy that admired typefaces like Helvetica and
Gill sans...God, it was boring! Actually I found design terribly boring, the mechanistic idea of form follows function was hugely depressing. But
Rick's stuff looked like an item off the grocery shelf of some fantastically obscure civilization from another star system and it was
amazing. I never came to terms with the Grateful Dead so much as I did the album cover! Rick was a strange guy. I really enjoyed his company. Very
strange, very clever, hugely underrated. But the things that were fabulous about him were his physical skill, he painted like a master calligrapher,
there was a simplicity and fluidity of his paintings that was breathtaking and he really opened doors, he said you can do what you
want. As long as
you do it incredibly well, it'll stand, it'll work. He did some joke squiggles that looked like Rick Griffin lettering that actually said
nothing and people spent years trying to figure it out like some mad Buddhist puzzle from some Tibetan Monastery.
Are you still in touch with the other designers that you helped and worked with in your publishing company? (Patrick Woodroffe, Chris Foss, Rodney
Matthews)
I'm not responsible for Rodney Matthews! He built his career doing copies of my work, I don't approve of that you know. It's like someone's burgled
your house and they leave a note saying "copying is the sincerest form of flattery" and I'm thinking "Good God call the police!" Patrick Woodroffe,
yes, he visits us and we have good times with him and his family. Chris (Foss) I haven't seen so much of recently but by and large I'm in touch
with probably half the artists we published.
I work a lot with Michael Kaluta. He's working with me on a project now and he worked with me through most of the last part of the 90s on a huge
project that never saw the light of day. A good friend and client of mine Hank Rogers spent something like 7 million dollars developing a game called
Onyx and Michael and I worked on that doing about 4000 drawings together, we sorted out the animation we were responsible for the music, stories,
the motion capture…a huge project. I hope it comes out because it was such a lot of work and what was done was good.
Did you ever consider the fact that your imagery would influence the way in which the listener approached the music?
That seems a very arrogant thing to say 'Yes' to but I did, and that makes a lot more sense to me than the other question that I get asked which is;
Do you paint the music? And I don't. I have come across artists who look very mystical and who think they're painting a C or an F flat, but I don't
believe that. I just think that's pretentious. But I DO think imagery changes the way you perceive another medium and vice versa. If music didn't
affect the way you saw things you wouldn't get music in films. But it works
backwards which is where your question comes from so I would say yes, just as much as the right score can completely change the mood of what you're
looking at on screen. An image with the ability to move you will affect the way you hear something.
The most dramatic example of that I can think of was many years ago. The beginning of the Stalingrad symphony starts off with an incredibly long
snare drum roll, and builds and builds to an incredible crescendo. And the first time I heard that I thought it was unbelievable and it's one of my
favourite pieces, but I saw it in connection with fields of corn on the Russian Steppe, endless fields with the endless building of this music but
much later I saw the same piece of music being played against some film from a camera mounted in the cockpit of a Russian pilot shooting down a
German plane. What you're watching is not something that somebody made up as a video, it's actually war footage of somebody being killed and suddenly
that same piece of music is about a war for survival and it changed
enormously how I felt about the music. I still think it's incredible, I still love it. The imagery does change the music just as music can change
the imagery.
Do you listen to an album before designing the sleeve?
It didn't work that way because very often I had to do the sleeve before the music was finished. I remember flying all the way to Vancouver to hear
Yes in the studio when they were working on The Ladder and it doesn't make sense to do that really because you can spend two days in the studio and
you hear the same drum track 57 times, and you have no idea what the album is about, so that doesn't work. One does it for the social interaction but
the way it works in terms of getting an idea for the album is talking to them. No matter how inarticulate someone is, that's the key. My brother
taught me a lesson about talking with people. He said: "if they don't know what they want, make them write 10 or 20 words that they think describe
what they're doing or trying to get", and I've done that, but not with Yes
because I can talk to them and I can as it were read between the lines now. But when there is an interaction, that's how I do it: I talk and they'll
play me a few tracks or send me a demo of what they've got which is nice but it's not as useful as the words. Words are like magic. If
someone is
skilled with words they evoke a lot but even if they're not they still evoke something so words are what I go for. I am aware that some people are
disappointed when I say that but music for me is about mood. I don't listen
to it much when I'm painting.
As you are still designing today, what modern techniques do you employ/have helped
you most?
Well there's two obviously. I would say my work is much more painterly now, so someone of 500 years ago would recognize what I'm doing now better than
what I was doing 20 years ago. When we put Views together the day before it went to the printers, my brother and I changed the first paragraph with
scalpels frantically looking for the odd piece of letter or type or comma that we didn't have, making up letters out of other letters. It was a
bloody nightmare! It took us maybe an hour to do some words and then justifying it...We were literally up all night doing it…the two of us. It
doesn't show too much. No ones ever said hey this looks a bit too hand-made at the beginning. But being able to do type on computers has allowed you to
not bat an eyelid when making corrections. The problem is nobody else bats an eyelid, so anyone who can open a file can make corrections! The problem
today is saying "don't mess with it". In the old days it was too much effort to mess with it.
The other big change is lettering. For me I could do very intricate lettering but getting that to the printer was a nightmare. If you look at
early album covers the synchronisation between the lettering and the
artwork was always a struggle for printers. But now with a computer it means that the lettering not only goes in fairly seamlessly, I can get it
right. If I'd spent two or three days painting something that's got to be reduced enormously and then dropped in, and I never see it till the final
print run. If I'd thought "Oh lord, I wish I'd done that blue" it's too late. The record company would say "it's going to cost us millions and
you're delaying the band blah, blah" So they were very reluctant to accommodate me changing my mind, but now one can get that right.
Are there any artists whom you always wanted to design for and never got the chance?
Led Zeppelin, I guess. I would have liked to have done the third or fourth album (laughs).
How do you feel about pieces of work meant to be viewed in 12"x12" being shrunk to CD size?
I don't think that way at all. I recently bought some Japanese imports, miniature gatefolds and they were done so beautifully. Those little bonsai
album covers are fabulous. The problem for CDs for me is when companies like Atlantic for 10 years put out Close To The Edge without the painting.
Give me a break! You could see that they'd saved 0.1% and I thought that was just such an incredible insult to the customer. It's deeply offensive
to me and must have been deeply offensive to millions of music buying
customers.
The record companies were spending a lot of money on packaging and two events in history allowed them to cut back on that. One was a paper
shortage in the early seventies which suddenly meant no gatefolds, but when CDs came out, they could have done them well you could still make it a
beautiful packaging, the size wasn't an issue, the issue was the incredibly predatory attitude of record
companies. You know: "if we can give you less we're gonna give you less" The opposite approach to that is shown by a
friend of mine who runs a small German record company. He taught me a very
interesting lesson. He re-did the Gun cover and he sold about 2000 copies with just a reproduction of the album cover in a jewel case and he came
back to me and said "I want to do this properly, I want to shoot it from the original artwork, I want to put additional sketches in, really make a
nice job of it" and he did a fabulous job. It was the best that it had ever been printed because in 1968 colour printing was pretty mediocre.
But the really fascinating thing was that he'd estimated the market to be about 2000 but he thought if he really packaged it well he might double the
sales. When I asked him afterwards whether it did he said no, but it doubled the profits! Big companies never learn that Yes fans are no longer
in the college dorm struggling for the next cup of coffee. They can afford to pay 5 cents to get it done properly. I resent it so much when they do it
badly.
Do you feel that any innovations which you at the forefront of (complex fold-outs, hidden imagery) could be repeated on anything other than vinyl
sleeves?
I took a patent out on that way of folding. What I'd invented (with Yessongs) was a way of going from gatefold to any number of pages, folded
out of one piece of card and because I couldn't spend money to develop it Tinsey Robor, the printers jointly patented it with me, and I think the
next year was the paper shortage and all that stopped! I actually do more work now than I did then for a cover because there are box sets and all
kinds of things and especially small companies are coming round to doing a good job of wrapping and packing. You don't need any packaging now to get
music; it's entirely an abstract thing. There might come a time soon where you don't even need to download it. The only thing left is to make it back
from an abstract experience into a tangible gift. If someone is going to buy their cousin, their friend, their auntie, their niece a present for
Xmas, a record token never does as well as a record. And if it's wrapped up with care, it can be a gift again; and I think it's about time music became
a gift again.
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