Signing album cover prints
In the
early 1970s, illustrator Terry Pastor
was asked by Bowie's childhood friend and fellow artist
George Underwood to do the artwork for the
album cover for
Hunky Dory. Both George and Terry shared a
design studio in Catherine Street, Covent
Garden, London operating under the name
Main Artery.
According to Terry, it wasn't George's
style -
"He was also an illustrator and David asked him to do the
Hunky Dory cover, but he didn’t
really use an airbrush or do that sort of work so he passed it onto me."
A
Brian Ward
black and white studio portrait of Bowie
for
Hunky Dory arrived which according to Terry
had a “slightly fey sort of pose and longish hair”.
Terry reddened the musician’s lips, made his hair
yellower and added some eye-shadowing, “although I didn’t want to go
over the top and make it overtly androgynous, because at the time Bowie
wasn’t really projecting that image yet”.
"I suggested to David that he should use
Terry Pastor again to colourise the Brian Ward [Ziggy] photo - front and
back" - George Underwood
Terry was
subsequently
commissioned to
do
the next
Bowie
album -
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
- the cover image showing Bowie standing in Heddon Street,
just off London’s Regent Street, not far from Bowie's
GEM management
office at #252 Regent Street. With
Mark Pritchard's Les Paul guitar slung from his
shoulder, foot up
on a step, he stood under a
lamp and the K.West sign.
The rear image was of Bowie in a telephone box.
Album colour separation scheme
Terry's brief was to colourise and add titles.
For both Hunky Dory and
Ziggy he was given just
one photograph to work on. "In both cases I was given just one
photograph. Luckily my first go seemed to work okay."
"I was given
a
black and white photograph printed on matte paper -
David Bowie's management wanted some colour put into it. I also did the
cover for his previous LP, Hunky Dory. This was also a black and white
photo that I coloured up in the same way. Perhaps this is why the label
decided that the Ziggy cover would be similar? I applied the colour
using photo-dyes with an airbrush -
a
DeVilbiss Super 93."
"It was just a case of a black and white photograph
which was a good shot but a bit dull. It needed life breathing
into it with colour really."
"The lettering was lettraseted
(rub-down transfer lettering) - a very hands-on way of doing things, but
in 1972 that was the way things were done. Then
traced down onto hardline art board and painted using the airbrush. All
the lettering for track titles and credits for the back of Ziggy were
rub down Leteraset type. No Mac computers in
those days!"
Terry
estimates
he spent about a working week
on hand-colouring and tweaking the photograph – using
the paintspraying airbrush technique popular at the time, and
hand-tinting. "The colours were my own choice. If I had seen a
colour shot of the [Bowie's real] outfit I would probably have stuck to
the actual colours. Same goes for the hair. [But] as people generally
like both covers perhaps it was a good thing!"
“For his jumpsuit I went for
that Turquoise because it’s a very contrasty
colour – a colour in the centre that’s completely different to the reddy
browns and the yellows.”
In reality,
Bowie's jumpsuit
was
grey/green in colour as seen
later on
his
The Old Grey
Whistle Test performances.
“Certainly with the turquoise
and the yellow hair, he” – Bowie – “stands out quite well. I think at
the time his hair wasn’t blond; it was a mousey/blond colour."
"At the time that was shot it was a rainy, damp
night, and quite cold. The band and David did some shots in the studio.
Then Brian [Ward]
said ‘Let’s just go out and
do a quick shot outside.’
“It was such a horrible night the other guys said ‘Oh
no, we’re not going out there; it’s too cold,’ so just David went.
That’s why he’s on his own. There’s a chance that had it been a warm
night, in the summer, you’d have had the whole band standing out in the
street.”
“It was lucky it was a damp night
because you’ve got the wet reflection in the road,
which gives the whole thing a little bit of atmosphere.” And Bowie being
alone works better than being in a group, as he was, really, the exotic
focus."
"I was working on the back cover
one evening at my studio, which at the time was in Covent Garden, London
when I received a phone call from David.
He
asked ‘How’s the cover going?’ I said it was all right. I’ve finished
the front and I’m doing the back. ‘Oh, there’s a back?’ Yeah, with the
phonebox. ‘Oh, I didn’t know there was going to be a back cover as well.
Can’t wait to see it!’”
"He was very excited hearing
that, having no idea there was an image for the back cover. He asked me
what the image was, and said that he was really looking forward to
seeing it."
"From that you can assume David
didn't have any real input into the art direction at this stage of the
cover. He probably had much more input when the photograph was being
shot."
"The back cover, featuring Bowie
in a phone box was done in exactly the same way."
When asked in 2007 about whether the creases - seen top-right on
the Ziggy back cover - were an artistic addition to depict an old or
aged photograph, Terry replied "I didn't know there were creases. They
certainly weren't creased when they left me. Perhaps the courier did it
or something, or it was just handled carelessly."
Terry sent the completed covers to
Bowie's manager Tony De Fries and moved on to
his next bit of work.
Terry
wasn't
given a
detailed artistic brief for the job, for which he thinks he probably
received about £200. "You could be
fairly experimental and not too fixed. I wasn’t really given any
pressure anywhere. That was great for an artist.”
"It wasn’t ‘corporate’ in those
days! David Bowie was virtually unknown, so
there was no pressure on me to pull something out of the bag because he
was a big star."
"He became a big star about six
months after that LP came out. He became mega."
"Before this album was released,
I would bump into David occasionally in the West End
or meet up in a pub, and he would go totally
unnoticed. I saw him a fair bit while I was doing the album covers; he’d
drop into my studio in Covent Garden in London and see how it was going.
I’d go down to the pub with him and Angie, his wife at the time.
He didn’t look all that outrageous to me then, just had long hair and
was a bit hippyish. He was just my mate’s mate at the time. It was no
big deal. I remember once he popped into the studio with his wife Angie.
I was doing a cover for a band called Byzantium with a crystal held by a
woman’s hands in a pair of black leather mittens. They were quite
excited about the S and M feel of it with the black leather."
"Within a matter of
months from the release of Ziggy Stardust, he became a mega-star and
would get mobbed if he appeared anywhere in public."
Terry’s had
emails from Bowie fans over the years, asking things like “Did he stand
there because of that . . .”, “Does that mean something?”
“They read all sorts of
things into it, and actually I don’t think it means anything. It’s just
an image that looks quite nice!”
"David told me that he had started to receive a lot of fan mail and
that they believed he was from out of space. That made both of us
laugh".
“I did think
Hunky Dory and
Ziggy Stardust were very good albums musically: very
strong. All the tracks were pretty good. There wasn't really a weak
track on either of those LPs."
The fact it’s become an iconic cover isn’t because of my
artwork, in a sense, but because it was a very strong album musically,
and the cover worked with it very well. So it was a kind of symbiotic
relationship."
Terry didn’t
then have a sense that Bowie was on the cusp of making it big. He was
“Very nice. A clever guy, but straightforward. Didn’t seem to have a
‘side’ to him. Not pretentious.”
The
singer hadn’t yet developed fully the androgynous look hinted at in
those album covers, though it was about to happen. “He was fairly
exotic, but not too much!”
“He said to
me in the beginning that he wasn’t sure where his career would go, and I
wouldn’t say that he was struggling, but it was very early on. I
remember him saying that Hunky Dory
didn't sell well, and he was quite concerned about what was going to
happen to his career. If someone had said to me then that [Ziggy] was
going to be a really major record, and also an iconic image I would have
said no, you’re kidding."
"Then of
course Ziggy came out and that
changed everything, and after that Hunky
Dory sold well too. At the
time they were not anything I considered particularly special. I think
Bowie would probably say the same thing, he didn’t know if they were
going to be hits or not. “Ziggy Stardust was a make or break thing for
him.”
A few
months after the Ziggy Stardust album cover, he just became a mega-star,
I think partly because of the music and partly because of his look."
"I've never been asked to do anything similar as far as colouring
up photographs for LPs. I've been asked to do full artwork, but not a
Hunky Dory or a Ziggy Stardust. They were one-offs."
Asked about his thoughts on recent changes in album art - "Going
from a 12-inch vinyl cover, particularly if it was a gatefold, to a CD,
which was half the size, and now to downloads hardly getting any covers
at all, it’s a shame. I think the whole thing with a record is that you
can study [the cover] while you listened to it."
2018 Calendar
2018 Calendar
David Bowie's 1972 album cover was featured on a
1st-class stamp issued by Great Britain's Royal Mail in January 2010.
Others in the Classic Album Covers set were : The Division Bell by
Pink Floyd; A Rush of Blood to the Head by Coldplay; Parklife by Blur;
Power, Corruption and Lies by New Order;
Let It Bleed by The Rolling
Stones; Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield; Led Zeppelin IV by Led Zeppelin;
& Screamadelica by Primal Scream.
In 2012
Terry attended the official
unveiling
of the plaque to Ziggy
Stardust on 23 Heddon Street.
"I was asked if I was going to do Ziggy
Stardust now, if I'd improve on it? And I don't think I could.
I think it was pretty good the way it came out at the time." -
Terry Pastor
Video credit
Big Vision Publishing
Web
link:
www.terrypastor.co.uk
A renowned figure whose paintings feature
in private collections around the world, including those of film
director Roman Polanski and international designer Roman Ford Coppola,
British artist Terry Pastor has also had his paintings exhibited in
galleries in London, New York, Munich and Amsterdam, and has won several
awards for his work including two Art Directors of America awards. He
first became famous, however, for designing record sleeves for rock
legends such as David Bowie and the Beach Boys, and for the evocative
illustrations he has provided for book jackets by writers such as Arthur
C Clark, Jeffrey Archer, Len Deighton, Brian Aldiss, Michael Chrichton,
Ed McBain and many others.
Terry Pastor has
worked for various bands, designing album covers, but is best known for
his cover for David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust.
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