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Q - THE 100 BEST RECORD COVERS OF ALL TIME
‘” We wanted lots of naked people, of different colours, all lying together and merging into a whole, a one-ness,” explains Felix Buxton of Basement Jaxx. “The image should look very human yet also amorphous -– like the skin of some strange creature.” You’d think he and partner Simon Ratcliffe would have been well satisfied with the intriguing cover image to their debut album ‘Remedy’. Rumpalicious yet hygienic, the rows of serried naked bodies of different hues is distinctive and striking. Harking back to the oily, Karma Sutra fantasies of funk heroes The Ohio Players, giving a more tasteful spin on house’s relentless libido, or embracing booty-crazy hip-hop, the cover seems to link the mixed up frenzy of dance music’s orgiastic dreamland. And yet both Basement Jaxx and designers Blue Source were hugely disappointed with it. “They wanted human beings intertwined physically but not sexually, for an abstract piece based on physicality,” explains iconic lensman Rankin, who shot the cover. “I was excited and keen to do it, because they were so directional and knew exactly what they wanted, which is very unusual.” Felix and Simon both attended the photo shoot. “I’ve shot nudes a million times and I love it,” says Rankin, “but I think the band felt uncomfortable directing the models. Sometimes you just have to say, ‘Can you move your tit’, or, ‘Hide your cock’, but nude models are used to it.” “It was embarrassing,” Felix says, “because we knew some of them. One of them was our percussionist.” Basement Jaxx delivered the fruit of the afternoon-long session to designers Blue Source and explained their specific vision. However as company founder and creative director Seb Marling recalls, creative tensions arose from the outset. “We have a particular approach and aesthetic,” he says. “We tried a series of options in a more illustrative, collage direction but these didn’t strike with them. They gave us the Rankin shots and talked about the sleeve looking like an animal hide or human desert landscape.” Blue Source played with the images in Photoshop and “warmed them up”, adding tones and colours. Their efforts didn’t meet with approval: “They didn’t seem to understand what we wanted to do”, says Felix. “Plus we wanted to use our logo, and they said it didn’t work. We wanted a logo which was very US hip-hop style, fluid and mercurial with a twist, like the music.” “The band had a loose, handwritten logo,” recalls Marling, “and we were keen to move it on. I’d argue there is a US hip-hop reference point in the lettering we used, but we didn’t work from a very obvious, tagging angle. We looked more towards the boldness of Parliament, or Funkadelic.” A grudging stasis set in, with Jaxx and designers haggling over various tweeked versions of Rankin’s shot for two months. Blue Source managed to “talk the band round” to the new logo, but neither party was satisfied with the final result. Felix succinctly summarises the process as a “nightmare”. “I agree, because we were quite at odds in terms of design,” says Marling. “They really wanted somebody just to follow their brief exactly, rather than develop it and try to help them. They knew what they wanted, which was very simple and straight-up, and we were trying to get them to work with more subtlety and sophistication.” “I
suppose we are very critical,” concedes Felix, “but it’s
hard not to be when we’re so involved. We’re very fussy on
the aesthetic side of things, but in the end we had to just accept the
sleeve wasn’t exactly what we wanted.” Both parties now say
the sleeve has “grown on them”. DL |
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