Off The Record

It doesn't seem a coincidence that album art of the 70s so often recalls the wax dioramas of 19th century metropolitan low art later appropriated by Surrealism. The air of stilted bourgeois drama that hangs around the form at its most stagey - Dali, Paul Delvaux, the sculptures of the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition - resurfaces in the gestures of a form caught between the glistening pleasures of international business (which rock had long since become a part of) & the now antiquarian memory of wrenching sexual & material alienation (that survived, coelocanth-like, in the likes of the Knack & Dr. Feelgood). (The radical strangeness of the dioramas, incidentally, would be picked up primarily by Walter Benjamin, who devotes part of The Arcades Project to them, & Hollywood's B-industry, responsible for 1953 Vincent Price vehicle House of Wax, whence it fed into the likes of Alice Cooper & The Dictators.) The climate of many of these covers, curiously composed, simultaneously frozen & charged, hinting at non-existent mystery, seems of a piece with the LP's ongoing role as spliff-rolling surface. They provide the appearance of spurious depth whose spuriousness they self-consciously proclaim. They appear to us now as the sexual climate of the fin de siecle appeared to the 1970s - the emphasis on tits, arses & male impotence in particular is quite peculiar; the general air, particularly of Hipgnosis' many covers, quite explicitly recalls Moreau, Watts & Alfred Moore.