It had two parents: the long-playing record and the LSD trip. The classic 12-inch LP used to carry a friendly photograph of the artiste on the cover, and a list of tracks (with perhaps some edited career details or a fulsome encomium) on the back. After the arrival of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, things changed - every LP sleeve from now on could be the canvas for avant-garde artistry, whether spidery drawing (the Beatles’ Revolver) or moody photography (the Stones’s Between the Buttons). In 1967, flower power and psychedelic experimentation - two social phenomena that were essentially private, gentle, herbivorous things, expressing inner harmonies and one-ness with the cosmos - exerted a terrier-like grip on all rock-related art. An explosion of colours, in which the musician becomes part of the cascading hues, was used to convey the wild power of amplified guitar licks, or the proliferation of sense- data that accompanied an acid trip. Look at the image of Jimi Hendrix, and the wash of colours streaming from his hair, arm and guitar as he hits a power chord. Look at the blizzard of concentric rings, like thought bubbles, surrounding Bob Dylan’s head as the words “Blowing in the Mind” appear in the right lens of his trademark shades. As an expression of intense thousand petalled creativity it’s hard to beat (though it’s slightly spoilt by the superimposition of Dylan’s head over the title of one of his best songs, so that it seems to read “Mister Urine Man”- as Dylan-hating visitors to my bedroom would gleefully point out).
Both posters were the work of the same man, Martin Sharp, a designer who moved from Australia to London to become art director on Oz magazine, the bible of the counterculture. He’s the presiding deity at Explosion!, an exhibition of “classic original rock and pop posters” that starts in London this month. They run from the Beatles era (the original 1964 film poster of A Hard Day’s Night) to the post-Britpop time of Pulp, whose CD art for This is Hardcore features a dead-eyed naked blonde pictured (by Peter Saville, whose best work was with Joy Division) as though she were an inflatable doll. There’s no visual sign of the band anywhere, except its logo. The implied moral censure by the musicians is a feature shared by The Smiths on their album artwork, and spin-off posters, from the 1980s. Morrissey, their singer, chose most of the pictures himself. He often selected unknown people whose faces conveyed raw emotion - like the US soldier in Vietnam whose helmet bore the legend “Make War Not Love,” which Morrissey changed to “Meat is Murder” in 1985. Or the sulky James Dean wannabe in the leather jacket and oily quiff he chose for The World Won’t Listen.
