The story of the Johnny the Fox centre artwork is one I’ve never told properly, and going back through the old files recently I found the original pieces, which brought it all flooding back.
The border of the album cover was already drawn and ready to go. What I didn’t have was the centre. We had no title for the album and no graphic to fill that space. Then one lunchtime Philip rang me and said he had an idea. He wanted a fox’s head placed onto his own body. He sent me a beautiful photograph of himself, and Chris O’Donnell, the manager, somehow got hold of a real fox’s head and had it sent over to me.
So I went about the business of merging the two. Philip’s body, the fox’s head, but keeping elements of Philip in there. His chain. His insignia. The whole thing had to be ready for a courier arriving at eight o’clock the next morning, so I worked through the night. Twelve, thirteen hours straight.
The technique was all photographic paste up. I created a composite of Philip’s body and the fox’s head, then made a black and white negative from it. The negative was where I did the real work. I retouched out all the paste up marks, added little bits of fur, and painted in these blasting eyes. It was painstaking work, and looking at it now after all these years, it brings back a lot of memories. It’s been sitting in the vaults for over forty years.
I sent it off to Philip and got a phone call. He said no. To be honest, he said, “it scared the shit out of me.” And I could understand that. It was a powerful image. But it wasn’t what he wanted.
So now we had a problem. Hours to go before the deadline for the album to be printed, and no centre artwork. Philip and I agreed I would draw a fox, something slightly sinister, overlooking a city at night. The idea was to echo something of the Nightlife cover, which Philip liked because it gave the image a connection to work we’d already done together.
I was so stuck for time that I did something I never do. I started the city in pen and ink, which is my normal way of working. I’m a perfectionist. Everything gets drawn in pen and ink. But I realised very quickly that I was never going to finish in time, so I switched to pencil. The fox, the city, all of it done in pencil on heavy tracing paper. That’s not me at all, and when I found the original recently I was gobsmacked. I didn’t remember that I’d worked in pencil.
The drawing itself came out well. The fox looks right. The city looks right. But something was missing, so I stripped in a photograph of the night sky, the Milky Way, behind it all to give it a more esoteric quality.
And that’s the album cover we have today. That entire centre section was done at the very last moment, under enormous pressure. A lot happened at the last minute with this record. But considering what we were up against, I think it came out pretty well.