It may not be by Hipgnosis, but the above is my favorite sleeve from the early 1970s. It perfectly encapsulates 1972 and the rock ‘n’ roll rumble. 10 years later and pop cult sholars would be looking at The Face and writing essays about bricolage and the post-modern, but it was already afoot a decade and more before. Rock ‘n’ Roll is Here To Stay is all about the iconography of youth culture collapsing in on itself – late 1960s American custom choppers, the early 1960s Parisian blonde sex kitten look and, of the moment, London Ted style with 1950’s applique courtesy of Let It Rock. All surface and no depth: a signifiying monkey. How pleased I was then to discover a couple of German variations, which are all the better for checking out the Ted’s opulent waistcoat and the model’s ability to get almost completely prone without toppling off the bike (and she’s wearing neat platforms to boot)
Sounds news item (March 4, 1972)
The cover conception is credited to Pierre Tubbs (great Anglo-French name), photography is by Bryce Attewell, who I presume had fairly steady work at UA as he also took the photos of Brinsley Schwarz on their Dave Edmund produced classic, New Favorites Of (1974), but that’s about all I know. I know even less about the Teddy Boy, though with that hair and those sideburns I presume he was the real thing. As for the BB impersonator I was, until recently, equally ignorant, but in my pursuit of the lost short fiction of Mick Farren (see here) I stumbled across this 1972 edition of Penthouse; she is rather unmissable. Her name, if you believe anything written in the editorial that accompanies glamour spreads, is Karen McCook, 20 years old and a daughter of San Francisco. She was photographed by David Jonathan
Karen’s Penthouse cover image made a hit not only with me, 48 years after the fact, but also with whoever did the marketing for Stoke-On-Trent’s Heavy Steam Machine discotheque, NME classifieds November 1972. PoMo or just plain-old plagiarism?
Those keen to follow Karen’s traces a little further might Google ‘Susan Shaw’ and ‘Mona Solomon’
Suzy Shaw appeared on the cover of at least half-a-dozen Hallmark Top of the Pops albums, circa 1971-4. That whole series is covered in delightful depth here. Some of the shots from the modelling sessions turn up on other budget label sets like the above from the Mike Morton Congregation. See here for more of the same
The biker image does the rounds again on a picture sleeve for a 1977 45 for a German band called ‘Mill’
The November 1975 issue of Game reported that Suzie Shaw was Susan George’s body double in Sam Peckinpah Straw Dogs, which is a good place to pause and reflect . . .