Graham Reid | | 2 min read
Crowded House's cover art for their forthcoming Gravity Stairs is far from the first to reference the 1966 Beatles' Revolver designed by Klaus Voormann.
Voormann's first encountered the Beatles when they were playing in Hamburg. The story has become legend, how after an argument with his girlfriend Astrid Kirchherr -- an aspiring photographer who would take seminal images of the young Beatles -- he wandered the streets and was drawn by the sound coming from the club.
Voormann was immediately taken by their sound although, as a jazz fan, this rock'n'roll thing was new to him.
He invited Kirchherr and his friend Jurgen Vollmer (also a photographer) down to the see them . . . and so on.
Voormann learned bass, moved to London to find work as an artist (living with Harrison and Starr) and was a member of the short-lived Paddy, Klaus and Gibson then Manfred Mann before becoming a popular session musician.
In '66 Lennon invited him to design a cover for their forthcoming Revolver album and in doing so Voorman picking up a Grammy for Best Album Cover Design. That is him on the far right peaking out of Harrison's hair.
His music career continued and over the subsequent decades he played on albums by Lennon (and the Plastic Ono Band), Harrison and Starr, and dozens of others.
He continued to design album covers , but, like many Beatles' album covers, Revolver became iconic and has been much copied and parodied.
The odd Russian version for some reason kept Voormann's drawings but changed all the images of the Beatles he had collaged in.
But scores have got in on the Voorman/Revolver imagery.
Here's a small sample.
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Note: Back in 2017 we wrote the original article on which this is based but had many more examples of album covers and images which used Klaus Voorman's art as the inspiration.
That article is here.
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