Front men

By Larry Schwartz

Ian McCausland is modest about his role in the history of Australian rock’n’roll. “There’s not much point in doing it any more because I still get into gigs for nothing,” he says of his years creating covers for Australian albums. “That was part of the payment. Getting into gigs for nothing.”

He says this with a laugh. The 54-year-old graphic artist has his fans, but though he has created artwork for groups from the Rolling Stones to the Dingoes, his is hardly a household name.

“It’s hard to put your finger on exactly the statement that art made,” Billy Thorpe has said of McCausland’s designs for a host of album covers including some by the Aztecs, “but looking back on it, Ian’s work defined the era.”

McCausland is one of three artists whose work on album covers is celebrated in a new book, Under The Covers, compiled by the music industry identity and founding editor of Juke magazine, Ed Nimmervoll.

Nimmervoll writes that, when McCausland designed covers for the Aztec’s Hoax Is Over and Chain’s Toward The Blues, “he didn’t know he was on his way to becoming Australia’s most legendary graphic artist.

“I didn’t know I was a rock journalist until I saw my name in print. We were pioneers, like the musicians and everyone else, making it up as we went. There were no rules, no guidelines to follow.”

The work of McCausland and artists Graeme Webber and Steve Malpass, who followed him into cover design, “spans the most important years of Australian music’s evolution, from the birth of the album as an album, to the arrival of the compact disc.”

“My covers were mainly illustrative,” says McCausland. “Graeme’s were mainly photographic. Steve’s a straight-down-the-line graphic designer.”

The Dingoes’ self-titled 1974 LP features McCausland’s logo. It was he who found the location for the photograph of the band, an old boot repairer’s shop in Sassafrass.

Guitarist Ross Hannaford came up with the lettering for Daddy Cool’s 1971 Daddy Who? But the artwork was McCausland’s. He remembers the furore in Melbourne over Sex Dope Rock’n’Roll: Teenage Heaven that December. “That album created incredible controversy because of its title,” says McCausland, who did the lettering and cartoon gatefold. “I remember there was an article in The Herald just after it came out… about smoking dope. They’d even spoken to Joan Kirner who had something to do with the teachers’ association at that stage, saying it was not the right thing for teenagers to be focusing on.”

McCausland interspersed portraits of the Dragon members with African tribesmen for Ozambesi in 1978.

Webber featured gambling equipment borrowed from the old vice squad in a photo of Renee Geyer’s Ready To Deal (1975). It was shot in the Toorak mansion her then manager, Ray Evans, shared with Michael Gudinski. He did the cover of John Paul Young’s Green in 1978 and Phil Manning’s I Wish There Was A Way in 1974.

Malpass’s fingers loom above a landscape photographed by Webber from Doncaster Shopping Town for T.M.G.’s Disturbing The Peace (1978). He designed the cover of John Farnham’s bestselling 1986 comeback, Whispering Jack.

“The album was released around the world,” Farnham’s manager, Glenn Wheatley, has said, “and it never has been and never will be released with any other cover.

“… I’ve had covers designed by all three (McCausland, Webber and Malpass). Cover designs are all-important. They’re the shop front of the music industry. Often the cover’s the first impression people have of a performer, maybe even before the music itself.”

The book has been released with a CD featuring a “wish list” of favorites that Nimmervoll and the artists submitted to Mushroom with sleeve notes on some of the covers.

The project was initiated after Nimmervoll received a telephone call from a friend who was keen to exhibit covers from 1975. Nimmervoll told him he was too late; he’d be missing some classic covers.

He’d met McCausland while working at Go-Set magazine and with Webber at Juke. He’d review records designed by Malpass.

“Graeme Webber used to take photographs for me at Juke,” he says. “I hadn’t seen him for 20-odd years. But we’d talk on the phone now and again. He rang me up. He thought I was putting on the exhibition and he was saying, ‘You can’t do that. You’ll be missing out on Ian McCausland.'”

McCausland was also esteemed by Malpass, who had been collecting his work. “He’s got more of Ian’s work than Ian has,” Nimmervoll says.

Each of them was keen to include him but his whereabouts were a mystery until, as Nimmervoll puts it, “suddenly Ian arrived on our doorstep”.

McCausland was living in Torquay at the time. He’d been designing a CD cover “for a friend of a friend of a friend. The first cover in years and years. I just sort of dropped out of it all for a while,” says the artist, who has been helping a friend with a guitar and bass software project and doing graphic design for an American guitar string company.

Album design was never going to provide a stable career. “Cover art was something you could aspire to,” says Nimmervoll. “It was never something that you could make a career out of. There comes a day when the phone stops ringing or you choose not to answer the call.”

Malpass has his own graphic arts business; Webber teaches graphic art. “It’s exactly like musicians. They move on. You don’t get paid zillions.”

McCausland had started out as a musician, graduating from high school bands in the early ’60s to become a regular singer with the Strangers.

“I was working at Go-Set, the weekly pop newspaper. So I struck up friendships with guys in the bands, whatever,” McCausland says. “I was pretty accessible. Go-Set was the centre of the music industry in Melbourne at that stage. The opportunity to do these things came my way.”

His first was Chain’s Towards The Blues, released in September 1971. “My brief from Chain was, ‘We’re four individuals working towards a common goal’,” he says in the book. “That was where I got that strange tentacle-into-infinity illustration from. It was a bent image, which is what they were into and what I was into at the time. Airbrush was just the medium for me to convey that.”
All three have done work for the Skyhooks. McCausland created the logo for Ego Is Not A Dirty Word as well as for Little River Band recordings.

“I had a bit of a stranglehold on the whole thing for a while there,” he says. Cover art for Frank Zappa and his Mothers of Invention that had “a real bizarre edge” was an early influence.

McCausland first became aware of Webber’s work when perusing photographs submitted for his inner gatefold for the three-record Sunbury concert album.

What does he remember of the festival? “Not a lot. Which probably proves my legitimacy for the whole process.”

He believes that the role of covers has been diminished since the end of the vinyl era. “Now the disc is a lot more important than the packaging it comes in. It confines it so much. Both in size and the fact that it’s under plastic. You just haven’t got that immediacy.”

In an earlier era, record companies had dictated cover designs that were generally conservative and featured a photo of the band or performer. The artists had little say. McCausland entered the field at a time when artists were increasingly involved in design.

“They worked together on what they wanted to create,” Nimmervoll says. “I think today that sort of relationship is with the video-maker rather than the cover artist. The cover art is in the record company domain and the musician hasn’t got as much contact with that as in the past.”

McCausland remembers a time of collaboration. “They knew that I understood what they were doing and they were giving me the same go with the artwork,” he says.

“I think there was almost a rebellion against that standard album cover format that was in place. There’d be a stock shot of the band or artist . It was just assembled as a pretty ordinary sort of package. There was no personality attached to it.”

He’d worked on albums for which there was a clearly specified theme or concept. The covers reflected the preoccupations of the music.

“Once the band had worked with artists like Ian, they had to send it back to the record company and a lot of mistakes got made in that process,” Nimmervoll says. “What we don’t hear is that there’s a lot of covers they reconstituted.”

He cites a photograph used on a 1977 best-of compilation by Geyer. “This is a cover that got really badly done in the printing process,” Nimmervoll says. “When it came back, Renee and her manager were really upset.”

Geyer, not yet 30 at the time it was released, has indicated in the book that such an album was premature and “that cover (as it finally appeared) was a picture taken as part of a whole lot of other shots for some magazines, which is why it was so shallowy, fashiony… It was never meant to be an album cover”.

Malpass has recreated the intended cover for Renee Geyer At Her Very Best for the book.

Another unreleased illustration is a dark, evocative image of a naked woman in a boat somewhere out in space, casting a net at the earth. It was rejected by Little River Band for The Net in 1982. “It was the first album that John Farnham did with the LRB,” Nimmervoll says. “The band weren’t available. So Ian and Graeme created this cover, which the band rejected. This is a cover that has never been seen.”

McCausland says, “I thought it would be great to present this as some sort of almost mythological occurrence. The young maiden out fishing casts her net and snares the globe of the world. It was just an image that I had in the back of my head for this thing and Graeme and I worked on constructing this and it was done in a variety of ways. The girl casting the net was a separate shot. The globe and the reflection on the water
was another shot, the background another.”

He was proud of the work. How did he feel when it was rejected? “Pretty devastated. .. A couple of guys in the band objected to the fact that the woman was naked and they had some aversion to dark colors. They wanted something light.

“They ended up with an American-illustrated cover of a bird caught in a net. Which wasn’t a very good cover. No sour grapes involved but I didn’t think it was really good at all.”

Despite such differences, McCausland had often enjoyed relative freedom in elaborating on instructions from the band. In time, record companies began to reassert their right to dictate the design through inhouse art departments.

“There’s one classic case of Painters and Dockers,” Nimmervoll says. “There was a picture of the Last Supper and Michael (Gudinski) desperately wanted to be Jesus. He didn’t get it.

“Michael’s been good about that sort of thing. He’s a very powerful person but he’s left creative control very much to his artists.”

Sydney-based artist Martin Sharp created covers for the short-lived British supergroup, Cream. McCausland had his brush with a major international act, creating 1973 Australian and New Zealand tour posters for the Rolling Stones. The Australian poster, with image of Mick Jagger’s full lips and extended tongue, is prized by collectors. McCausland was later asked to submit some designs for album covers.

“Goats Head Soup was the first one,” he says. “I did what I felt was a really nice rough for that and sent it off to the London office and I got the story back later that it had either arrived too late or been put on the shelf and the Rolling Stones never visited the office. So no one ever saw it. They went ahead with Mick Jagger in this gauze sort of thing. It’s pretty bad.”

He was next approached to do a cover for the Stones’ 1977 album Love You Live and created an illustration of a red rooster singing in a barnyard.

“I did this rough which I knew was just not right for the Stones,” he says. “It was too light-hearted. So that was rejected as well. But at least it was a little foray into the international big name stuff. It didn’t quite come off but it was a good experience.”

The Sunday Age, 14-Feb-1999