With their groundbreaking use of graphic design, the best Peter Saville artworks helped to define the post-punk movement and beyond.
Through his association with the groundbreaking independent label Factory Records, British graphic designer Peter Saville changed how albums could be presented. Packaging each new record in ever more inventive ways, the best Peter Saville artworks revealed a unique vision that was as fit for your walls as the music was for your stereo.
Here are the ten best Peter Saville artworks, from his 40-plus-year career.
“I was a Roxy Music fan,” Peter Saville admitted. A longtime admirer of the band, the art director had the esteemed honour of designing the artwork for their swansong, 1982’s Avalon. Continuing the band’s tradition of including women on their album covers, Bryan Ferry’s soon-to-be wife Lucy Helmore donned a medieval helmet and looked out upon a lake in Ireland, a falcon perched on her gloved hand.
Evoking King Arthur’s and the mythical home of his sword, Excalibur, the Avalon artwork was a beautifully fitting send-off to the art-rock icons. Thereafter, Roxy Music went their separate ways, heroically sailing off into the annals of British music lore.
For Pulp’s post-Britpop comedown album, This Is Hardcore, Peter Saville knew exactly what was required. “The music was a lot deeper, darker, and moodier,” he said. For the artwork, a photo shoot led by German photographer Horst Diekgerdes took place in Saville’s apartment, where a Russian model, Ksenia, posed topless across a leather sofa looking like a Barbie doll.
With art direction by Peter Saville and John Currin, the This Is Hardcore album was immediately met with controversy. The media lambasted it as sexist, implying the woman was a rape victim, or that she was dead, and many promotional posters around London were defaced.
Peter Saville remained stoic in the face of such criticism. “For the whole thing just to have passed without a murmur would have been a great disappointment,” he said. He was also very defensive of the band’s creative decision: “It was not about pornography.”
Brett Anderson of Suede was aware of Peter Saville’s reputation and sought him out to design the cover for his band’s 1997 album, Coming Up. “I went back and looked on the bookshelf and I found [a book by] Paul Wunderlich,” the designer said. “There were things in this that were just so terrible that they were interesting. There was this weird kind of psychedelic, surreal quality this had.”
Admiring the garish sexuality of such Wunderlich pieces as Green Divan and Red Flower, Brett Anderson was keen to use models in an unusually domestic setting. Thinking of Wunderlich’s use of zebra and tiger skins, Saville suggested posing on a rug, but Anderson proposed using a mattress instead, as if he were in a squat.
The resulting album cover – depicting a couple of hazy squatters basking in a digital neon yellow glow – became a Britpop classic, and stands as one of the best Peter Saville artworks of the era. “It’s the mattress [that] makes it,” the designer reflected. “The mattress is what gives it this kind of cultural demographic. The mattress is brilliant.”
For OMD’s self-titled debut album, Peter Saville pioneered his innovative use of die-cutting, perforating the blue front cover with slanted obrounds which exposed the orange and black inner sleeve. The original idea came from Ben Kelly, an interior designer who had installed a metal grille in the front door of a clothes shop in London’s Covent Garden and brought it to Saville’s attention. Intensively designed across a two-day period, the artwork was an immediate success.
Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark spent 28 weeks on the UK album charts, largely owing to its cover. “To this day, I’m still convinced half the people who bought it were primarily seduced by the sleeve,” said OMD’s Andy McCluskey. The design earned Peter Saville won D&AD silver award in 1981.
With the remaining members of Joy Division adopting a new name following the death of Ian Curtis, New Order’s debut album, Movement, was a statement of intent bolstered by one of the best Peter Saville artworks of the early 80s. With the designers help, the band were able to start afresh with a new visual aesthetic inspired by early-20th-century Italian Futurism. Based on a poster designed by Fortunato Depero which promoted an exposition in 1932 called Futurismo Trentino, Saville’s minimalist use of colour and typography was bold and distinctive.
“A political poster from the Futurist period was the perfect thing for something called Movement,” says Peter Saville. “Movement and speed were at the very heart of Futurism.” The powder-blue cover was a visual equivalent of a lit fuse which would ignite New Order’s musical evolution into the 80s.
Peter Saville designed many album covers for electronic outfit Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, but his eye-catching design for their 1981 album, Architecture & Morality, brought them wider recognition and laid the blueprint for the synth-pop boom.
Produced in collaboration with Brett Wickens, the artwork’s most novel feature was a square cut-out which revealed an inner-sleeve photograph of diagonal hazard stripes beneath a stairwell, a nod to Saville’s architectural influences.
It wasn’t just the artwork OMD have to thank Saville for. His then girlfriend Martha Ladly (of Martha And The Muffins) suggested the album’s title based on the book Morality And Architecture by David Watkin. “We nicked it off her!” OMD’s Andy McCluskey recalled. “We stole it because we saw it as a metaphor for what we did.”
The inspiration behind his artwork for New Order’s third album, Power, Corruption & Lies, came when Peter Saville picked up a postcard in the National Gallery and found himself looking at the painting A Basket Of Roses by French artist Henri Fantin-Latour. “Flowers suggested the means by which power, corruption and lies infiltrate our lives. They’re seductive,” Saville later said. Getting permission to use the image wasn’t easy – as the original painting was out on loan, at first the National Gallery refused the band’s request.
Contacting the gallery director, Factory Records founder Tony Wilson pointed out that the painting belonged to the British taxpayer and argued the public had a right to see it. Surprisingly, the gallery yielded to his request, resulting in not just one of the best Peter Saville artworks, but one of New Order’s finest album covers. Saville has since stated that of all his work this design is his personal favourite.
Prior to the release of Joy Division’s second album, Closer, Peter Saville received a phone call from Tony Wilson to tell him singer Ian Curtis had committed suicide. “Tony, we’ve got a tomb on the cover of the album,” Saville awkwardly pointed out.
As it happens, the band – including Curtis himself – had already signed off on Saville’s design, which featured a stark photograph of the Appiani family tomb taken by Bernard Pierre Wolff in Genoa, Italy. It was a fittingly prescient and sombre artistic choice made even more tragic in the wake of the Curtis’ death.
Any worries that the artwork may have seemed exploitative were unwarranted. This iconic album cover remains emblematic of the collective grief the music world felt at the singer’s passing. Matching the morose lyricism and gothic soundscapes found on Closer, the artwork forever stands in testament to the memory of Ian Curtis.
The only single design in our list of the best Peter Saville artworks, Blue Monday more than earns its place. A harbinger of the computer age, the design for New Order’s Blue Monday 12” was a die-cut sleeve inspired by a floppy disc, incorporating the colour-wheel motif that Peter Saville created for the band. The colour code spells out the name of the single, the B-side (The Beach) and the band’s name. “I understood the floppy disc contained coded information,” said Peter Saville. “I converted the alphabet into a code using colours. It reflected the hieroglyphic visual language of the machine world.”
One of a number of game-changing New Order 12” singles, Blue Monday went on to become the biggest-selling 12” of all time. Much to the consternation of Factory Records, Saville’s unique design actually ended up costing more than the label could sell the record for, leading to a loss of approximately £50,000. “I suppose it really seals its place in history as a mythical being for that reason,” said Peter Hook.
Topping our list of the best Peter Saville artwork, the album cover for Joy Division’s seminal 1979 debut album, Unknown Pleasures, perfectly complemented Martin Hannett’s sci-fi-tinged production. Based on a graphic of radio emissions from a pulsar in deep space, it was found in The Cambridge Encyclopaedia Of Astronomy.
Bernard Sumner likened the design to Stanley Kubrick’s pioneering sci-fi film 2001: A Space Odyssey. “If you take the obelisk out of that movie,” he said, “it has that same black shape.” Peter Saville set these eerie radio signals against a black backdrop, making the cover itself it more tactile by texturing the sleeve design.
Aiming to convey the notion of “unknown pleasures”, Saville explained: “I thought the more this could be an enigmatic black thing, the more it might evoke the title.” His design is now cited as one of the most iconic albums covers of all time.
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