CD Art: "Everything will never be ok"

A few comments about the photography on Fiction Plane's Everything will never be ok.

The front cover is the most crucial and enduring image, for each album or CD. Here, the innocence of a young boy is mocked by the text [Image 1]. The harsh sentiment of the line of text makes the child's innocence and weakness even more keenly felt; the boy's hair and delicate features seem even more vulnerable. The landscape (what is visible) is clinical and barren, with no adults around: there's only a white emptiness with a subtle gradation of blue-grey surrounding the shoulders of the boy. The headset is ominous and benevolent guardian, its oversized ear cups clamped onto the boy's head. A slight smile on the boy's lips assure us he's okay - or at least, he thinks so, for the album title, Everything will never be ok, twists the usual reassurance adults dole out to children.

The cover's vicious observation, humor and nostalgia shares the same sensibility as the music inside.

The bitter observation, nostalgia, and humor in this cover image shares the same sensibility with the music inside.

[Image 2, back cover] What we expect to see: youthful band members.

The back shows a group portrait of the band, and feels fairly standard, if slightly confrontational.

Opening the CD case and removing the disc gives a momentary shock:

[Image 3, inside back cover] The flipside; self-parody or respectful nod?

It's the same grouping, but time has sped up forty years or so [Image 3]. And while it's still confrontational, different problems are raised. If you laughed at first, why? Does it take away from their role as rock band once they've aged? What about the clothes -- it reminds us that the cool factor of fashion fades eventually. The photo spins out into all sorts of uncomfortable realizations.

The inside liner notes feature a series of portraits of old age, some with dignity, and some without [Image 5, below].

Fiction Plane's prominent placement of older people reminded me of Fairport Convention's Unhalfbricking (1969), the cover of which showed band member Sandy Denny's parents, Neil and Edna Denny, outside the family home in Wimbledon, South London (citation: Wikipedia).

[Image 4] Cover to Fairport Convention's Unhalfbricking.

The Guardian Observer points out the the eccentricity and nationalism on display:

"The final stroke of inspiration was the sleeve, shot at the suburban home of Denny's parents, who stand awkwardly in the fore ground while the group themselves are half hidden behind a trellis fence. The image is pretty much perfect, rendering a mundane English idea unsettling, as if the age-old strangeness that underlies our national patchwork might be about to burst forth. From here on in that's exactly what happened." (Guardian Observer, June 20, 2004)

These three images -- the front, back, and inside back -- create a sort of tableau of three major life stages. If Unhalfbricking's cover has assured immortality to Sandy Denny's parents, Fiction Plane's art anticipates and attempts to control the artists' mortality.

I think there's also an uncomfortableness with ambiguity, found in the textual assertion that "everything will (never) be okay" [Images 1, 6]. Temporal foreknowledge must be certain, and there can't be any allowance for factors not in the subject's control. The concern with time is also evident in the liner note props, e.g., the giant clock and wilting flowers.

[Image 5] One of the liner images.

[Image 6] Prescription bottle and pills.

Image credits for Fiction Plane CD: Photography by Perou, design by Chris Turner @ Dark Matter.