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100 best album covers

The Art of Noise, In No Sense? Nonsense!

The cover design for In No Sense? Nonsense! by The Art of Noise is an odd mixture of awkwardness and elegance, humour, and style. The girl’s face is beautiful but distorted. Her expression is cool and aloof, yet she is doing something rather silly and frivolous. The lettering for the band’s name is a strange combination of both very small and very large characters, and is positioned perhaps too close for comfort to the girl’s forehead. The end result is charming — both fashionable and naïve — and like the music, laced with humour. All of this is epitomized by the party popper, an arty image that made noise. The Art of Noise.

Fashion

John Pasche commissioned Alan David-Tu, who had recently arrived in London from Holland, to do the photography. His work was then very fashionable. John saw it as “very impressive; fresh and different, which connected to the fashion dement I wanted to bring into the cover.”

Strange stuff

“I was doing strange stuff, and John let me get on with it and do my own thing. The shot was based on ideas I was already working on, but was taken specifically for the cover” — Alan David-Tu.

Mannequin

The cover image is a manipulated photographic montage of a mannequin, taken with a Linhoff Supertechnica camera. David-Tu’s style was to photograph an image, distort it in the printing, then montage the hair on, at the same time cutting it into a particular shape. No computers were used. It was purely montage with photographic and printing techniques. Alan found a mannequin as a subject, masked off portions of her face and hair, and photographed her. He then cut up the shot, rearranged it, and re-photographed it.

Quirky

Art director John Pasche wanted something, quirky, something sophisticated that related to fashion but with a bit of a twist. There was a lot of humour in the music. The band was much taken with odd sounds. They experimented enthusiastically with the Fairlight sampler and recorded the noises made by objects dropped on the floor. Any interesting results were incorporated into the music in a wry and incongruous way.

Did you know that that The Art of Noises was the title of an Italian Futurist manifesto, written by Luigi Russolo in 1913, advocating the use of everyday sounds? The Futurists also pioneered “wild” typography — long before the experiments of the Dada movement.