By collapsing history in on itself, designer Vaughan Oliver – who has died aged 62 – created complex images that heightened
music by Pixies, Cocteau Twins and more
A good album cover can be a map, a portal or a clue. A guide to the music within; a window on an artist’s life, be it glamorous or workaday; or something less obvious, an image that might allude to just one element of what’s inside. It can even be a foil to wrongfoot you. Vaughan Oliver sleeves were frequently all of these things at once.
The graphic designer, who has died aged 62, created runes to be pored over, adding – in tandem with photographers and type designers – his own potent pre-verbal language to the vocabulary of the musicians he was designing for, primarily on the 4AD label. There were human figures with entire stories to be wondered at: the man on Pixies’ Come on Pilgrim, so hairy as to be transforming; the woman suspended in something on the cover of This Mortal Coil’s It’ll End In Tears, be it seawater or starlight; the topless flamenco dancer posing for Pixies’ Surfer Rosa, a vision of pure sexuality looked on by a tiny, impotent crucified Jesus on the wall next to her.