The Drones are a band who passed me by even though I was living in Manchester at the time they - like quite a few others - ditched heavy rock for punk. But I did admire their debut album sleeve with what is often referred to as 'the blue girl', and nicked myself a copy from a wall display in one of the local record shops. Details are hard to come by; the photographs front and back were by Peter Higgins whose contributions to record covers were quite limited, while the cover design was by Ross J. Waters, his only punk sleeve amongst a selection of MOR releases, many for Music For Pleasure.
The Drones are a band who passed me by even though I was living in Manchester at the time they - like quite a few others - ditched heavy rock for punk. But I did admire their debut album sleeve with what is often referred to as 'the blue girl', and nicked myself a copy from a wall display in one of the local record shops. Details are hard to come by; the photographs front and back were by Peter Higgins whose contributions to record covers were quite limited, while the cover design was by Ross J. Waters, his only punk sleeve amongst a selection of MOR releases, many for Music For Pleasure, with art direction credited Joe McGillicuddy at Roc Advertising. Based in London Roc did a couple of dozen also-ran sleeves over the first half of the Seventies, but came good on a few including a rare early Vertigo cover for Freedom and perhaps their best known, Be Bop Deluxe's Modern Music for Harvest. The back cover photo was done in London, although Manchester did have it's own collection of seedy 'adult' shops back then (one of which I recall had a back room full of bootleg vinyl!). The cover model is not identified but the front is a studio shoot. Turning the model upside down gives an unsettling effect and it has been cropped really well, while the angled look is complimented by setting the titles at degrees. That it worked nicely is shown by a comeback album from 1999 called Sorted, which rotated the cover photo to a more regular portrait format and looks completely wrong.
Size: 3659px × 3858px
Photo credit: © Simon Robinson / Easy On The Eye / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., album, design, drones, face, girl, group, hair, higgins, manchester, peter, private, punk, red, ross, shop, sleeve, waters
