By Ryan Sparks – February 2008 

If you’re like me, a product of the vinyl generation, then chances are you remember the times spent listening to your favourite music on something called a turntable, in a day and age where the term album wasn’t a practically obsolete word as it is today. Long before the advent of the compact disc, digital downloading and file sharing, the record album was the preferred medium. The album cover itself served to not only protect the actual vinyl record and advertise the band or artist and the contents inside, it was more importantly a vital form of visual expression. In the 60’s and 70’s album cover designs flourished as bands not only strove to push the musical envelope but the visual one as well.

Throughout the annals of Rock ‘n Roll history there has been literally thousands of examples of imaginative and not to mention controversial album covers. For example The Beatles 1967 Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band record was not only a creative milestone musically for the band, but the elaborate and stunning cover design and cut out inserts pretty much equalled the music in terms of impact and originality. With the arrival of progressive rock in the late 60’s and early 70’s, heavyweights such as Pink Floyd and Genesis sought out the designs of Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell (collectively known as Hipgnosis) while Emerson Lake and Palmer employed Swiss painter H.R. Giger on Brain Salad Surgery.

In 1971 another progressive rock outfit Yes, was on the verge of releasing their all important 3^rd album entitled Fragile. For this album, which was perhaps the bands finest moment, they turned to artist Roger Dean to create a dynamic visual to match their music. Dean’s cover image of an earth like planet covered in a large body of water, sporting large trees had a very distinct feel to it and compared to the look of the bands previous two albums, it was definitely a significant upgrade. This cover design was the impetus for a longstanding creative relationship with the band which continues to this day. Over the years Dean has come to be known as an almost un-official member of the band, as his brilliant gate fold art work on the bands peak period 70’s output Close To The Edge (1972), Yessongs (1973), Tales From Topographic Oceans (1973) and Relayer (1974)  proved that his striking landscapes were largely a natural extension of the music itself. In fact few artists have become as synonymous with a band as Dean has with Yes.

Over the subsequent years Roger designed many high profile album covers and logos for bands such as Budgie, Gentle Giant, Uriah Heep and Asia. He published through his own publishing company Paper Tiger, two books of his art work, Views (1975) and Magnetic Storm (1984) as well as a successful series of album cover art books called The Album Cover Album. After leaving the company which he co-founded with his brother Martyn, the mid 80’s saw Roger turn his attention to video game cover designs for a company called Psygnosis. With a degree from the Royal College of Art in London, where he also studied industrial design, Roger has even gone so far as to replicate the exterior and interior designs of some of his most famous architectural creations through his Home For Life project. Home For Life and the accompanying Willowater are essentially a home and village concept for the new millennium which is quick and inexpensive to build as well as being environmentally kind. Not to mention how cool would it be to actually own a house that is straight out of one of his paintings!

Roger is one of the most respected artists in the field and over the past forty years his vast body of work has been an inspiration to thousands.  He fortunately shows no sign of slowing down as 2008 is already shaping up to be a very busy year. He has scheduled exhibitions of his work planned as well as a third book set for publication, not to mention he continues to work on his film project Floating Islands which began in 2005. Read on for a rare glimpse into what fuels his creative process, his feelings on the lost art of album cover design and what it’s like to work with both arms encased in plaster.

Ryan:  What projects are you currently working on?

Roger: This week I delivered an album cover and logo for Asia’s new album which is called Phoenix. Next week I fly out to Italy with my daughter, I’ve designed the sets for a new Puccini opera Edgar for the Pucinni festival in Torre del Lago. She designed the costumes and I’ve designed the sets. I’ve got a new book coming out in September and we’ve named it after the first publishing company we had which was called Dragon’s Dreams, so we’re calling the new book that. That will have a lot of pictures in it because I haven’t put out a book for a long time, so there are a great many paintings in that one. It’s my third book, the first was Views, the second was Magnetic Storm and this is the third. The first two will also be republished over the next year and a bit. I’ve got an exhibition in San Francisco in September [laughing]. I’m a bit worried because I’m supposed to have one in Tokyo in the autumn as well. I don’t have any dates for that yet but I guess I’ll get those soon. I’ve got a touring exhibition starting in Germany at some point later this year, but again with no fixed dates yet.. It’s quite a busy year.

Ryan: It sounds like it.

Roger:  Yes are going out on tour this summer as well and I don’t know what I’m doing for that yet but we have had a number of discussions. There is something I’m doing which may be connected to that. It isn’t connected to it, but it may become connected to it, I’m building three Yes landscapes for a company that’s building virtual worlds. You will be able to visit these landscapes and because they’re going to be made at quite a high standard it might be possible that we will have a short film made of them as well. I’ll be going out to California because the first deliverable for that one is in March.

Ryan: Speaking of films what is the status of your Floating Islands project?

Roger: For somebody like me who is not in the business, it’s surprisingly difficult to sort out the finances for it. On the other hand we have had a lot of people who have said ‘subject to you finishing the script, we’d like to do it’, so that kind of put the ball back in our court. We’ve had a number of re-writes on the script and at the moment we haven’t re-presented it until we’ve got a final, satisfactory script. In fact our ideal scenario is to have a script that we really love, because we have a story that we really love, but the script has always been not quite right and it’s a surprisingly exasperating process [laughing]. I can’t do it, I’m involved in it but I’m not a writer. It’s not like saying this painting isn’t working I’m going to go and do another one. It’s not in my hands to get this right, so it’s a little bit frustrating for me but I think we’re going to get there fairly soon. We’re currently in negotiations with a number of investors. All of the investor’s money that we’ve discussed so far for the movie hasn’t been with distributors, so our hope and expectation is that we will have a significant part of the funding in place before we talk to major film companies. 

Ryan: You started developing this project in 2005 so I’m assuming the scope of this project is pretty big.

Roger: When you say scope what do you mean by that?

Ryan: Just in terms of what is involved to make this movie. The plan is to make it a ninety minute film right?

Roger: That is the plan yes. It’s a ninety minute feature film. My partner and I haven’t come to a total agreement on whether it’s going to be CG with live action, which is my preferred route. He is still thinking we should keep the option of doing it fully animated with no live action at all which is something I’m not as enthusiastic about. However the technology is moving forward so I might change my mind later. You’re right it is a very complicated process. I have worked on more complicated projects that haven’t yet seen the light of day. We once worked on a huge game project that had a budget as large as a movie. It was very complicated because in that we were constantly pressured for story boards and the problem with a story board is that you need a story. In a game it’s a little more open ended you know? You can have an overall story but the incidents that take place along the way are of necessity, undecided; it’s like a race. A movie might be a race where somebody knows the beginning, middle and end. However with a game, that race, as you are a participant, you want the end not to be fixed, and these things consist of many equivalents, so it was quite a complicated project. I’m also working on a number of Tetris projects as well, not the design of the game, just graphics. Several of the last projects that I’ve done for Tetris haven’t been variations on the design of the game but really on the method of delivery. When I did the logos for Blue Lava Company, which was a company that had the rights for Tetris for mobile phones, as far as I know that was just Tetris, it wasn’t a question of a different game just a different deliverable.

Ryan: Back to Floating Islands, The first album cover you did for Yes was the Fragile album. That cover depicts an earth like planet fragmenting into smaller pieces which would land on a new planet and start anew. In the past you did mention that there were lots of plans to continue to develop this narrative but quote “probably fortunately it didn’t happen”. However isn’t this overall concept primarily the basis for the film?

Roger: No. Actually it’s very interesting because it has become a story within a story. It’s the story that triggers this story that is the film, and it’s told as a fairy tale. The hero of the story is told that it is a fairy tale when he is a child and that triggers the quest, so it’s in the film. A lot of this material is featured in the film but it’s not the story of the film.

Ryan: So that’s just a portion of the whole thing?

Roger: Yes. It’s told as a slightly animated story to a child at the beginning of the film and hence it becomes a sort of motivating force in his life, but I’m not going to tell you any more than that [laughing]. It triggers the main story but it isn’t the main story I guess.

Ryan: A common misconception when people describe your  artwork is that it’s often referred to as being science fiction or fantasy in content, when in fact what you were essentially trying to create were very real looking landscapes weren’t you?

Roger: If I’m thinking of myself as a painter or an artist then I do think of myself primarily as a landscape artist yes. It’s not science fiction at all [laughing].

Ryan: When it comes to designing an album cover you have mentioned that in most cases you don’t hear the music prior, largely because the music isn’t even done at that point.

Roger: That’s true.

Ryan: In the case of your work with Yes, how then would you explain the natural connection your art has with their music?

Roger: There are two answers to that. One answer is that I talk to the band and I confirm the ideas behind the album. If they have a title then I have an idea why they’ve used that particular title, and those ideas are very interesting because when they’re creating the music, they are making the music around a very fugitive idea as well. If we’re both working around the same fugitive idea, then there’s a fairly good chance we’ll come up with something that makes a happy end. I guess that’s one answer and the other is that there is a fair degree of good fortune, tolerance and flexibility in the way we perceive things. It’s not like it has to be a machine- precise fit. The brain accommodates a lot, so it’s from the same world and that works well enough. In fact it works very well.

Ryan: Would you say that in terms of past work you’ve done and I’m talking specifically about your album cover designs that your relationship with Yes has been fairly unique?

Roger: My relationship with Yes is quite unique; if for no other reason just the length of time and the quantity of work that I’ve done with them makes it quite different and quite separate. However the way we worked from the very beginning is how I think I would have worked with anybody. If they are developing an idea before they go into the studio, and even for the first weeks or months that they are in the studio, that idea that they are developing amongst themselves is the key source of my inspiration. That has been true with a lot of the bands that I’ve worked with. Sometimes that has been easily accessible and other times it has taken some digging to get it. Other times a lot of very successful covers that I’ve done have been bands coming to me with an existing painting that they really loved,  so its worked that way as well. Even with Yes it’s worked that way.

Ryan: So you’ve been approached in many different ways.

Roger: There have been lots. The four paintings I did for Yessongs were actually conceived before the band came to me, and I should say as a matter of fact even the band logo was done before they even came to me to design a logo. After Fragile I thought I could do better than that, so in the hopes that they would come back and ask me to do something else, I came up with another logo and we used it on the cover of Close To The Edge.

Ryan: Although you didn’t necessarily intentionally set out to have your work become associated with progressive rock, do you feel your art has a particular affinity with that style of music?

Roger: I think if you saw it from the other end, if you saw what I was doing back at the end of the 60’s and early 70’s, the reason it has an association with progressive rock it was almost inevitable. At that time the bands that had become known as progressive rock were the main bands that were focusing in on albums. A bit later everyone did but really you’d have to say that the big bands before them like the Beatles and The Rolling Stones for example, of course they made albums, but they didn’t focus on them to begin with. The Beatles started out as a band making very successful singles as did the Stones. It was only much later, towards the end of their career really that they started focusing on albums. I was working I suppose after the Beatles had gone in that direction, but bands that were starting at that point and focusing on albums as opposed to singles would have been the bands known as progressive rock bands.

Ryan: I think for the most part progressive rock bands presented their albums as more of a complete package. In my opinion the connection between your art and a band like Yes is that they were focused on delivering the complete package. It wasn’t just about the music it was about presenting something as whole with detailed artwork and complex and intricate music. Would you agree with that?

Roger: I would agree with that. I think the idea of creating a whole was very much in everyone’s mind. I think if the Beatles had continued then people might not have adopted the term progressive rock. They would have considered them the vanguard of that movement because a lot of experiments in music production and sound really were done by the Beatles. If you look at avant-garde musicians from the 50’s, you know people like John Cage’s 23 minutes of silence played on a piano, tapes recorded backwards and all that kind of stuff, the Beatles really scooped that up and had fun using it in their albums.

Ryan: You could say an album like Sgt. Pepper was really the first progressive rock album.

Roger: I wouldn’t but you could because it did stick to a lot of experimental stuff and it was a concept album. I mean The Who as well with Tommy which was definitely a concept album. I was never familiar with the word progressive rock until years later when I was allegedly involved with it [laughing]. It worked very well for me because a lot of things that I worked on in the 70’s have become serious collectibles in countries like Germany and Japan. Bless them both because companies like Repertoire Records in Germany have been re-releasing a lot of my early stuff. Sometimes I wince and think ‘My God I hoped no one would ever see that again’ [laughing]. They also have really beautifully packaged things I am very happy to see again. I’d have to say that in Germany and Japan there is a very positive attitude towards music and treating it as part of a whole, in a way that a lot of American and English companies have missed the point on. In Japan the fact that music is a gift is completely understood. We know music as a gift, that’s why we call great musicians gifted, but the way it’s presented to us as the public, it’s important that is respected. I just did an article for someone about this and I would say that in Japan you can see that the company honours the musician and they have terrific pride in what they do. They want everyone to know that when they put out an album that it’s the best that it can possibly be. They trust that the musicians will do good and they produce it beautifully, package it and present it to you gracefully, and you know there is respect behind that. When Atlantic put out Close To The Edge on CD for the first time, for ten years it didn’t have the painting. I mean does that sound like respect? I don’t think so. It’s not just disrespecting me, it’s disrespecting the band and frankly it shows no self respect on behalf of the company. In this day and age when you’re getting people downloading music and bypassing record companies, it’s something they brought upon themselves. When I worked on those albums for Yes it would be a delight to receive that as a gift, but it doesn’t work with the way it’s packaged now.

Ryan: That’s a whole other discussion right there because part of the overall enjoyment of the listening process back in the vinyl days for me was being able to spend hours with it as a complete package. I would pour over the liner notes and enjoy the artwork, as well as listening to the music. I definitely feel something has been lost.

Roger: Can I talk to you about a very serious issue that is happening around the world particularly in the US and England?

Ryan: Sure.

Roger:  You may be familiar with this or you may not. The American and British governments are under terrific pressure to change the laws to effectively destroy copyright protection. In America it’s called The Orphan Works Act, in England its part of The Gower Review, also called The Orphan Works, which is a clause in their proposal. The effect of this is whereas now if you walk down the road and you see a bicycle standing against the wall and it doesn’t belong to you, you can’t take it. The Orphan Works Act will say that if you walk down the road and you make a reasonable effort to find the owner and you can’t, then you can take it. That analogy would work with a car as well. The fact is that every musician, designer, artist, writer, anyone who depends on copyright protection is going to get screwed by this amendment. It’s been defeated twice in the United States but it looks like it’s going to be going through in the British government. It looks like they are going to support it and it will be devastating because they have a safe harbour clause that says that someone who uses the copyright belonging to someone else, providing they make a reasonable effort, cannot be sued. It’s extremely expensive to go to court in both the United States and the U.K. to sue someone, especially because the companies you would normally be suing are big companies. This would make it impossible and it would make copyright protection impossible. Musicians, artists you name it are going to get completely screwed by this.

Ryan: So if this went through I would be able for example to use one of your logos unauthorised without any legal repercussions?

Roger: Or even being able to stop you from continuing to use it. You have to show that you made a reasonable effort to find out who designed the logo and that you approached me. However because everyone has their stuff published in some unattributed form especially on the internet, it’s going to be impossible. It’s also pretty much technically impossible to register a copyright effectively because people find bits of it, incomplete or color changes or whatever. What I’m doing is, lots of American artists have asked for my support which is pointless really because I’m not an American artist, but here in England I’m basically saying to any artist or designer that I meet, to check it out the implications of this and to write to their MP or write to your Senator and to do something.

Ryan: A question you get asked a lot is where you get your ideas from and you’ve described the creative process for you as the basic ideas for your work are always there; it’s just a matter of moving out the clutter of thought to allow these ideas to flow through.

Roger: It’s true that is how it works.

Ryan: Maybe this sounds easier than it is but is there any specific way you go about achieving this?

Roger: Yes I would say there is, two or three things actually [laughing]. One is you really have to trust. You might have to deliver a new project, new design or painting tomorrow, you’re running out of time and you haven’t got an idea. Panic is the antithesis of creativity. At the time when you should be panicking you really have to not worry, you have to trust that it will come. I’d have to say this is one thing that is hard to learn without experience and especially without bad experience. Learning to meditate, learning to be calm is the way. One of the things that I find very difficult for example is doing the kind of thing we’re doing now, which is exploring ideas and talking about things which interest us, excite or agitate us. I think adrenaline has a very difficult role in the creative process. It can definitely work if its there, but its also the thing which keeps the mind too busy, because if you can have adrenaline and calm then you’ve really got it made. However the best thing I find is to go for calm because without having to go for a complicated mix, freeing the mind is definitely the way to go. For me meditating, even prayer or a walk around the countryside with my dogs helps me clear my mind. I used to do Kendo for many, many years and I found that terrifically helpful. If I was to recommend to someone starting out at art school or even someone much younger actually, that wanted to be an artist, I would say two things, learn to draw and learn to use a sword [laughing]. It doesn’t sound logical but it is. 

Ryan: As a large body of your art was created in the 70’s, people have always wondered what you took as far as chemicals in order to fuel these ideas. However you’ve been very quick to point out that you don’t drink or take drugs and have certainly never worked under the influence. Is it safe to say that the perhaps the main reason for not operating this way was to avoid that very situation of having drugs or alcohol impede your creative process?

Roger: It would make a nice logical story if I had been that aware but I wasn’t. I was lucky that I found a way that worked for me. Entertainment of any kind clashes with work, even watching television. I tell my daughter all the time that you can’t watch just 5 minutes of television because once you turn it on it will stop you working for the rest of the evening. Some people can work and watch television; I listen to stories because you can work without using your eyes and I can just concentrate on what I’m doing very well.  In fact the mind works especially well that way, you can not only do two things at once but you pretty much have to do two things at once. That process of listening to a story for example or the radio, takes your mind away from your work and that, although it’s not clearing the mind, it’s clearing the mind from that path. While you’re concentrating on the story your mind does the job of making the picture very efficiently. So I would say in the part of the creative process that works very well. It’s hard to pin down though where the ideas come from in that sense because they often come fully formed and almost in a split second. One minute you don’t have an idea and the next minute it’s there. It’s rarely a slow and cumulative process; it’s usually pretty instant and fully formed.

Ryan: Is that process the same regardless of what you’re creating?

Roger: I would say yes. Although I would have to say that when I was much younger I learned intuitively without understanding the process and I sure as hell did my share of panicking I can tell you [laughing]. I had no idea how to do a job and I had no time to do it in, so I definitely made my dues in terms of panic. The process that actually taught me about what I was doing and it was very interesting was Kendo. That really helped me become aware of the process. When I’m talking to people about being aware and not being aware of what you’re doing, and how to take your mind off of your activities, you have to act without thought but not in a thoughtless way. The example I give is that if you’re running down the stairs and you start to think of what part of the step you’re going to put your foot on, you’re going to wrap your toes just over the edge of the step or you’re going to put it fully on the edge. Before you finish that thought you’ll be falling and breaking your neck, we all know that. But at the same time you have to have a kind of global awareness. You can’t think where you put your foot; you can’t think in detail, but if you don’t know globally what’s going on you might trip over a suitcase that someone’s left on the staircase. You have to be aware, but not focusing, and as I say Kendo was wonderful in helping me understand that. I’m going to do a book about this by the way. It’s a book I’m working on now which will come out after the book that I’m publishing in September. It will be just about how to the extent it might be possible that you can make the creative process work for you. I don’t know what I’m going to call it but I think it might be subtitled The Drawn Sword.  

Ryan: Pathways and bridges are reoccurring elements or themes in your work. 

Roger: They are. 

Ryan: Can you explain their significance? 

Roger: They have lots of different significances, but I do think an established pathway around a landscape is particularly wonderful and something really close to a spiritual experience. I literally think sometimes that pathways are like a wordless prayer because they bring you in touch with a greater awareness of the power of nature, by seeing the human role in it’s way of travelling through it. It’s just a wonderful process and it’s something I’m very interested in. I’ve taken hundreds and thousands of photographs of pathways; it’s an important thing for me.

Ryan: Would you say that it’s symbolic of how it relates to the paths that people choose in their lives?

Roger: Only metaphorically. ‘Do’ as in Kendo means the way. We understand this as a philosophical concept, there might be an overlap but I’m not thinking of it in that way.

Ryan: To fans of rock music you are certainly well known for the album covers you’ve designed for many different bands but in the beginning of your career you studied both industrial design as well as art. In fact the principal of the art college didn’t think you were cut out to be an artist isn’t that right?

Roger: Not really. It was a very specific and crazy thing I think. The story that I tell which is true is when I started at Canterbury College of Art, I’m repeating an old story, but when I started it was just four days after my seventeenth birthday. I was very young and naïve and I was in a life drawing class and no matter how wonderful it is, it’s also hugely embarrassing for someone who’s just turned seventeen to sit with a pencil and draw a naked lady. You can’t do it unless you look and sometimes you feel guilty about looking. In an enlightened age you might not notice it but I have to tell you I was very embarrassed and most of my contemporaries were as well. In the middle of this process, I was suffering horrendously because the model was pretty much our age, the principal came in and asked if there was anyone in the room named Dean. I put my hand up and he said ‘You better come with me you’re not meant to be here’, it was hugely humiliating. He took me to his office and he pointed to my exam results and he said ‘Math and physics’. I had been there long enough in those few days to know that I had done at least as well as anyone else in terms of academics especially in math and physics which at the time I thought I was pretty good at. However that was the problem and he said that I shouldn’t be doing fine arts, but that I should be doing math and physics. So he sent me off to do industrial design which I didn’t mind. I’ve often said it worked out very well because those of us doing industrial design continued to do all the academic fine arts stuff. We did life drawing, composition and all that stuff, but the people who were doing fine arts stopped doing that. It became very abstract and conceptual. We were taught all the traditional techniques that the artists weren’t.

Ryan: One of your early creations was called the sea urchin chair; did this piece of furniture help get you the job of designing something similar for Ronnie Scott’s famed club in London? 

Roger: Not directly. The design of that particular piece of furniture, by the way in May that chair is going on a four month exhibition in Vienna. I don’t know the exact location of the gallery. A furniture manufacturer saw it and approached me to design something for them. I wasn’t hugely interested in designing furniture although I was very flattered to be asked. However they did have the contract to do the interior of Ronnie Scott’s, so I got the job of designing the seating in the discotheque. It was indirect but the sea urchin chair triggered that, in fact it triggered a lot of things didn’t it?

Ryan: Is it true that a chair design of yours also ended up in the film A Clockwork Orange? 

Roger: That was entirely my Brother Martyn’s piece, the retreat pod.   

Ryan: I want to ask your thoughts on the creative process behind some of your album designs. 

Roger: Ok. 

Ryan: How about the album First Base by Babe Ruth. 

Roger: Oh my God [laughing]. That has to be very obvious isn’t it? I mean not a big creative leap there. 

Ryan: Was that a particular situation where they came to you with a specific idea in mind? 

Roger: I imagine they must have had some reason for calling themselves Babe Ruth. Babe Ruth was not only a baseball player but it was a chocolate bar as well. I did the lettering like a familiar English chocolate bar and I believe the idea came from the band. I did that occasionally, there was two others where the band, the management or record company had an idea, none of them I thought were very successful with one exception. The exception was Ramases, his idea was that the front cover of his album (Space Hymns - Vertigo 1971) would look like a rocket in space and then when you opened it up you would discover that it in fact was the spire of a church. That was his idea. He was a very interesting guy.  

Ryan: Tell me about Uriah Heep’s Demons & Wizards and The Magician’s Birthday. 

Roger: Demons (“Rainbow Demon”) and separately Wizards (“The Wizard”) were two different songs on that album and Ken Hensley probably thought it was a neat idea to make the album follow that. It was the same with Yes if you like; I was looking at the ideas while they were playing them and I would follow those same ideas. Demons & Wizards was a very problematic painting for me that one was. I had just gotten going with hand drawn lettering as well, because on Gun which was the first album cover  I ever did, I had a very good friend of mine, a graphic designer who was at Canterbury the same time I was, she did all the graphics for me, I just did the painting. After I had finished that album she went off to India as was the want of young people back in the late 60’s, so when I got my next album cover I didn’t know anything about graphic design at all. I didn’t know where to turn, so I went into the record company with a finished painting and the moment I was dreading was when they were going to ask me about where all the typesetting was. I didn’t know how to go about it so I fished out from behind my back as it were a sheet of paper with it all handwritten. I figured I’d have to explain that I would just need another day or two. They looked at it and said ‘Oh wow it’s all handwritten, that’s cool’ [laughing]. This was for Clear Blue Sky I think it was. It meant that I was beginning to develop typography interests. Before I finished the Demons & Wizards album cover I went with my then girlfriend for a holiday on Sark which is an island in the Channel Islands in England that became the model for (Mervyn) Peake’s Gormenghast. While I was there I was running down the road which was very rocky, I had a fall and broke both of my wrists.  It was very stormy and we couldn’t get off the island for a couple of days, and by the time I finally got to a hospital in Guernsey which is another island, my hands had really swollen up. They immediately put them in plaster and told me that I might need plaster for a long time, but that when I went back to England I would have to have it reset. I went to the hospital in England and they took the plaster off  and they said ‘I’m afraid we’re going to have to re-plaster it and you’ll need it on for thirteen weeks and you wont be able to use your hands for most of that time’. I said ‘Thirteen weeks? Give me a break I thought it was going to be six weeks?’ He said ‘We’ll check it in six weeks but I think it’s going to be thirteen’. I couldn’t have my hands in plaster for thirteen weeks, so at first I wouldn’t let him plaster it up again but at the same time I couldn’t use my hands. So I pretty much had to finish Demons & Wizards with my left hand, which was also in plaster but it was not anywhere near as painful, so the lettering was a problem. My Brother helped me a bit with the lettering but as I say it was a serious issue for me finishing that album [laughing].  

Ryan: What happened with Gentle Giant’s Octopus? You created the artwork for the U.K. version but they went with another artist for the American release. 

Roger: The reason was they did it first. I thought it was an excellent sleeve and I had no idea why they asked me to do a different design. Do you think it had a good sleeve? 

Ryan: Sure but I liked your version better to tell you the truth. 

Roger: Well I liked my version better as well, but if I was the record company I wouldn’t have seen any reason to do another one because I thought the American one was great. It was kind of a major nudge to make sure I could match that in terms of impact. I did have the advantage to see what they had done first. It made no sense though because you’d have thought for continuity sake that they would have wanted the same cover. There is a very interesting package put out, again by the Japanese doing things right, a Japanese retailer not a record company that makes specially made beautiful and very robust boxes. They have an Octopus box and if you buy this box it has my painting on the cover and inside it has the replica gatefold of the original cover plus the American cover. It’s a really nice package.  

Ryan: You designed some very iconic logos including the famous bubble style logo for Yes, as well as Asia’s and the original design for Virgin Records. Did you have any input into these designs or was it case of them knowing exactly what they wanted?   

Roger: When I met Richard Branson I think he was still running a magazine called Student and he was talking about getting a record company together. We talked about it a lot and I had plenty of time to design quite a few different record labels before he ever got around to forming the record company. He had a record store before the record company and his first store was quite a small one on Oxford St. in London, but it did a huge amount of business. As they opened other ones in Brighton and Liverpool and places like that, my Brother designed and built all the interiors. We used the designs that I had done for the record label for advertising, carrier bags and for the stores, so they kind of gradually evolved. The twin girl had become a sort of symbol and logo for Virgin long before they had a fixed point. I probably did at least twenty or thirty different designs, which all got used, before we did the final one. I remember he invited us to a party which was at this fantastic manor house out in the country and we were all truly impressed that anyone our age, in fact he was younger, could afford to buy such a place. It was a fairly raucous party and afterwards he said to me ‘What do you think of the place?’ and I said ‘It’s brilliant when did you buy it?’ and he said ‘Well I haven’t yet I’m just trying to decide whether to buy it or not’ [laughing]. That was a good idea, have the party first just in case you don’t.

Ryan: Something else I’m interested in is your Home For Life concept.  

Roger: You’ve actually done your homework haven’t you? You’ve asked me a lot of surprising questions.  

Ryan: How far have you been able to take the concept? 

Roger: At the moment I have a client in Hawaii who has asked me to design and build four guest houses. I don’t know when that will happen but it won’t happen until he sorts out other issues on his land. Unfortunately that doesn’t have a fixed schedule but it’s possible that could start this year. I have at this moment maybe fifteen or twenty people individually asking me to design houses and I have two or three groups of people who want me to build small communities or villages.  It’s a very active thing except we’re not actually building anything yet. However on more solid footing if you like, we signed a contract last year to design a campus associated with a university, which looks like it stands a chance. I wouldn’t call it definite because the financial world we’re in this year seems a bit bleaker. It was fairly marginal financially back then because it had a sponsor; it might happen. The other thing we’ve designed that we’re waiting to hear if it comes about is two hotel projects, as well as a small business and conference center with hotel accommodations. There are a number of projects going on right now and I have to say they are all very close to my heart and it interests me almost more than anything else. It’s quite frustrating that we haven’t built anything yet. One particular project that I really love and you’ll probably see it in my book before you see it built is the church in California which they’re in the process of raising the money for.

Ryan: Thanks so much for your time Roger. Your album cover artwork is just a small portion of your total body of work and your designs are very inspiring. 

Roger: Bless you, thanks. I’d count this as one of my more interesting interviews in that you actually know what you’re talking about.