REVOLVER:If you walk into your local Tesco today and try to buy a copy of Manic Street Preacher's new album ( Journal for Plague Lovers), you'll find that the sleeve has been covered up by a slipcase. The reason? The album sleeve is a threat to all that we hold dear in Western civilisation and may well prompt young people to go a blood-soaked killing spree. Or something like that.
The sleeve of the Manics album is a portrait by Jenny Saville called Stare. Saville's brushwork style is similar to Lucian Freud's; she tends to splatter images with colours. To "family-friendly" supermarkets in the UK and Ireland, Saville's image appears to depict a boy with blood on his face. In fact, it's not blood, but that's enough to cover it up from the sensitive types who shop in Tesco and other supermarkets.
Oddly, you can still buy a copy of U2's Boyin your local supermarket. The image of a young boy naked from the waist up was unremarked upon in Europe, but U2's then US label, Warner, had a panic attack over the image and replaced it with a stretched-out band shot.
What causes a slight “moral panic” and what is allowed to slip by totally unnoticed in album artwork is a glimpse into the inconsistent, and quite often, hypocritical prevailing morality of the times.
Consider the weird case of The Five Keys, an American vocal group from the 1950s. Their 1957 release, On Stage, featured a standard group photo of the five singers on the cover. They are side-on to the camera and, if you peer closely enough andhave a vivid imagination, it may be possible to mistake one of the singer's thumbs for his penis hanging out of his trousers.
Go to www.noiseaddicts.com/ 2009/04/30-most-controversial-album-covers to see the Five Keys album, along with others that have caused boardroom marketing problems over the years. (I’d pass quickly over the Chumbawumba sleeve if I were you.).
The only apparent consistency is that any imagery of females under 16 immediately gets banned – which is at is should be, not least because using this form of imagery could now lead to a prosecution. Otherwise, nothing seems to make any sense at all.
“You can have lovely shiny buttocks and guns everywhere in the supermarket on covers of magazines and CDs,” says the Manics’ James Dean Bradfield. “But you show a piece of art and people just freak out. If you’re familiar with Jenny Saville’s work, there’s a lot of ochres and browns, and perhaps people are looking for us to be more provocative than we are being. It is bizarre that supermarkets actually think that that’s going to impinge on anyone’s psyche.”
You don’t really expect supermarket chains to have an on-call representational art adviser, but even the most casual viewer can discern that the Saville painting uses a mix of olive green, reddish brown and blue and black colours. It simply can’t be interpreted as a child who has just been hit in the face (as the supermarkets seem to think). Knowing Saville’s work, it’s more likely to represent something along the lines of “psychic hurt” – which is what would have attracted the Manics to it in the first place.
But is Starereally what it seems? According to one art critic who is familiar with Saville's work, the picture is not of a boy, but a girl. And the "blood" is a birthmark.
