'The Zipper Man'

Paul Whitehead in conversation with Alan Hewitt and Thomas Holter - Montreal, November 1998.

Alan/Thomas: A lot of people have asked: "What does Paul Whitehead do now?" But let's start at the beginning - how did you meet Genesis?

Paul Whitehead: Through John Anthony (the producer for Trespass) and I was the art director for a magazine called "Time Out" which is a sort of what's on in London sort of magazine - very visible, you know and tuned in to everything that is going on and I met John Anthony and he saw my work and said; "I'm producing this band and you'd be a natural; a perfect fit" And the first time I met them I went to the office- the Charisma office and it was like; you've got to understand with the English class structure, English Public School boys are twits (laughter) and these guys also seemed to be very naive and like "Oh what a good wheeze, we'll form a band and go on the road..." right? And they were very naive. The only guy that was kind of real was Mike really he was the most real guy to talk to and basically I had an interview with them; they interviewed me and I had no idea what they did. I think that they gave me a copy of "From Genesis to Revelation" to listen to and I didn't like it.
So something I said, they figured that I was their kind of guy and...
Armando Gallo: Peter Hamill introduced Genesis to you...

PW: So he introduced me to John Anthony then because he was producing Van der Graaf...

AG: Paul went to see a show with Van der Graaf and John Anthony was there and he got the interview with Genesis, I just remembered that...

PW: He remembers it better than I do! (laughter) And it was kind of weird, remember they kind of went on the road with a picnic hamper and they were just not Rock & Roll you know. They didn't trust the food in the transport cafes, you know, they took their own food and so that was it. I spent time with them

'Trespass' - 1970

and listened while they wrote the songs and gave them my feedback and brought books for them to look at and to me it was like they had the musical language and I had the visual language - I knew things they didn't about visuals and artists and stuff and it worked.

AH/TH: The ideas for, in particular the "Trespass" cover, was that a collaboration between the "musical" and the "visual"?

PW: Yeah, well they gave me the songs, right, and I'm trying to remember how we did it. I went away and listened to the songs and came back full of ideas: we could do this, or we could do this or that and at that time I was very into pen and ink drawings a lot of pen and ink drawings. And I said, "you know we could do a real romantic almost like a Renaissance thing with pen and ink…" and they said; "like what?" and I had a book of one of my favourite artists at the time was called William Pauganay and I said; "Like this.." and I said "If we did it like this it would be great" and they said "ok". So then the question was how do you make it relevant to "The Knife"? And my reply was; "well, you slash the canvas" and they thought it was a joke and so I finished the painting; brought it in and said; "now we're going to slash it" and they said; "You're not going to slash it?!" and I said; "Yeah" and I just did one sssht with the razor blade...

AG: And stuck the knife into it!

PW: Actually I rented a knife from a prop house and got a Renaissance like dagger and stuck it in and that was it.

AH/TH: Obviously you then went on to do the next two covers for the next two albums and got more involved and once again was it a case of listening to the

'Nursery Cryme' - 1971

music and getting inspiration or did you already have ideas that you wanted to get across..?

PW: Yeah, I lived with them down at the house where they were writing the songs and got up in the morning and had breakfast with them and heard what they were talking about...

AG: The house is pictured on one of Van der Graaf's album sleeves...

PW: So I was like the sixth member in a way in the creative process, I knew what was on their minds; knew what they were trying to say and it just evolved. It evolved as the songs evolved and as I got the feel of what they were trying to do. I think that once the decision was made that it was going to be around the musical box then we just went... "OK: Victorian" and that gives you a great period to work with and once again I brought a whole bunch of books with me and it was a Dali painting that decided it was going to be the false perspective and the greenish colour you know...

AH/TH: There's the classic story that when you varnished it, the bluebottles on it are actually real..?

PW: Yeah, I lived in Norfolk when I painted that and then I decided that I wanted to brown the whole thing up a bit so I varnished it with some Marine Varnish - the stuff they varnish boats with which is very dark like brownish almost like treacle. And so I took it outside, put it on a chair and I never thought about the insects and there's flies and earwigs on it and I just thought; "hey; leave it" and it kind of adds to it. I think also as an artist I like that kind of thing which is one of those happy accidents where you have a certain amount of control and then fate kind of takes over and does other things…A lot of artists try to stop those kind of things happening but I like those kind of things.

AH/TH: So you did those covers, and obviously since then you have been working on a variety of projects, who else have you done work for?

PW: Oh boy... It's been very varied; I mean I've done covers for people like Fats Domino; Credence Clearwater Revival and a lot of English stuff like

'Foxtrot' - 1972

Renaissance and The Yardbirds and stuff like that. I get all kinds of people come to me and ask me to do a cover. There's a band in Los Angeles called Operator who area real punky, nasty sort of band but there's something about them which I respond to. They've got a feedback guitarist who's really good.

AH/TH: But your collaboration with the band ended with "Foxtrot" - why?

PW: Basically because I moved to the States; I moved to Los Angeles and in those days that was a huge distance and I think there was a kind of feeling; "oh, he's abandoned us!" (laughter) "He's gone to America" and I just felt that was it; I'd done my bit although it probably would have been nice to have done "Selling England..." that could have been a nice image...

AH/TH: I think the Betty Swanwick image is in the same spirit in some way...

PW: Yeah, I remember when I first saw it I thought: yeah, that's appropriate that's really nice. But in those days it was a long distance and we didn't have E-Mail and it was a big deal telephoning and I think it would have been difficult to do a record cover long distance.

AH/TH: You could do the next album cover for Genesis..?

PW: If there is a next one! (laughter) yeah. I've just started work on an image called "Requiem" looking back on all the people that were in the band and all the stages of Genesis and if you go on the Internet there's a painting on there called "No Scrumping" and you'll see that it's an image made up of islands floating in space and I'm going to do an image like that with maybe five or six islands that will have the various stages of Genesis from the small one to the baseball stadium you know? (laughter)

AH/TH: And now you've decided to recreate those early covers in this new format, tell us a little bit about that..?

PW: For me it has always been difficult to do reproductions of images because if you lithograph you have got to make thousands an d thousands of them and in the process of making an image there's a part of the process where you invariably lose something when you convert an image to the lithography process you lose something. Well, now we have something on computer technology and this basically uses the nearest original transparency I could get which I got from Virgin, and scan that and colour corrected it to my best memory using the printed cover from the record company and how I remembered the painting and now we are doing what are called Iris prints which is a 3200 DPI dot matrix spray printer which has no screen on the image; it's a continuous tone so it is as close as you can get. The other great thing is; there's two advantages; you can print ones and twos but you can also print on any material; paper; vinyl and there's a guy who comes to the place where I have my prints made who prints on velvet and I'm doing mine on canvas because the original images were on canvas and so the finished result is as close as you could possibly get and I am amazed. The added advantage is that the original image was taken from a canvas so it has that texture and it is printed on canvas so...

AH/TH: Are these available now or are they going to be available soon..?

PW: They're available now. The lithographs I'm still colour correcting and they will probably be available in about two weeks and with those I do ones and twos as people order them and it's great - it's exactly what the original was.

AH/TH: Will they be available through your own Internet site?

PW: I have my own Internet site which is www.paulwhitehead.com. I've been working with two guys from Nevada who have done a great job and I've been looking back into my archives and I always had very good transparencies made before they left my sight so there are a lot of images where people commissioned the painting; I delivered them and they were never seen again. So I've gone back and hooked up my top ten favourite images you know, and they're available as well.

AH/TH: What are the, apart from the Genesis ones?

PW: Well, I did a series of astrological signs - I did the twelve astrology signs so that's with the web site now that's the first show that we're having in what we call "The Main Gallery" and every six months it's an ongoing changing show in there, and another part of the site is what I call my musical images which are images we used on records and sleeves and that's where the new stuff is that you've never seen before. I did a cover for Tom Fogerty from Credence Clearwater Revival which was a great image which was never seen I mean, he didn't sell a lot of copies of that album but it was always one of my favourite images. It's funny because I've done something like 160 covers and Genesis was like; my first, after that I did Van Der Graaf and all the Charisma bands and I was always baffled why those three covers were being persistently asked about and I guess that now I look back on them I think; yeah; they were good and it was pretty unique relationship to say: "Ok, here's the guy who is going to do your cover; we're going to send him down to stay with you while you create…" and that's pretty unique. It was only them and Van der Graaf that I had that kind of relationship with where you are kind of the "Gun for hire" and I think it shows that that process works...

And there you have it, a unique insight into two unique artists and a unique band. Our thanks to the following people for making these interviews possible: first of all to our host; Mr Jack Beermann for his inestimable generosity and hospitality. To Serge Morissette and the guys in "The Musical Box" without whom we would not have had a reason to be in Montreal in the first place! To Tom Oastler and George German III without whom... (you know what you did, folks!) and finally to Armando and Paul for giving up so much of their time on our behalf it is greatly appreciated!

~ By Alan Hewitt and Thomas Holter, Montreal, November 14, 1998

Paul Whitehead's 'Galleria Testabianca' - his own web site.
Armando Gallo interviewed by Alan Hewitt of The Waiting Room + Thomas Holter.
My Montreal report.
Check out info on Gallo's 'I Know What I Like'.

Paul Whitehead's

And - as always

Buy these beautiful CD's from