10. BudgieNever Turn Your Back On A Friend
I really could have chosen any Roger Dean cover. There’s so many great ones he did. Some of those Yes covers, obviously, which are incredible. But I chose this one because I like the imagery of wrangling a bird – this parrot character. There’s something symbolic about that. It’s also a fun, strange narrative to have on here. But really, it’s all about Roger Dean and his worlds – the stuff he created felt like he was channelling something from a land that we all know, that we’ve haven’t been to in a long, long time. But every time we see it, we say, ‘Oh, yes, I remember that from a dream!’, or, ‘I remember that from a previous life’. It looks idyllic, and utopian, and very, very dreamlike.
He really nails it every time with his stuff. I think that’s why it resonates with people a lot – even people who don’t care for the bands. Almost any artist, anybody who’s interested in visual imagery at all, seems to respond to his artwork in a way that feels like it’s bigger than himself. It’s a world you can get lost in. He doesn’t change his style for anybody – he does what he does. It’s like bands are renting space in his world.
He, probably more than anyone, has influenced my album artwork, because he is the exemplar when it comes to making a world for the music. It becomes almost inseparable from the music and that was always my intention. I like to make worlds for the music to exist in with a lot of open history there. They’re not crowded with narrative.
