PICTURE YOURSELF
Fabs intimate Klaus Voormann turns the story of his legendary Revolver cover into a graphic novel!
Which is the best Beatles record covers? Sgt. Pepper? The White Album? Yesterday And Today? MOJO’s money is on Revolver, with its black and white combination of Aubrey Beardsley and photo collage presenting the group at their most surprising and subversive. Indeed, 50 years ago Beatles confidante Klaus Voormann won a Grammy for designing it. To celebrate the anniversary, he’s prepared a new boxed edition of his book Revolver 50, limited to just 500 copies. Including a signed Voormann drawing, it tells the story of the sleeve’s creation in comic-strip form, beginning on the Reeperbahn and taking in Abbey Road listening sessions and the Fabs’ reactions to the finished work. Ironically, Voormann was never much of a comics buff, he tells us down the line from his home in Germany. “We had Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and maybe Superman when I was a kid, but it was only much later that I got interested in the graphic novel,” he says. “A friend of mine showed me some great artists that work with a lot of effort. I must mention my really good friend, Thomas von Kummant – he does great graphic novels and he helped me a lot. There was a comic of M, the film with Peter Lorre [M – Eine Stadt Sucht Einen Mörder, Jon J. Muth, 2009] and I really got into this story. You looked at each little thing, what they are saying, the atmosphere, it was all right. Then I thought, well, that would be a good thing to do for
“I COULD NOT JUST INVENT CRAZY STUFF… IT HAD TO BE EXACT.”
this Revolver at 50 years. For me words are difficult anyway, I’ve got this dyslexic problem, So for me most things are visual anyway.” Toiling for 18 months on the project, he eschewed computer techniques, using pencils and post-it notes as he refined a story that went through numerous phases of editing, expansion and experiment. “I did it all analogue, all by myself,” says Klaus. “I drew on those little pieces of paper and shifted them around, and if they didn’t look good enough I threw them away. Eventually I kept them. It was supposed to be a rough but I stayed with this way of working.” It is a subtly evocative piece of work: we see Voormann working late at his kitchen table in Parliament Hill, and experience, via carefully rendered speech balloons, George Martin’s refined manner of speech. Did visual revisiting differ from simply being interviewed about it? “I’ve talked about those things again and again,” he says equably. “It’s established, because I made a point of remembering, and actually, I have a much better picture of myself because of that. Whenever I thought, What was it like in that little attic flat? I’d remember, the roof was not straight, the bathtub was in the kitchen… so that’s what I tried to show. What did the EMI office look like? I had photographs too. It was a handicap, I could not just invent things and do crazy stuff, because if you had free will you could have people with three eyes and fifteen legs if you wanted. So it made it difficult, but it’s authentic.” One reader who appreciated it was Paul McCartney, who wrote the foreword. “I sent him the rough version, and he loved it,” says Klaus. “I even asked him a few questions, but he was not very helpful in that direction, because he couldn’t remember much! I sent it to Ringo too. They’ve seen the whole story.”
REVOLVER 50 – The Grammy Anniversary Edition by Klaus Voormann. The signed limited edition book is available at www.revolver-book.com from Genesis Publications