JAM SLEEVES
BILL SMITH DESIGNED THE JAM’S RECORD SLEEVES FROM IN THE CITY TO ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS, WITH THE AID OF SOME BATHROOM TILES AND A DOG CALLED MAX. “IT WAS AN AWFUL LOT OF FUN,” HE TELLS DANNY ECCLESTON.
Bill Smith designed covers for five Jam albums and 17 singles (plus a couple for Sigue Sigue Sputnik). As he reveals, some ingenuity was required.
FROM THE MOMENT Polydor art director Bill Smith saw The Jam on-stage, at the Greyhound in Fulham, he could see the cover of their debut album,
In The City, in his mind’s eye. “I had this story in my head,” he tells MOJO today. “The Jam were being chased by a rival band or gang, and they’d hidden in this underground toilet, where they spray-painted their logo.”
Since underground toilets are not ideal photographic locations, Smith and snapper Martyn Goddard built one in the studio: “So the morning of the shoot me and Martyn put up these two two-metre by one-metre boards and tiled them ourselves.” Smith sprayed the logo in one go. “I can’t remember having a plan of what it would look like,” he says. “Luckily it turned out all right – imagine if I’d messed it up?”
After the group had been photographed in front of Smith’s creation, he took a hammer to it: “I said to Martyn, I’m going to be one of the rival gang or band and I’ve just seen their logo and I’m gonna smash it up. So I knocked it about a bit, and we shot it with the three shadows on it, and that was the back cover.”
For three concentrated years, Smith was responsible for all Jam record sleeves. They take pride of place in Cover Stories, a new, richly annotated collection of his cover art that includes quirky, arresting work for Genesis, The Cure, King Crimson and Sigue Sigue Sputnik. Yet his relationship with The Jam was formative and featured increasing input from Paul Weller. “For Setting Sons, Paul explained his concept –of these three school friends who go to war,” says Smith. Photographer Andrew Douglas agreed that a statue of soldiers would give an aptly elegiac feel, but public statuary is often high up on plinths and the angles are problematic. Then Douglas found The St John’s Ambulance Bearers: a small, 1919 bronze by Benjamin Clemens in the Imperial War Museum. Shot close-up, it combined monumentalism with a moving intimacy.
“I put in the moody, cloudy sky to add a touch of realism,” says Smith. “Early versions were embossed, so the figures were in kind of bas-relief, giving it more of a tomb-like quality.”
Smith left his mark on Jam covers in more ways than one. That’s him on the A299, in a moody shot by Martyn Goddard on the sleeve of the Strange Town single. “But by the time of Sound
Affects, Paul had basically become the art director,” he concedes. “He gave me the BBC Sound Effects record and showed me what he wanted changing. He said, ‘Just give me some pictures that relate to the songs.’”
Between them, Smith and Goddard filled the squares. The telephone box was in Gravesend, where Smith lived; the dog – named Max – belonged to his partner’s parents. Goddard shot the hearse in Islington and the baby was a friend’s. But it was the last significant piece of artwork that Smith would create for The Jam. The Munch illustration on the Funeral Pyre sleeve was brought in by Weller; Smith directed the video but had another, for Absolute Beginners, rejected (it was screened at the Jam exhibition, About The Young Idea, at Somerset House in 2015). After that, they went their separate ways.
Cover Stories includes iconic Smith sleeves for The Cure’s Three Imaginary Boys and Genesis’s Abacab (picked from Smith’s sketch book by Mike Rutherford after the band knocked back the illustrator he originally proposed) and much more. But it’s rare for a sleeve designer to embed with an artist in the way he did with The Jam.
“I was incredibly lucky to work with a band from their first bit of recorded music,” says Smith. “Five album covers and 16 or 17 single bags is not bad going
– a lot of work in a short space of time. And it was an awful lot of fun.”
Cover Stories: The Album Art Of Bill Smith Studio 1977-2019, is published by Red Planet Books on April 27 priced at £25. Order at www.redplanetbooks.com.