Alan Aldridge
Artist whose fantastical album covers and posters saw him hailed as a ‘Young Meteor’ of the Sixties
ALAN ALDRIDGE, who has died aged 73, was a graphic artist whose airbrushed, psychedelic, often fantastical images graced everything from album covers to Penguin books and film posters and defined the 1960s as sharply as the music of the Beatles (for whom he worked for a time as “official design consultant”) or the Rolling Stones.
For the Stones he created a poster for Rock and Roll Circus, a live album recorded (and filmed) in 1968, which was supposed to have been released on several occasions, but finally appeared only in 1996.
Aldridge was a quintessential 1960s figure: talented, working class, ambitious and handsome, with long blond hair and a penchant for velvet suits. He appeared alongside Mick Jagger, Michael Caine and Julie Christie in Peter Whitehead’s documentary Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London (1967), and was listed by the journalist and future MP Jonathan Aitken as one of the “Young Meteors” of the in-crowd.
As well as hobnobbing with the Fab Four Aldridge designed album covers for The Who ( A Quick One), Cream ( Goodbye) and (later) Elton John’s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy. He was friends with Jimi Hendrix, collaborating with him on a psychedelic design for the back of a Fender Stratocaster, and was the creative director for the opening of the Playboy Club in London in 1966.
In 1968 he created the poster for a London screening of Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, a milestone in cinematic tedium, which prompted Warhol to express the wish that the film had been as good as the poster. Based on an “Advent calendar” design originally conceived for the Beatles’ White Album, it featured a nude girl – an aspiring artist, Clare Shenstone – turned into a hotel, with surreal characters peeping out of her strategically placed shuttered windows.
It won Aldridge a Silver Award from the Design and Art Directors Club – and a warrant of arrest on charges of pornography which were later dropped. “This is Swinging London,” he protested, “and I’m being persecuted and hunted for a pair of nipples.”
Alan Aldridge was born in Mile End on June 1 1943 and left school at 14 to work as a docker. “Had you have asked me who Picasso was when I was 14, I’d have thought he played soccer for Italy,” he recalled later. Subsequently he worked as an insurance clerk, a chicken plucker, a scene painter at the Old Vic, a barrow boy on Stratford Market and a waiter in a coffee bar.
Aldridge first worked as a “junior visualiser” at the Sunday Times Magazine (a job he was said to have landed by turning up at somebody else’s interview and passing off their work as his own). In 1965 the magazine featured a classic Mini painted in Aldridge’s inimitable style on its front cover.
His big break came when Germano Facetti, art director at Penguin, offered him freelance work. Aldridge soon replaced Facetti and introduced a riot of nudity and psychedelic surrealism into the publisher’s fiction covers. His tenure ended with the sack in 1967.
The same year he was sitting in an airport bar doodling in his copy of The Hobbit when he was accosted by Salvador Dali, sweeping past with his entourage, and challenged to a “draw-off ”. Dali began with a rearing unicorn, to which Aldridge responded with a drawing of Dali as the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland.
Dali then drew a winged dragon being lanced by a horse-mounted knight, calling it “St George da Inglaterra”. Then, although Dali’s plane was ready, he refused to leave before Aldridge had delivered his coup de grace – a fishtailed plane with Dali as the nose, complete with oversized moustache.
When Dali left, Aldridge kept the book, but lost it in a fire years later in his studio.
Aldridge had first met the Beatles in 1966 when John Lennon got in touch with him, asking him to design the cover for his collected writings, The Penguin John Lennon. After leaving Penguin, Aldridge set up his own graphic design firm and in 1969-70 had his first publishing success with Beatles Illustrated Lyrics, published in two volumes and featuring the cream of contemporary artistic talent – Ronald Searle, Tomi Ungerer, Peter Max, David Hockney and Ralph Steadman – and Aldridge himself.
The only illustration the publishers rejected was an Aldridge design of “John Lennon as a giant hypodermic needle, scattering pills over Manhattan.’’ Afterwards the band’s Apple company took Aldridge on as “design consultan” (without the “t”, to denote his Oriental eminence).
So close did Aldridge and the Beatles become that, when the band broke up in 1970, he took only one more job before he closed his business – a campaign poster for the Labour Party, which lost that year’s general election. He bought a huge rectory in the English countryside, and for a time spent his days “being a professional hippie’’.
It was during this time that he stumbled upon an 1807 children’s poem by William Roscoe, “The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast”, and was inspired to create a modern version combining enchanting anthropomorphic illustrations with text by William Plomer; it won the Whitbread Literary Award in 1973 and became the bestselling children’s book of the time.
After designing the cover for Elton John’s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy (he won a Grammy nomination for his artwork), Aldridge proposed developing the album art into a partly animated feature film starring the singer himself and spent 18 months in Beverly Hills working on the project. When Elton John admitted his bisexuality however, Hollywood was no longer interested.
In 1980 Aldridge moved to Los Angeles, “looking for some kind of yellow brick road into the movie business”. He embarked on a number of projects which failed to make it past the drawing board, though he designed the logos for the Hard Rock Cafe and the House of Blues.
In 2008 he released an illustrated autobiography, The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes: The Art of Alan Aldridge, to coincide with a retrospective of his work at the Design Museum in London. In it he reminisced about episodes from his time at the forefront of the popocracy, including a private slow-dance with Princess Margaret at Kensington Palace; an epic drinking contest in Barbados involving Oliver Reed and three “weed-smoking Rasta dudes”, and a high-speed motorbike ride through the Hollywood Hills with Steve McQueen.
Aldridge had seven children by three different women. With his first wife, Rita, he had a son, Miles, a well-known fashion photographer, and Saffron, a fashion model, formerly the face of Ralph Lauren. By his second wife, Laura Lyons, a former Playboy “Playmate of the Month”, he had two daughters, Lily and Ruby, both of whom are fashion models. He also had three sons from another liaison.