Instead, he asked a friend, fashion illustrator Leslie McKinley Howell, to pose for Polaroids wearing an old American baseball jacket. It was decided to create something similar, only with Elton actually stepping into the poster. The artist was played the unreleased album, handed some lyrics, and given just 10 days to complete the assignment.īeck had previously drawn David Bowie on a street in front of a Bowie poster for the cover of Cream magazine. Beck persuaded Rocket it would be confusing for two albums to have the same cover, so it was decided instead that he would create a new picture along the same lines. Rocket wondered if they could reuse Beck’s cover painting, as “it seemed to fit the mood”. The new title of Elton’s album was Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, a song in which the protagonist quits the city to return to the countryside. But obsessive record collector Elton had a copy and liked Beck’s cartoonish image of a theatre stage where a smoky industrial backdrop was being lowered over a countryside scene. The year before, Beck had illustrated the cover of an album by Irish folk rocker Jonathan Kelly, Wait till they Change the Backdrop, which came out on RCA and failed to sell. So it was decided to borrow someone else’s.īritish artist Ian Beck was summoned to Elton’s management company Rocket. There were already three illustrators and five photographers involved, but suddenly, at the last moment, they had no front cover.
The working title was Silent Movies, Talking Pictures (although Vodka and Tonics was also briefly considered). Work had started on the follow-up sleeve before recording even began, with art director David Larkham planning a triple-panel foldout crammed with lyrics and illustrations for each song. He made 12 albums in the Seventies alone, and had already put one out in 1973, Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player. Elton was a busy man, churning out albums to meet rising demand. It’s an accomplished work by a major artist, but there was a change of heart at the 11th hour, when it was deemed too understated and sombre for the purposes. It depicted Elton wearing a T-shirt with Marilyn Monroe’s face on it, a reference to the song Candle in the Wind. The original plan was to use a portrait by fine artist Brian Organ, painted in acrylic on canvas during recording sessions. It could have been a very different cover. The cover is a triple-panelled gatefold sleeve, which depicts Elton stepping from an urban city pavement into a torn poster on a wall depicting a magical road winding through bucolic countryside to a dreamy sunset.
A double set recorded in two weeks at the Château d’Hérouville near Paris, it went on to sell more than 30 million copies and is still regarded as a Seventies classic. Released in 1973, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was Elton John’s seventh studio album. It might explain why his most famous album cover is an idealised illustration of a tall, handsome, glamorous man stepping into a world of fantasy. Good thing he was such an incredibly gifted singer-songwriter, really.
Let’s face it, even when he first arrived on the music scene in 1969, the man formerly known as Reg Dwight was nobody’s idea of what a rock star should look like: short, gap-toothed, bespectacled and balding. I’m not sure which is worse, the scruffy snapshot on Rock of the Westies (1975,) in which he looks like he hasn’t slept for a week, or the bored pose of Songs from the West Coast (2001), slouching in a diner with an expression that says whoever thought this was a good idea is getting fired in the morning. While his music has been consistently accomplished, his cover artwork has varied enormously in quality, with the least interesting sleeves tending to feature awkward portrait photographs. Over a career stretching 51 years, there have been 33 studio albums, seven soundtracks, five live albums and 16 compilations to date.