In this Cover Stories both Clive and David Wyatt (the artist who designed the artwork for this album) tell us about the artwork of Contagion. We start at the beginning of the process… now more than a year ago. I asked Clive how it all began…

THE START 
Clive: It’s a result of talking to David quite a lot. We started talking a good year before the album was finished. Initially we had absolutely no idea what we wanted, apart from the fact that I said to him I wanted something that is kind of ‘arty’.

As a start he sent us a few ideas. The only thing we said to him was ‘well this looks kind of right’. Eventually we got something that was based around the front cover. Just the idea of this man either walking away or towards us with some kind of purpose. The bandages that are flying around is some kind of symbol about never let him stop seeing. 

an early version of Contagion

EVACUATE  
David: Once the idea was there, I had to actually construct it. I was aware that Arena wanted to keep a flavour of the Hugh Syme style, which meant using a lot of photography. To shoot the cover, I built a homemade smoke chilling device (a cool box packed with ice which was supposed to keep the smoke at floor level) and secured the services of my friend Nicholas and his rehearsal studio (Nick was in a band with Mr. Mitchell and I). I arranged some lighting, and got Nick to walk around until I had enough useful pictures. 

The problem was, the lights heated the smoke up and it wasn’t long before the room was completely full of fog. We had to evacuate, empty the room and start again several times. The sky was photographed on Dartmoor behind my house, and I transplanted my head (with bandages) onto the figure. The various bits of junk I photographed in my garden and the whole thing was stitched together in Photoshop. 

SEPTEMBER THE 11TH 
Clive: Initially it was on a much smaller scale and we panned out the picture so we got sense of size and then David added the sky and the flickering flames all over the scene. And the swirling mist to get more drama into it. Amongst that there are bits and pieces of a kind of wreckage of the world.

One day he sent me a picture he had done… I already had spoken to him before September the 11th and he came up with this picture with a building that had collapsed and it looked just like the scene in New York. We both looked at it and we thought ‘Hmmm, we’d better not use that’. Over time it evolved until it became what you see on the front.

BANDAGES  
David: Clive had written a synopsis, almost a movie treatment of the story that the album is based on. Fundamentally, I was trying to get across the apocalyptic nature of the thing, without getting too ‘science fiction’.
Removing the buildings and just having this landscape of smoke made it more surreal. I think Clive had seen a cover I’d done - a ghost story concerned with the Plague which involved lots of smog and burning torches so I had that in mind when thinking of the cover. The bandages came from an early rough - I imagined the character with a ‘third eye’ that was so powerful it had to be covered over, but it just burnt through the bandages.

THE SHORT STORY 
Clive: As you can see on the digipack it’s a bigger picture. We wanted it to be bigger and the artwork deserves it. So I’d love to do it as a poster! There is a lot of detail in it.

David came up with most of the visualisations. I just told him the elements. He picks these things out of the lyrics and out of the things we talked about. And of course out of the short story as well. So there are things in the artwork which you won’t be able to recognise in the lyrics. That’s because they’ve been left out of the songs. He also put in some cross references of the other albums, because they seem to tie with this album. 

another unused piece of artwork

THINK BIG 
David: Clive likes to think big, and I got a bit carried away and came up with all sorts of little adventures for our main character. One of my favourites (about a kid who lives in a scrap yard and constructs his own little world) pawned a digital sculpture that I’m not going to show anyone yet as I'm sure I’m going to use it someday…

THE CLICHÉ 
Clive: With the booklet pages we just wanted to give all pages their own identity. That’s obviously tied to the lyrics on that particular page. Some of them are very subtle. I mean the images of the car, for instance. In the story there is a scene where the main persons hide in a car and find this body in the car. So you can find a picture in the booklet of that car. 

One of my favourites is the one with the sort of wheel of time thing. Again one of the sub plots at the end of the story has something to do with a stopwatch. So he has taken that, but he made his own vision of it. Also the playing cards have little elements of the other artwork in them. Mick didn’t want just normal playing cards in it, because of the cliché used in a lot of symphonic artwork. 

BITS OF LYRICS 
David: The booklet images evolved over such a long time, I actually see things in them that I’d forgotten about. I wanted to get a slightly cinematic feel to echo the big musical ideas, and suggest the story that underpins the whole thing. Sometimes I would snatch bits of lyrics, and sometimes refer to the original story. The watch was in there at the start; I imagined it belonged to our main man as a last reminder of normal structured life. 

VISION OF HEAVEN 
Clive: And the City of Lanterns is a poster waiting to happen. It’s a fantastic landscape; this man’s vision of heaven. And the path leading up to it… you almost want to go inside and have a look.
One of the things we love to do for our upcoming stage show is to start here and let the camera go straight into the city. Which would be a fantastic idea… ‘cause I’d love to know what’s in there!

The city of Lanterns

CLASSICAL LITERATURE 
David: That was the first officially finished piece – mostly photographs of various religious buildings merged together. The floating lights came about because it was called the City of Lanterns – although they might be souls, or angels, or something. The City of Lanterns exists in Classical literature, but I’ll let everyone discover that themselves if they wish to do so [read Follow The Signs – eds.]. 

BAND 
Clive: For the first time we allowed a picture of the band in the booklet. Well, it was there in Immortal?, but not as big as here. It really fits into the rest of the artwork, I think. 

SCREAMING HEADS 
We saved the best till last… the artwork on the digipack.
Clive: We simply packed in a whole lot of clues and made one wide scene. All little hints, bits and pieces. But it’s up to you to take out your magnifying glass and let us know what you have found… 

And there is the screaming man on the inside of the digipack…
Clive: That was one of David’s first images and it could easily be the front cover. I think all the three pictures he did for this album, the City of Lanterns and the screaming heads and the front cover are all very well suited for a front cover. The reason that the screaming man didn’t make it as a front cover is that it’s a very widescreen scene. And if you just had the man himself you wouldn’t have the same impact. 

the inside of the digi pack

But his idea of this man who is just like screaming and his head is exploding into the sky is great. And you can tell it’s the same man as on the front cover because of the bandages around his neck… he has pulled those away and his face, his mind is reaching out to every particle of the world. You can sort of hear things he doesn’t want to hear and knows things he doesn’t want to know, you know, that’s the curse he suffers from. 

I think it’s a very dramatic image. And again this lake in the background has a tiny link to The Visitor and in case that’s not enough, there’s another tiny clue in the picture as well [laughs].

KING ARTHUR 
David: The exploding head man was actually the last thing I came up with, shortly after hearing the first demo of the album. It was inspired by the layered voices that appear at the beginning and throughout the album. At first I was just going to use the screaming mouths on the first page of the booklet, but it struck me that there was more I could do with them. The lake (although I’ve digitally altered it so it’s more of a flood) was shot on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. In local legend it’s where King Arthur told Bedevere to throw Excalibur; although I didn’t choose it for it’s romantic associations – it’s just the bleakest spot I could think of! Eagle-eyed viewers will spot a familiar object discarded in the water. 

OTHER ARTWORK 
Clive: There are some very slight links between The Visitor and Contagion. It’s up to people if they want to find these things. 

And there is still a lot of artwork to come. You got the EP’s… the way we will be doing it is that the covers will be just pieces of paper with the basic information on it. And the EP’s itself will have a design which will fit into the digipack. And any other artwork will be on the EP as files. Also the lyrics will be on the EP’s so if people want it they can simply print it out. 

LOGO 
Clive: And at last… yes, we brought back the original Arena logo again. David has changed it a bit, but it’s here again. And I think it fits in great on this cover. So yes, it’s a feast! Enjoy it!

MONEY 
David: If I’d have known how much work there was I’d have asked Mick for more money! But it has been a great project to work on – very satisfying as it’s something I’ve always wanted to do, but also unlike anything I’ve done before.

I hope you all will enjoy both the music of Contagion as well as the artwork. I think it’s a joy for both eyes and ears!

By: Marcel Kolenbrander