home back to coverstories	From Cover To Cover October 2004
	There hasn’t been an Arena album where the lyrics and the artwork are more entwined and mutually reinforcing than Contagion. With the trilogy complete, it’s time to take a last look at the clues and references – from cover to cover. So we sat down with copies of Contagion (the digipack, of course), Contagious and Contagium plus the short story and looked closely. This was followed by a second round behind the computer, with the great advantage of being able to zoom in! Then we put the questions that rose to David Wyatt who kindly provided us with additional information. The Contagion cover shows the story’s protagonist Noah. He’s standing in the blue fire, in a desolate landscape ravaged by the salamander virus. His ‘piercing gaze’ stands out, as well as the ‘blue fire spreading across from [his] fingertips’. His gaze is so powerful that the bandages can’t block it and they are blowing in the wind. The landscape shows the imagery evoked by the track Bitter Harvest. The ground is covered by debris (‘I’m walking through the debris’), bits and pieces from civilization that has been destroyed. There’s a TV (‘Powerless technology’) and a compass (front right), a suitcase filled with books (‘reference books and catalogues’) half covered by other junk and there’s a fragment of wooden carving (front left).  About this last object David says: ‘The carving is one of the Stations of Christ, from a condemned church, which is currently hanging on my wall. I think one of the lyrics mentions crumbling churches or something (‘Empty churches, empty town halls’, Bitter Harvest – eds.), so I thought it would be good to chuck it in among the detritus.’ It is also one of the accompanying images of the short story on Contagium (Mea Culpa page), where you can see more of it. About the books David says: ‘The central figure in the story (the original story- I'm not sure how much Clive changed it) was a bit of a hermit, but desperate to acquire knowledge of the disease he was afflicted with in order to cure it. As civilization crumbled, I saw him wandering around collecting as much information as possible, before it was gone for good.’ Noah is standing on a path marked by lights that leads into the sky, to the City of Lanterns. But he is walking away from it – he has a mission to fulfil on earth before he can go there. The back of the cover shows a gloomy building with a blue lit window. An earlier version of this image showed a mysterious figure behind the window (cover Cage newsletter November 2000), but on the cover he’s no longer there. David: ‘I think there may have been a reason, but I can’t remember it. The Cage ‘teaser’ was done well before the cover itself, so the original man at the window was more a reference to previous Arena imagery. The building was found in a forest near me – I’ve always loved abandoned structures that get slowly reclaimed by nature.’ It’s the old, broken down church where Noah and Una seek refuge and the final confrontation with Louis Hengman takes place. The back cover also features the interior of a car, with a doll on the driver’s seat. This is the car where Noah and Una hide as they’re chased by Hengman and his gang; the doll a reference to the girl Una. In the car the find the dead body of a man who had been using the car as a home. Both car and doll appear on other places in the booklet. Moving on to the inside of the digipack – which looks like a diary with all kinds of clippings and papers collected in it, complete with a lock and key with the horseshoe sign (the ‘key to the story’?). Is this Noah’s journal in which he collects information he finds on his search for a cure for the virus? A picture of the aforementioned car, a picture of a moth (‘Burn – like moths in the flame’), a playing card (ace of spades) and scribbled lines of the Mea Culpa lyric stand out. Notice also the Visitor velocipede. There’s a typewriter with keys of the letters of the word ‘contagion’ only - a reference to Clive’s short story? When we ‘look inside the journal’ we see the widescreen image of the lake with the screaming man in front of it (and the velocipede again, of course!). It’s Noah screaming out, because of all the visions, thoughts and voices he sees and hears (‘Every thought, every dream, I will call!’). ‘Here was a man who had, perhaps, seen far more than he should.’ Now let’s take a look at the booklet. The pages that start with the Witch Hunt lyric show the doll again, entwined in blue wires. ‘The doll represents the girl; I used the wires as a kind of visual tension, blue to represent the contagion,’ says David.  The next two pages show the three images of the car, as well as Noah’s hand with the horseshoe birthmark, set around a kind of computer grid background (‘Computer chips and stereos, powerless technology’). This is followed by a large salamander representing the salamander virus and a moth burning in its flame; everybody is attracted and then consumed by the virus like moths are drawn to a flame. The next pages are a nice puzzle! Books and papers represent Noah’s attempts to save what’s left of civilization and to find a cure against the virus. After much zooming in we found that one of the books on the right of the computer, behind the candle (and next to a Jack Daniels’ bottle!) is Homer’s Odyssey. Both Odysseus and Noah undertake a journey in their respective stories, but what is even more striking is that Odysseus’ travels from Troy to Ithaca take ten years, just like Noah’s quest takes ten years (‘So it continued, for ten long, frustrating years’, March Of Time). The titles of the other books we could not decipher; about these David comments: ‘Among the books I used were some old editions of poetry, collections of Greek and North European mythology – generally classic literature to represent the wealth of human creativity.’ Then there’s the mountain, which must be the mountain Ararat, on which the arc of the biblical Noah strands after the flood has receded and which is ‘hidden’ in the last verse of the Bitter Harvest lyric. Also the ‘rainbow skies’ in this lyric are shown on this page (including a little rainbow fragment left top center). Various small items are scattered over the left page, a compass and a watch among others. ‘Being a spaghetti western fan, Clive wanted his hero to have an old fashioned pocket watch. I guess once chaos had taken over the world, the perfection and reliability of the clockwork mechanism would be a reminder or comfort....’, says David about this. Noah finds the pocket watch in the debris near the car where he hides with Una. She’s comforted by it’s constant ‘tic tock’ sound. Time is a recurring theme in both the artwork and the lyrics (March Of Time, The Hour Glass). It appears again on the next two pages, with the large image of the ‘wheel of time’, as Clive has called it. The unstoppable passing of time while Noah travels the world (notice the ‘globe meridians’) seeking the cure, the ‘bad cards’ he’s been dealt by fate whirling in its slipstream. One card hints at the ‘happy ending’ to come: it’s an image of the City of Lanterns. The last two pages speak for themselves. The two EP’s complement the artwork of the album nicely. Contagious showing the dark, sinister image of the screaming man in stone, the back cover a deserted building marked with the horseshoe sign, just like houses afflicted by the plague were marked in medieval times. Contagium showing Noah’s hideout with the PC setup and books and papers we know from the Contagion booklet, the abandoned coat token of the fact he has left, to the City of Lanterns that can be seen in the background. The back with the ‘pile of stones’ (Mea Cupa) as a reminder of the misery and desperation he went through, the bandages floating in the air underlining the redemption he has found. By: Marcel Kolenbrander & Erik Beers