That's all from the front cover. Now let's explore the back, and the first thing we see is that, amid a small collection of records strewn on the floor of the figure's room is the 12-inch single for “Punch and Judy”, released from this very album.
A woman's high-heel shoe. Don't need a degree in psychology to work out what THAT represents!
And a jack-in-the-box, a pop-up jester on top of the TV. As mentioned, up until their fourth album the jester was the unofficial symbol or sigil of Marillion. On the back of the next album, “Misplaced childhood”, the jester is seen escaping out a window, and on “Clutching at straws” he is not seen, except for the jester's cap dangling out of the main figure's pocket on the cover.
This is a good one. Not only is it a stylised representation of the front of their debut album, “Script for a jester's tear”, but it's also a jigsaw, with a piece missing, and one of the songs on “Fugazi” is indeed called “Jigsaw”.
The stuff of drug or alcohol-induced nightmares, a demonic hand clawing its way out of the TV screen. Perhaps also a comment on how television was, and is, taking over people's lives to the extent that they are virtually slaves to it.
Not of any symbolic significane, but for those who are too young to remember, THAT my children was what we used to call a “video recorder”, or VCR, short for Video Cassette Recorder, and back before there were DVDs and SKY boxes, that was how you recorded a programme from the TV onto magnetic tape. See? This column is educational, too!
A toy train, perhaps a memento from the figure's childhood, perhaps hinting at the title of the follow-up album, “Misplaced childhood”.
So there you are. And you thought an album cover was just a pretty drawing! Well, some are, or were, and it would be mad to claim that every album cover told a story, or was discussable to this extent. Many were not. Many were just photos, pictures, symbols or even just letters. But there were many which, on closer examination, turned out to be far more than the sum of their parts.
I hope you've enjoyed this journey through one of the great album covers of the early eighties, and I'll be looking at another one in the not too distant future.
Apologies for the somewhat skewed nature of the full album sleeve. In order to get the sort of detail I needed, particularly for the cutaway sections, I had to photograph my own CD sleeve and no matter how steady you try to hold it, it's always going to end up just a little off-centre.