Dunk's Daily Blog

Muses over album art

Storm Thorgerson's avant-garde cover for the current Muse album, 'Black Holes & Revelations' has had me deep in thought for some time now. Unable to contain myself any longer, I spent much of the weekend Googling away for answers. What might I discover: coded messages to meet the Cornish three-piece for tea & cakes by the sea? Or something a little more sinister?

My initial thoughts were soon confirmed: here were four baldy men sat at a table on the surface of Mars; the earth and its moon clearly visible above. On the table are three miniature horses - referencing equine transportation for the 'Knights of Cydonia',the album's spectacularly apocalyptic penultimate track (Cydonia being an area of Mars). That must make the four foliclly challenged chaps the Knights.

What I hadn't previously reckoned with were the links with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, they of the 'Book of Revelations' (A.K.A. Wikipedia.org.) A reference, surely, to the album's mystic title. The four horsemen traditionally represent war, famine, pestilence (false Christ) and death. Heavy stuff. My first problem with this is that Thorgerson has only presented three horses for our four nights. The black one's missing - so no transport for the Knight of 'famine' to traverse his Cydonian landscape. Mmmmmm. This sent me scouring the cover-art for a hidden black horse somewhere - after hours with a magnifying glass, my 'where's Willy' game produced nothing. Could any significance be drawn from this? A plea for fair-trade?

Next, if our knights did represent the hitherto mentioned powers of evil, which could be which? By my reckoning, from left to right: Mr Death wears religious symbols on his jacket, but is blinkered towards the certainty of our mortality; Mr Pestilence wears the all-seeing eye of God watching over us; Mr War is dressed as a sword; and the somewhat rotund Mr Famine is dressed in greedy gold, signifying the inequity of world power. He doesn't deserve a horse!

While I might be wide of the mark, I take at least one clear, unhidden message from all of this: Art continues to live and breathe in album covers. I remember as a kid being hypnotised the first time I saw Peter Blake's Sgt Sgt Pepper's cover. My jaw hit the floor when a friend pointed out that the Black Flower of Death was pointing at Paul McCartney, revealing his supposed fatality in a car crash (Wednesday morning at five o'clock; he didn't notice that the lights had changed).

Storm Thorgerson's portfolio has bridged pop-art generations. Most notably, he's the name behind the iconic Pink Floyd album covers such as 'Dark Side of The Moon' and 'Wish You Were Here'. His unique style of photography stands so clearly as to demand questions and answers from its audience - just as art should. "Art is about flights of the imagination," he told Q magazine in 1992.

Whatever the real significance of the Blackholes & Revelations cover, let your imagination run wild with the possibilities.