Album art has at times grown to be almost as important as the record that lies behind it, the imagery giving an ever-lasting face to the vinyl and just recently, the narrative of one music’s most iconic album covers has been revealed.
The record held under the microscope is Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, the mysterious black and white patterned cover that has been immortalised from a never-ending wardrobe of apparel designs to tattoos and God knows what else, has had its full story told, as Rolling Stone (via Scientific American) reveal.
For those that weren’t aware, back in 2012 a short video was published that saw former Factory Records (Joy Division and New Order’s label) graphic designer Peter Saville at long-last explain how the band arrived at the imagery of their cult debut record.
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The four-piece had handed Saville a page from Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy (1977 edition, Scientific American notes) of the pattern, which was said to be the very first time the frequency of a pulsar signal (a star that emits repeating series of radio waves) had been captured, Saville commenting, “The diagram itself is a cutting of the continuous read out and then a stacking,” he said. “So what you’re seeing is this comparative chart of the frequency and the accuracy of the signal.”
The story of the iconic image ended there, that was until a recent article published detailed the full origin of the legendary album cover.
According to the Scientific American, the image was actually created at the Arecibo Radio Observatory and was published in 1970 by Dr. Harold D. Craft, Jr. in his PhD thesis titled Radio Observations of the Pulse Profiles and Dispersion Measures of Twelve Pulsars. It has been said that Craft worked on the image with a group of classmates, and that they were computer made and traced with India ink to stand out more.
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Craft actually had no idea that in 1979 Joy Division had used his published image, as he jokingly recounts, “It was a complete surprise. In fact, I didn’t know anything about it, and a colleague in the space sciences department, who is now a professor of astronomy at Cornell, Jim Cordes, saw me on the street – he’s been a long time friend – and he said, “oh, by the way, did you know that your image is on the cover of Joy Division?” And, I said no, I had no clue.
“I went to the record store and, son of a gun, there it was. So I bought an album, and then there was a poster that I had of it, so I bought one of those too, just for no particular reason, except that it’s my image, and I ought to have a copy of it.”
So there you have it. One of the most spoken about and recognisable album covers in the history of music was apparently created out of polar and early pulsar visualisations via a computer-generated illustration by a team of doctoral students from Cornell University.
