![]() O’Connor says, ‘We started the job before we even knew it was called Parklife. Stylorouge worked closely with the band and their ‘svengali’, Dave Balfe, who had founded Food Records and had played keyboards in and managed the band Teardrop Explodes. That was the whole mischief of the thinking.’ We were misappropriating advertising imagery from one field to package and market music. That sort of design, when you’re actually using very little imagery, is a difficult concept but that’s part of the spirit of those early Blur covers. We designed the covers of the first four albums. The first job we got for Blur was to design a T-shirt and that gave rise to the band logo. The commission for designing the cover fell to the creative agency Stylorouge, which had been founded in 1981 by Rob O’Connor, who explains, ‘We were involved with Blur from the point that they were signed to Food Records on an independent deal – they were called Seymour, so it was right from the word go. The approach of using a found image was in keeping with Blur’s previous two albums – Leisure featured a crop of a photo by Charles Hewitt for a 1954 Picture Post feature on bathing hats Modern Life is Rubbish featured a painting of the steam locomotive ‘Mallard’ by Paul Gribble. The cover of Blur’s seminal 1994 LP Parklife is rather an anomaly among album covers in that it relies on a ‘found image’ – a greyhound racing image by sports photographer Bob Thomas – rather than a photo shot specifically for the album. In 1984 Thomas was voted Sports Photographer of the Year and his image portfolio is now represented by Getty. By 1980 they were travelling 200,000 miles a year shooting some 20 sports. He gradually built up the Bob Thomas Sports Photography agency alongside photographers David Rogers and John Evans. Born in England in 1958, Bob Thomas began his career after leaving school aged 17. ![]()
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