Paul McCartney: Chaos and Creation in the Backyard

Whilst not involved with this project from the beginning—the creative on the ‘Fine Line’ single was done by James Cooper and Mark Higenbottam based around Brian Clarke’s line art—I took it on when Rob, the creative director at Stylorouge fell ill.

After an all-nighter, the boards were ready for Rob to take to his meeting with Paul. As I was leaving the office to get a fry-up and some sleep I got a call from his wife Jane saying that he had been taken ill.

When the rest of the troops rolled in crisis talks dictated that with James being in Amsterdam pursuing his music career and me being closest to the project I would do the presentation. At this stage I was too delirious to realise the enormity of it but in hindsight—having the biggest job your studio has seen in months riding on your presentation is daunting, but having to do that in front of one of the forefathers of modern British music on absolutely zero sleep—I should have been packing it.

The only thing I was worried about was not having had a shower and still wearing the only clean thing in my laundry and having gone out the night before the night before in it. I managed to stop by a Tesco’s on the way to MPL to pick up a can of deodorant before going into the meeting.

To kill the waffle, the meeting went well and Paul approved all the visuals on the spot.

Rob had proposed that we run an old photograph of Paul for the cover as Chaos and Creation we were told was largely a reflective album. This also solved the tricky situation that we didn’t have any recent photographs of Paul to use on the artwork.

The idea of “reflection” also led to the jewel case tray being lined with a sheet of reflective gold foil. These trays caused problems in America because it was setting off alarms in stores that had magnetic theft protection systems. Only when you’re working for an ex-Beatle can you get away with things like that.

Rob’s idea for a “Paul McCartney” ambigram was also a reference to the idea of reflection, albeit somewhat loosely as an ambigram is less a reflection than it is a rotation of a word. The ambigram was what took the longest time on the design and it was after working on it for days the combination of the “CART” of Cartney was achieved. There’s a discussion on Typophile about this, and I agree with the criticisms levelled at it.

Given the opportunity to draw it again I can see where things could have been improved but I did use what I learnt drawing this for a shirt in Schwipe’s Eyes Don’t Lie range.

The booklet was illustrated with line-drawings by Brian Clarke of Paul’s hands and features.

The cover being a photograph was printed on satin stock and the inside pages on uncoated. I was later told that all these factors—gold blocking on the o-card, the gold inlay and two-tone stock made it one of the most expensive releases in Parlophone’s history. Burn.