Goodbye Yellow Brick Road an account

I have recently read several silly reports about me demanding my original art work back for the cover of Elton John’s great album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. This is all nonsense. A sneaky journalist asked me after a recent lecture if I would like to have the art work back. I said I knew that was impossible and thought no more of it until the story was reported in some of the tabloids and on the internet, all completely untrue, so should you ever read this Elton John management team I did not demand my drawing back. I thought it might be worth reprinting my account of how I came to make the set of drawings for the outer panels of the triple fold record cover. This account was orginally written and published for an Australian charity exhibition catalogue last year.
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The Goodbye Yellow Brick Road cover illustrations were made a long time ago but my memory of their creation is pretty clear. It was 1973, and the year before I hade made an illustration for an album called, Wait Until They Change The Backdrop, by an Irish folk / rock singer named Jonathan Kelly for RCA records, curiously his agent was a one time Australian child actor whose name now escapes me, but he was difficult to deal with, he might have been called Colin and was rumoured to have been in a long running series on Oz TV. Anyway the Jonathan Kelly album was issued to no great fanfare but Elton’s people saw it and must have liked it because in 1973 I was summoned into the offices of Rocket Records in Soho. There I dealt with a nice man called David De Costa, son of the well known 1950’s radio entertainer and DJ, Sam Costa. He said how much they liked my cover for the Jonathan Kelly album, and that they had a problem; the inside illustrations to all of the individual songs had already been commissioned and illustrated by a variety of hands, (including David Scutt who later went on to create the front cover painting of the Alethiometer on the first edition of Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights, the first volume in the His Dark Materials trilogy, known in the USA as The Golden Compass), and that a cover painting had been made, a fine art portrait of Elton which was considered unsatisfactory for the purpose. Could I therefore sell them my J Kelly cover as it ‘seemed to fit the mood’? This was obviously a non starter of an idea. How could they have used a painting that had already been used as an album cover and very recently too? It would have been confusing to say the least. We agreed that a new painting should be made, and it was then that I was invited to listen to the master tapes of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. So I spent a happy couple of hours listening to those then unknown songs, Candle In The Wind, Bennie And The Jets, and so on, I was given some typed lyrics and I went away to work on some ideas, to make some rough drawings etc. Time was of the essence, and there was a very tight schedule indeed, I think I had ten days from beginning to end to design and draw the three outer panels.
I was working in a shared studio space in Covent Garden, at number 6 Garrick Street (now a restaurant) parts of the Covent Garden area had been under threat of demolition and development and we had a short lease on a shop and basement, it was a very convivial place. I shared it with John Kosh a designer of Record Sleeves, and Richard Rockwood, an illustrator and designer. I hurried through some ideas, and had my friend and fashion illustrator Leslie McKinley Howell (then known as Leslie Chapman) pose as Elton for some Polaroid reference pictures to draw from, he was wearing an antique American baseball jacket fresh from a thrift store in New York, and was tall (one day those pictures will turn up amongst my junk) hence the long legged look that Elton Has on the cover. I delivered some rough ideas and everybody seemed to like the one of Elton walking through / off / whatever / the wall / poster / so that was the one I worked up as a cover painting.
1973 saw a great revival of interest in 1930’s American design and Graphics, and in old Hollywood movies Graphics etc, this was of course in the days before home video and the cinema or TV was the only place to see old movies. Casablanca was re-released at this time and I tried to base what I was doing on a kind of dream of Los Angeles the dream factory, the shadow of a palm tree, the bonnet of a 1930’s car etc.
I had been briefed about certain things to include on the front cover to please ‘Elsie’. These included a Teddy Bear, and a piano, ‘Elsie loves pianos’, they said. At first I thought Elsie was perhaps a beloved tea lady at the offices of DJM or Rocket Records, and they were including these things to amuse her. Finally I realised that they were talking about Elton…. Anyway I delivered the three pristine panels drawn on Colyer and Southey CS2 Not surface Illustration board, painted in watercolour, pastel, and coloured crayon pencils. They were propped up in a line on the floor of Penny Valentine’s office at Rocket Records. ‘I’m having that one’, she said, pointing to the panel with the car bonnet. This was in the days before Illustrators were guaranteed the return of their original art work, the drawings, once paid for, were seen as the property of the commissioner, in this case the record company. I don’t know if Penny got her way and kept that panel, I doubt if I shall ever know, she sadly died a year or so ago. I never saw any of my original illustrations again.
I did keep one or two of the rough drawings, but eventually gave one away to the child of a friend, who seemed interested and now lost like the friend to history, as are all the other rough drawings. It’s quite possible that one might turn up tucked into the bottom of my old plans chest who knows?
Since drawing that cover I have illustrated over seventy books for children. I now write fiction for children too; my novel Pastworld is at present in development as a film with Gold Circle Pictures, it is published by Bloomsbury. I have two new novels coming out this autumn, The Hidden Kingdom published by OUP and The Haunting of Charity Delafield published by The Bodley Head at RHCB, I have also recently illustrated Philip Pullman’s version of the Aladdin story which is also due to be published this autumn.
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