A weekly look down into the mortal coil of music industry design.

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Artist: The Clash
Release: London Calling
Label: Sony
Designer: Pennie Smith (photography)
Release Date: December 14, 1979

I’ve talked before about a certain designs enjoying a hegemony in the sense that it breaks out of the “this is an album cover design” and becomes a part of the wider culture’s language by way of images, as opposed to just being a part of the lexicon of the artist and their followers. There are some which offer a different linguistic attribute: designs that come to embody and entire genre and movement.

Enter the Clash’s London Calling. It works on many levels, including the concept that a still image representing, to a literal degree, could broader idea. There is a concrete connection objectively between the image and the idea. A half degree of separation between a philosophy and its de facto consequences. This is what punk thought would look like at that point in time.

The acclaimed album itself was a granite, spikey milestone in punk rock’s then-young journey, and it prominence certainly propelled the technically mediocre photograph overlaid with the goofy, gaudily-colored typeface into our mass consciousness.

The picture was later voted the best rock and roll photograph of all time by Q, although at the time [Pennie] Smith did not want the picture used. She did not feel it was a technically good shot because the photograph is slightly out of focus (as she was backing away from Paul to avoid getting hit). However, [guitarist] Joe Strummer convinced her to use the shot.

And from an interview with Pennie:

I mean that picture to me, I can’t see it now, its been used in various forms so many times – it’s a bit like wallpaper.
… Of The Clash photos, there are others that perhaps I’d prefer, for all sorts of reasons. Yes I like that picture, as I say, it’s so long ago now, I’ve seen it too many times to get the gut reaction, that I had at the time.

It’s understandable that an image’s rate of return will decrease over constant exposure, but that just serves the image’s status as a icon of an entire artform.