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Shotter's Paradise
The story, boiled down, is this: with Kate Moss and Pete Doherty split, and Doherty busy cleaning himself up and uncontactable, management panicked about the use of an image of Moss on the Shotter's Nation sleeve and instead stuck a random photo of a woman in knickers on the cover instead.
Victoria Newton's starting something, mind:
KATE MOSS could go KP Nuts when she sees the cover of BABYSHAMBLES’ new album.
KP Nuts? Eh? We know what Newton's getting at, but it took us a couple of minutes to make the connection.
About six paragraphs later, Newton explains the reference:
I’m sure Kate — who sung duets with Pete under the name KP NUTS before their split — will be gutted to learn her face isn’t on the album after helping with those four tracks.
Will she, though? She's dumped him and moved on. Isn't it a bit more likely that either she'll be either relieved that he's not trying to flog albums with her picture, or annoyed that they've chosen a lookalike body double to try and imply her endorsement without getting into choppy copyright problems?
The decision to rip the head off the photo of the lookalike model is disturbing, though - taking a catalogue shot and making it pornographic (in the strict sense of the word) by removing the face and head of the model, leaving her a featureless and depersonalised 'body'. This is exactly the same thing that got Rain into trouble twenty-something years ago; you'd have hoped that a supposedly smart band like Babyshambles would have spotted that objectifying women might be a slightly more shameful outcome than falling into an argument with a knicker company over the copyright of an underwear advert.
6 comments:
Ah, but what would Shambles/Dirty Pretty Things artwork be without a random naked woman?
It's a god-awful cover, isn't it? I mean, yes, politically, but by artistic standards too. Particularly when compared to Polly Harvey's new album cover, which in one simple photograph conveys more poetry and anguish than all of Doherty's lyrics thrown together.
It's interesting that "management" changed the sleeve and felt comfortable doing that - it's because it's now brand management rather than artistry, isn't it?
"you'd have hoped that a supposedly smart band like Babyshambles would have spotted that objectifying women might be a slightly more shameful outcome"
you obviously never looked inside Up The Bracket. if you did you'd have found ripped out arses, cunts, breasts galore. and pictures of pete's ex girlfriend (giving him head). and random ones of johnny borrell too, weirdly.
I actually like the cover with or without head (!?!). Based on Wallis' painting of the death of Chatterton (as a surrogate for Pete no doubt), the absence of a head on the model kind of makes it poignant in that the death goes unseen.
Great album by the way......moving, catchy, not maudlin at all but also not a whitewash. Personal without succumbing to self-pity, it's the stuff of great Rock & Roll.
maybe it's a tribute to the recently reformed rain?
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