“Rock will always represent the extravagant, the flash, the fantasy. That’s what it’s all about. These pictures are a memento to that dream.” Guy Peellaert in an interview in Penthouse Magazine April 1974
Belgian artist and illustrator Guy Peellaert died last week. His seminal 1973 book Rock Dreams provided us a visual feast of rock and roll’s biggest stars.
David Hepworth remembers Peellaert in his piece, Guy Peellaert the man who invented rock and roll, at Word Magazine.
Peellaert illustrated a few album covers as well including David Bowie’s 1974 album Diamond Dogs which reached number 1 on the UK charts. This cover illustration was extremely controversial, with the full painting clearly showing some genitalia. Very few copies made their way into circulation before the controversial parts were airbrushed out. The ones that did make it into circulation are some of the most sought after and collectible record sleeves of all time.
Also of note:
Diamond Dogs was partly Bowie’s musical homage to George Orwell’s 1984.
“Thematically it was a marriage of the novel 1984 by George Orwell and Bowie’s own glam-tinged vision of a post-apocalyptic world. Bowie had wanted to make a theatrical production of Orwell’s book…but the late author’s estate denied the rightsThe songs wound up on the second half of Diamond Dogs instead where, as the titles indicate, the 1984 theme was prominent.” – via Wikipedia
A gallery of images that appeared in Rock Dreams can be seen here.
Thanks to Peter Hilgendorf for the lead