BURIED TREASURE
Stranger Things
This month’s re-evaluated album: foreboding 4AD mysterios go bang on the indie dancefloor.
Odd ones out: The Wolfgang Press (from left) Mark Cox, Mick Allen and Andrew Gray asked the big questions in 1991.
Kevin Westenberg
The Wolfgang Press
Queer 4AD, 1991
CULT ART-ROCK impurists and 4AD label mainstays The Wolfgang Press originally planned to picture famed albino gorilla Snowflake on the sleeve of their fourth album. When they were denied permission, a session with photographer Kevin Westenberg gave the London three-piece an equally memorable cover image.
“We were in the photo studio trying all these things,” recalls guitarist Andrew Gray of the December 5, 1990, shoot at The Worx Studios in King’s Cross. “At one point I sort of crouched down like a chimp and looked flat into the camera, like an ape would – a man in a suit hanging like a monkey. And [singer] Mick [Allen]’s gone, ‘Yeah, that’s what we want.’”
With keyboardist Mark Cox, the group were photographed in similar simian style. With Gray on the front cover, the portraits duly featured on August 1991’s Queer (put them together and they resemble a Francis Bacon triptych). The title was deliberately selected for its historic Oxford English Dictionary meaning: “strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric… of questionable character.” “I’ve always loved that word,” says vocalist Allen. “It wasn’t meant to be something derogatory. It was claiming that word in its very English sense, and how it described us as a band.”