FLASH OF GENIUS
The creation and afterlife of the Aladdin Sane album cover, by DANNY ECCLESTON.
IT CAN’T BE common for an album artwork brief to begin with a demand for the most expensive treatment available. But these were Tony Defries’s exact instructions to Aladdin Sane cover photographer Brian ‘Duffy’ Duffy.
“The key was to make something that was different and astonishing and important,” Defries tells MOJO today. “Which we managed to do with Hunky Dory and Ziggy. But this needed to, in a sense, go up a step.”
Defries’s logic, explains Duffy’s son Chris – the man behind a new book containing the full story and shoot – was cunning. “He wanted to commit RCA, to make them spend as much as possible on Bowie, on the basis that they couldn’t then drop him. There was too much to write off.”