Erasure • Features • Private Ear

Their diverse range of work includes recent campaigns for INXS, Primal Scream and Simply Red, with one of their most recent commissions being for the forthcoming Peach single, 'Made In Vain'. One of Intro's directors, Adrian Shaugnassy; and the designer of the Cowboy sleeve, Julian House, agreed to let the EIS take up some of their valuable time with questions like, 'Tell me about your jobs'...

Artwork Adrian: I'am a designer, that's my background, but as the company grew we took on better designers than me and I became more of an art director and the liaison with the client. Julian joined us just over a year ago and he's very much hands-on. He sits at an Apple Mac and works through ideas, while all do is sort of drift along at the end and chat about them.

We set up to service the record industry, but after a while it became important to do other things, as in the record business you can be flavour of the month and the next month you're forgotten. Having said that, over the past two or three years we've found that the record business side has become predominant - we worked on a little reggae label called Blood and Fire and took a very revolutionary approach and actually made sculptures of these 70's dub reissues. People really loved these tactile covers and as a consequence we took on a lot of work.

We're doing three or four new artists at the moment. People quite like that one of the approaches we take is we say, 'Don't come to us for [just] a CD cover, let's think about the whole campaign' and so we get quite a few start-up acts.

Is there a particular 'Intro' style?

A: Definitely not, and I think that's one of the reasons why we're in the position we are. We allow individual designers to have their own style. That's very unusual, as most design companies have a style - if you think of something like Me Company, they have a very strong individual who heads that company [who] imposes their style.

So what is your style, Julian?

Julian: Well, I'm interested in 60's design imagery and film titles. The approach is generally to work with whatever the job demands, but I suppose that if there is a style it's quite minimalist, sort of 60's graphics, pop- art, very strong images.

The Cowboy sleeve has a 60's look...

J: Yeah. Where that came from was we all sat down thinking of ideas how to interpret Cowboy. One of the ones we came up with was this bucking bronco machine to represent Cowboy, but in a kind of offbeat and not so obvious way. And from that it developed and I suggested a sort of 60's penthouse apartment, a sort of Dean Martin playboy interior, as a juxtaposition. I think the idea was that the bronco image on its own is quite a bizarre-Iooking thing, but also to try to put it in an environment which was not what you would expect.

A: Because it was called Cowboy, other design companies had submitted ideas that were all very Wild West and [Andy Bell] said, 'No, I don't like that'. So we sat in this room, three or four of us, and we just brainstormed it - 'How can we say Cowboy without saying Wild West?' And one of the guys here went, 'Well, bucking bronco'. And we thought about a bucking bronco. They're absolutely amazing things, they're very graphic shapes.

Artwork A lot of music design now is about creating memorable campaign icons, and we just thought 'Yes, it is an icon, it is mad'. And then Julian developed this whole scenario of, 'Where do you put it? Do you put it in the Wild West? That's too obvious, so instead let's go for this really weird setting.' And Daniel [Miller] responded immediately to that whole sort of playboy, Hugh Helfner, sort of vibe. It just lent itself to all this treatment.

Then we had the problem of how physically to do it. It's all done in a 3-D computer package, but we spoke to bucking bronco manufacturers, we looked at making one, we looked at making one in 3-D and finding a room like Julian had designed, we got quotes to go to America to film it and photograph it. But in the end, partly because of time, partly because of budget, but partly because of just the way the design developed. we thought. 'No. we'll render it all and make it all in 3-D'.

While we were coming up with the idea. it was the day we were going to present it to Daniel, we were working away on it and we had Radio 1 on upstairs and Andy was being interviewed. The DJ asked him, 'So, what's your new album called?' and Andy said, 'Well. it's called Cowboy', and she said to him, 'So I suppose you'll have bucking broncos at your concert?' Our jaws just hit the floor, because we thought this was such an off-the-wall ideal! And he just laughed and said no, it was something to do with Vince's experience with builders, but we were just gob smacked, it was like we had a spy in the camp!

What was important, on the serious side, was that we had a wacky image we thought was quite fitting for them, and the synthesized, computer-generated 3-D style and just the over-the-topness of it all seemed to work. And out of it we got an icon - the bucking bronco became the image of the campaign that went on t-shirts for the tour and the tour brochure and will appear on the back of the next single.

J: The other thing was that they wanted to steer away from the 3-D computer generated stuff that they've done on some of the past covers, so we were constantly looking over our shoulders to make sure it never became too synthetic.

A: Some people have actually said, quite seriously, that they thought it was a photograph! Daniel constantly said he didn't want it to look like some cheap cartoon and so by distressing it a bit and making it a bit fuzzy I think we got quite a realistic look and not the usual shiny, pixellated, computer games look.

J: The funny thing is, though, that while we went for a real photographic look, like an old 1960's film poster or graphic, we didn't quite achieve that look. Instead we achieved something in the middle, which gives it part of its strangeness because you know that it's computer-generated but it's not absolutely cartoony either.

Artwork You also designed a new logo for 'Erasure' and a strange little 'e' symbol.

J: That was basically from playing around with this film titles feel. You get these little roundels that come up at the beginning of old films.

A: It's like the way Warner Bros have a little logo in the corner. They call it the Warner Bros bug. And also it's got the two black panels which give it a sort of letterbox, widescreen effect, which is again to emphasize the film aspect.

The other thing we haven't mentioned is that we created the horn device which we then applied to a cocktail shaker, cigarette lighter and cufflinks - all the things the fictional Dean Martin character might discard at the end of a busy day. And then we took those and had them as imagery we could use.

Do you know why the American version of the album has a slightly different cover?

A: No. We handed the artwork over to America and they just did their own thing. We would have preferred it to have been kept the same but knowing American record companies I think they just wanted it more punchy and more vibrant.

There are some mysterious shadows on the curtain on the cover of the Cowboy album. Some fans have been curious what is hidden behind the curtain and whether it has any deeper significance.

J: Basically just to make the thing look more 3-D and real, we just put an image behind it. I think it was just a holiday snap we took off a CD of images. We wanted it to look like somewhere in California with a blue sky, though the actual picture was of somewhere more like Thailand. There's a very blue sky and there's a hut or a temple, and there are two figures, a woman and a guy in a red shirt, pointing.

A. It's supposed to give the idea of a Califonian poolside but we think it's probably some holiday snap from a family in Thailand! We just told them to put some ambient texture in there and they put that in.

Artwork And finally the next project you're involved with is the upcoming Rain single...

A: Well, because 3-D is quite expensive, it's still in that same room, except that we've done two things. We've opened the curtains so the Americans can't change the colour! - and got a shot of an American city at night. We've put rain on the plate glass window which makes it very blurred but you can still see this city at night. Then we got rid of the bronco and we created in 3-D an umbrella, fully extended and open, but it's got the cowhide over it.

J: And there's a half-finished glass of whisky on the table, so it's like the same room at night but something's happened.

A: When we first came up with idea we faxed Daniel in LA and instead of putting a long explanation of what we were doing I just wrote, 'It's a rainy night in LA, Dean Martin's just returned from a night on the town with a glamorous air stewardess. He's thrown his umbrella in the comer of the room and they've gone upstairs...'.

And I just got this message back, 'Approved', which I thought was very cool. He did have one thing he wanted - he wanted a bra hung over the chair, so we've actually created in 3-D an air stewardess's brassiere and draped it over the chair. That was Daniel's idea.

Would you like to do more Erasure releases?

A: Oh yeah, I'd love to. It's been a great job for us. We've absolutely loved doing it, but our only regret was that we came in quite late when there were two singles already gone and it would have been nice to have done those two singles. I would love to do more, but our only regret was that we couldn't do it all.

Adrian Shaugnassy and Julian House, thank you.