‘That Evil Kind of Feeling’: The Inside Story of Black Sabbath’s Iconic Cover Art
An Anonymous Coward writes:
'That Evil Kind of Feeling': The Inside Story of Black Sabbath's Iconic Cover Art:
For the look of the cover[*], [designer Keith Macmillan] used Kodak infrared aerochrome film, which was designed for aerial photographs and gave the portrait its pinkish hue. (You can see a similar look on the first album cover he designed, Colosseum's Valentyne Suite.) Later on, he did "a little bit of tweaking in the chemistry to get that slightly dark, surrealistic, evil kind of feeling to it." Since it was sensitive film, he'd boil it and then freeze it, to make the image grainy and undefined.
He decided the shoot should take place at the Mapledurham Watermill, a 15th-century structure in Oxfordshire, about an 80-minute drive from central London. He'd found it with one of his college girlfriends, who lived near it, and had remembered taking a walk around it. "Nowadays it's very much more modernized, beautified, and touristed," he says "Then, it was quite a run-down and quite spooky place. The undergrowth was quite thick and quite tangled, and it just had a kind of eerie feel to it."
He contacted a London model agency, asking for a woman who could portray the ominous figure he'd envisaged for the shot, and picked out Louisa Livingstone. "She was a fantastic model," he says. "She was quite petite, very, very cooperative. I wanted someone petite because it just gave the landscape a bit more grandeur. It made everything else look big."
[*] Here's a link to a picture of the cover.
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