This lyric from The Kinks’ “Do You Remember Walter?” pretty much encapsulates the aftermath of my abbreviated life in music as a youth, which is another story. In fact, I’m usually asleep a bit earlier. How I ended up doing the sleeve of the rock duo Fantasmage’s new album is a bit of a fluke. I usually do not do illustration work, because there’s usually a rapid turnaround, and the people asking generally think of you as a passive instrument they are guiding—kind of like the plot of an airplane disaster movie where you’re the first-time pilot, and they are talking you down from the control tower.
I already had an ongoing email correspondence with cartoonist and Fantasmage guitarist Andrés Magán. He had already sent me links previously to their first album and also to the more ambient solo music he had created. Listening to these links, I had the far too rare response of “Hey, this is actually great!”
Fantasmage reminds me a little of The Ramones due to their lack of solos and the precision of their arrangements. You’ll often hear them drop a beat or a bar to get to a chord change faster or keep things concise. I also think the singer Nico has a really unique rock and roll voice. The melodies are simple and catchy. The drums always swing and run through a variety of feels, so nothing gets too repetitive.
I just happened to be lucky enough they were willing to give me many months to do the artwork instead of, like, a week.
How it ended up actually working was I started painting the front before any of the recording had actually begun. I looked at the cover of the first album with a discomfited green man on it and decided, “Well, how about 2 green people for the second?” I then came across a photo of Pili y Mili dancing in tandem and used that as a reference. I Googled “Vigo, Spain,” the band’s hometown, and used a generic street photo for the background, a street Andrés subsequently recognized and had a mild chuckle about.
For the back cover, I tried to imitate the cartoons in what I later learned was called a tebeo called El DDT. I then discovered Google Translate has a drop-down for Galician, the language native to Vigo, to translate my punchlines. Andrés seemed to enjoy the clunky robot interpretations better than an actual accurate take.
For the insert, I was in an antique store in Long Beach and came across a children’s jigsaw puzzle I was able to alter slightly into a portrait of the band.
All during this time I was being sent the recordings as they finished each batch. It was always exciting to hear that after 13 years they had maintained their energy and savvy, and each batch was to me happily an unpredictable surprise where my usual response became “Okay, these guys know what they’re doing.” Not that I exactly knew myself ha ha.
I kept thinking back to some vague acquired aesthetic that came from years of loving Barney Bubbles and Hipgnosis designs and tried to create something as fun as their music.
Anyway, all I can say is I’m thrilled to be a small part of their new album, and I hope it brings them the notoriety they deserve. The title they came up with, “No Salgas Más,” also struck me as perfect, as they recognized what unified a lot of my art—a mostly unfounded and somehow amusing fear something terrible was about to happen. The title reminded me again of The Ramones when they told their audience “Leave Home.”
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