There’s an Alan Aldridge exhibition on at the Design Museum coinciding with Thames & Hudson’s publication of The Man with Kaleidoscope Eyes. Best known for his groovy work with The Beatles, Aldridge tells Computer Arts where he got his ideas:
My third eye [taps forehead gently]. It sounds pretentious, but I’m a very visual artist. I’ve never been a scribbler. Take the Chelsea Girls poster, for instance. As soon as I got the brief from Warhol I had a visualisation of how I wanted it to look. And that’s precisely how it panned out.
It’s like the Lennon piece for ‘There’s a Place’. I had a real idea for this of John’s body like a caterpillar, snaking round and going into his own head. So I told John about the idea and he showed me the lyrics, which went: ‘There, there’s a place/Where I can go/When I feel low/ When I feel blue/And it’s my mind’. And I just thought, ‘Fucking hell, this is weird!’ Because it was talking about exactly what I had in mind for the piece.
Further: How I designed the 1960s, Aldridge in The Observer / A selection of Aldridge’s covers for Penguin books
