mostly david ephgrave

While editing photos for July's Hitchin Mostly Comedy Festival today, I inadvertently turned the comedian Daniel Cook into the sleeve of The Miracle by Queen.   Maybe this is how album covers are invented: by chance events. Perhaps Freddie was fiddling around with a primitive version of Photoshop in 1989 (or an airbrush?) when he accidentally morphed all his band members’ heads into a monster four-person amalgam. Either that, or Queen genuinely started life as conjoined quadruplets that were separated by innovative surgery, and that’s in fact the miracle the album title’s referring to; let’s face it (or four-face it): they’d have to be incredibly fortunate to survive the operation when you consider the nature of their overlap; they've barely got a pair of eyes between them. I like to imagine it was Anita Dobson who performed the operation, as the waiting list was too long for it to be done under the NHS. Speaking of Dobson, I find it ...

Terrifyingly, we live in a world where someone wanted this. It’s the composition of the thing that gets me; there’s a whole mismatch of scales. It's also designed with little thought to the backstory; why put the prenatal scan in-between the most heavily pregnant picture and the strangely cropped baby shot? Wouldn’t it make sense to put it further away from that? Also, what’s with the wicker screen to the left? Maybe they're implying the baby was conceived behind it, but let’s not delve into that too much; whatever the case, it’s the epitome of bad taste. No wonder it’s still in the shop as no-one in their right mind would buy it. I can understand wanting to chart the stages of your pregnancy in principle, but they didn't need to get so trigger-happy with Photoshop; it must have been hard for the family to envisage the final outcome of what they'd ordered, but let’s hope for their sake that they had no inkling it would turn out ...