Designer Andy Vella on creating art for the goth rockers

Designer Andy Vella has been creating album covers for more than 40 years, with his work to be found in millions of homes around the world.

“The weird thing I get is whenever I design a new album or a new logo for The Cure someone sends me a tattoo that they’ve just had done of it,” he explains.

“I’ve seen pictures of Robert Smith’s silhouette from Boys Don’t Cry on people’s backs, on their arses, on their legs, on their arms.

“I met [comedian] Greg Davies and he said, ‘Did you do Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me?’ and he got on his knees and bowed to me. I was so embarrassed and he just said: ‘Oh my God, I grew up with that on my wall.'”

For his latest record sleeve, Vella has used his much-lauded design skills for a project run by the charity War Child, as part of its fundraising efforts to help children caught up in conflict zones.

Vella’s career in design has seen him work with various musicians and authors over the years, from Jeff Buckley to Margaret Atwood, but it is his work with acclaimed goth rockers The Cure, often in collaboration with lead singer Robert Smith, for which he is best known.

It is also where his career began, soon after the band formed in Crawley in the 1970s.

While still studying at art school, Vella was approached by on-off Cure guitarist Porl Thompson who wanted him to photograph another group he was playing in.

“He said, ‘You’ve got a reputation at the college that you’re really good at photography’… and by chance he showed Robert my work and then suddenly at the age of 18 I was being asked to design a record sleeve [for The Cure],” he says.

That record was the band’s doom-laden third album Faith. Vella would later return to create the covers for some of The Cure’s most iconic records, including the 1989’s Disintegration, The Head on the Door from 1985 and last year’s chart-topping Songs of a Lost World.

Whenever he’s working on a new design, Vella says he looks for “something that just makes you tap into what they’re doing and you just riff on that”.

“With Robert, his lyrics are so inspiring… All you have to do is read one line quite often and suddenly you’ve got the start of something really great.”

It was this and the expansive brooding sound of Songs of a Lost World which saw Vella and Smith hit upon the design for the record, which features a stone statue head lying on its side.

“The Cure sounded just as brilliant and massive as they did back in the 80s… so the album had to have something large, something incredibly poignant and solid to represent that,” Vella says.

Even so, he admits the final look of a record can come about from something unexpected, as happened with the cover for 1987’s Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me.

As the band were on tour in Brazil, Vella was asked to fly out to Rio de Janeiro to get his design for the new album approved – despite the fact he was still working on it.

With the photo of a pair of heavily painted lips decided upon and the handwritten lettering printed on a separate sheet of clear plastic, he was experimenting with the layout in a taxi on the way to the airport when “we went over this sleeping policeman [speed bump] and the acetate just jumped to the middle of the sleeve”.

“Now I would always say don’t put type in the middle of the sleeve, and especially the top, but it just stuck in place so I stuck it down with Sellotape thinking, ‘well it’s an option’,” he says.

“I showed it to Robert when I got to Rio and he said: ‘I love that, that’s brilliant! I love the way you’ve placed the type.’

“You can be really arty-farty about things but I think sometimes it’s quite nice to let the universe take over,” Vella adds with a laugh.

For his latest record sleeve, Vella has created a cover for War Child’s Secret 7″ project.

It sees 700 creatives, such as designer Sir Paul Smith, sculptor Antony Gormley and Radiohead artist Stanley Donwood, all forming one-of-a-kind untitled record sleeves for a song by one of seven different artists – this year including Sophie Ellis-Bextor, The Cure, Gregory Porter and Scissor Sisters.

The 700 records are then put on display at London’s NOW Gallery, in Greenwich Peninsula until the start of June when they are auctioned off, with all the proceeds going to charity.

It is only when the sale is over that buyers discover the song that they’ve purchased and which designer was behind the cover.

It is not the first time Vella has taken part in Secret 7″ having previously created record sleeves for the likes of The Rolling Stones, St Vincent and The Chemical Brothers.

However, it still left him a little stressed.

“There’s just too much pressure! One year I was in there and I was next to [father of British pop art] Peter Blake,” he says.

“It’s a really amazing cause and you want to create something brilliant so that you raise a load of money for War Child.”

The charity started up in response to the Bosnian genocide. The Help Album, which it released in 1995, featured artists including Oasis, Radiohead, Suede and Portishead. War Child now works in more than a dozen countries helping children living in warzones.

Describing the process of putting together his creation, Vella says it involved “going through the painstaking thing of creating about 20 iterations, all crap”, before “suddenly you have that amazing Eureka moment”.

That Eureka moment led to a cover he considers to be “quite deep” and “very meaningful” – although of course he won’t reveal which song he created it for.

Vella says the project is something he’s proud to be part of.

“It’s such an amazing, powerful cause, helping children in war-torn countries. It just shows you as well how music and art can bring people together.”

Secret 7″ is on display at NOW Gallery, Greenwich Peninsula until 1 June with the 700 record sleeves then being sold in a global online auction on the project website in aid of War Child.