III- Paul Whitehead & Genesis

GENESIS - 'Trespass'

Although artist Paul Whitehead is also well-known for multiple achievements in the fields of music and cinema, he remains best-known for the album covers he created for GENESIS. The album cover of ''Trespass'' is among the most beautiful and surprising: at first glance evoking medieval world imagery, the front cover also contains a black line superimposed on the drawing like a gash. Only when the album cover is unfolded do we see that the line is the notch of a dagger seemingly embedded in the album cover. According to Whitehead, the notch and the knife are real. This dichotomy between the bucolic universe of the drawing and the brutal tear of the knife corresponds to the music of this album, wherein the peaceful innocence which prevails in the majority of the compositions is abruptly broken by ‘The Knife,’ one of the most aggressive songs ever recorded by the group.

The covers of the following albums – ‘Foxtrot,’ and, to a lesser extent, ‘Nursery Cryme’ - continue to surprise by the revealing use of the ‘gate-fold’ album cover: only when the covers are unfolded do we see the complete ‘direction’ of the scene. It should be noted that Paul Whitehead is also the author of two very beautiful album covers for the group VAN DER GRAAF GENERATOR (‘H to He, Who Am the Only One’ and ‘Pawn Hearts’), which are more evocative of the world of science fiction.