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sons and fascination: artwork
It was the summer of 1981. Simple Minds were rushing around numerous
London recording studios, desperately trying to finish a double album in the time allotted for a single.
They couldn’t stay still.
During these frantic, fraught sessions, a night was spent standing motionless outside New Covent Garden Flower Market in
south London. Built in 1974, this low two storey square steel and concrete building with its tented pitched roof
was in direct contrast to the concrete brutality of the Nine Elms Cold Store and industrial wastelands of Vauxhall
standing around it.
No wonder it was spotted by local boy Malcolm Garrett.
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The Love Song single featured several shots including this one taken at a
corner of the building. Cropped shot above with the full sized picture below.
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With the market closed for the day, the unlikely photo session moved in.
Simple Minds posed motionless in the loading bays as
Malcolm Garrett drove his American cars between band members and
Shelia Rock captured the scene with a Polaroid on long exposure.
The result was a strange juxtaposition of style: the band in ghostly transit, the American cars suggesting
the musical birthright of the album, the architecture futuristic yet vague. It could’ve been anywhere
and perhaps that was the intention. Garrett surrounded the prints
with his modern reappraisal of 1930s Constructivism creating a visual fusion for the record's sleeve.
The results were colourful, intriguing and blurred into anonymity. And another aspect of the recording
sessions was captured: the band just couldn’t stay still.
New Covent Garden Flower Market: nearest tube, Vauxhall.
Sons And Fascination album 
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