Klaus Voormann on Designing The Beatles’ ‘Revolver’: ‘Hair’s Very Important’
Klaus Voormann was good friends with The Beatles years before he designed the album cover of their 1966 album, Revolver. Voormann had never worked with the group directly. There was a lot of pressure, careful planning, and conceptualizing. The record cover later became one of the most iconic.
The bassist and artist met The Beatles during their residency in Hamburg, Germany
The Beatles met Voormann during their residency in Hamburg, Germany, in the early 1960s. The group impressed Voormann, and he wanted to be friends with them.
He told The World, “Well, I thought it was so amazing that those young kids — they were completely unknown. George, who was just 17 and he was just lovely. You know, he was lovely, cuddly. John was great, like everybody knows. And Paul was fantastic and Pete Best was playing the drums in those days and Ringo wasn’t around.”
After the group became famous, Voormann moved to London. George Harrison and Ringo Starr invited him to live with them in their London flat after Paul McCartney and John Lennon moved out.
Voormann had no idea he’d become an even more integral part of Beatles history when John called him to come to hear Revolver and design the album’s cover.
Klaus Voormann said the hair was important on the album cover for ‘Revolver’
Voormann thought Revolver was terrific when he first heard it in the recording studio.
“They were just rough, not finished, but it was amazing, just amazing. So many great songs,” Voormann told Ultimate Classic Rock. “And then came ‘Tomorrow Never Knows,’ which was so amazing because I didn’t expect it.
“I was sitting there listening to the tracks, and you suddenly heard those birds fluttering and sped-up tapes, backward cymbals, the guitar solo, all this rumble was going on. Immediately I was captured by it and thought it was wonderful. But when it was finished I thought, ‘Oh my God, what are the fans gonna say?'”
Voormann knew that his album cover design had to let fans know that Revolver was unlike anything they’d heard from The Beatles. It’d be a tough undertaking.
“You had… I don’t want to call it split fan unity,” Voormann explained, “but you had fans that liked ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘Hold Your Hand’ and all those early tracks, and for them, [Revolver] was a big step in a new direction of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ or even ‘Eleanor Rigby.’ Then you had the newer, a little more sophisticated fans. It was difficult to combine the two things.”
Since the album held non-traditional Beatles music, Voormann couldn’t design a regular album cover. He chose to use black and white caricatures of the band instead of the usual colored photograph. Interwoven in the group’s locks are more photos — a collage.
“I thought we needed lots of pictures,” he said. “Fans always want to see pictures, and the more they can get, the more fun it is for the fans. That was the main idea. I wanted to have lots of figures and faces of the boys.”
Voorman said he asked The Beatles to contribute their own photos of themselves to the album’s collection of images. They were hesitant because they thought their pictures were terrible, but Voormann assured them he wouldn’t choose the worst.
The designer said the group’s hair was the most important aspect of the design. Many called The Beatles the “Mop Tops.” They helped usher in an era of longer male haircuts. Their locks were famous and part of their image. The Beatles had a different sound on Revolver, but they still had those haircuts.
“Hair’s very important,” Voormann said, “and it’s very difficult for people these days to imagine how important and how sensational those haircuts were. The Beatles hair — we called them ‘mushroomhead’ in Germany. So I thought, ‘That’s a good idea, something with hair.’ Then I came to the conclusion of using lots of hair.”
Voormann made history when he designed the album cover.
Voormann made The Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, cry with his design for ‘Revolver’
Voorman explained that The Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, worried about the band’s new sound. However, Voormann’s design for Revolver put his mind at ease and even made him cry joyfully.
“That was true, yes,” Voormann said. “I don’t invent things. [Epstein] really said that he was worried that the public would not accept the music — the same thought I had. He said, ‘This cover is the bridge. You’ve built the bridge to this new music.'”
All of Voorman’s hard work bridging new music together paid off. In 1967, he earned a Grammy for his work on Revolver‘s album cover. To this day, it’s still one of the most recognizable album covers in music.
