“It seemed to just shut everyone up!”

Inspiration or influences often come from unexpected sources and when searching for images for our album we had some unexpected twists and turns. Nathan had been playing with the idea of reflections and worked out that if we had a band photo of us all near water then including the reflected images there would be ten of us... which of course fits very neatly with our name.

We had just finished a photo shoot based on this idea (see Henry’s blog post coming up) and I was at home planning a trip to London, looking at the Royal Academy Summer exhibition and dreaming of paintings. Clicking on the Affordable Art Fair I saw they had a few thumbnails of featured artists and amongst them a thumbnail image.... Linear. An original work by an artist called Jo Holdsworth.

I was very struck with the image and thought it would fit perfectly with the reflection idea and loved the style. There were even 5 figures featured in it. Of course, the next step was getting the very illusive agreement of all 5. We’d considered various images before but never managed to find one we all loved.

We had our art on the grass evening in summer 2021 (see Nathan’s blog post ‘Monday night is Band Night Right?) and after hot debate over frankly every image presented, I decided to take the plunge and showed a screen grab of ‘Linear’. It seemed to shut everyone up! There was a very quick consensus that we all loved the image and that it would make a fantastic main image for our album.

The next step was working out how we could use it and figuring that you don’t get anything unless you ask; we approached the artist via the gallery who were hosting the work and explained that we would like to use it for our album. In a lovely synergy of artistry, Jo wanted to hear the music. So we sent a few of the tracks over and waited with fingers crossed. Thankfully both Jo and her gallery owner Rachael Noon Powell really liked the music and were keen to collaborate. In an ideal world we would have bought the original painting, but then there would have been a tousle over who had it hanging in their house, so we worked out a license deal with Jo via Rachael and are very happy that they were so on board with the whole project.

In fact, I went down to London to see Jo’s exhibition on the Kings Road and we are hoping to meet Jo at some point. If you love Jo’s work as much as we do then you can read more about her in our blog Jo Holdsworth and follow the links to Jo’s own pages.