Cover
The album's cover was a painting by American sci-fi artist Frank Kelly Freas. Roger Taylor had an issue of Astounding Science Fiction (October 1953) whose cover-art depicted a giant intelligent robot holding the dead body of a man. The caption read: "Please... fix it, Daddy?" to illustrate the story "The Gulf Between" by Tom Godwin. The painting inspired the band to contact Freas, who agreed to alter the painting for their album cover, by replacing the single dead man with the four "dead" band members (Taylor and Deacon falling to the ground). The inner cover (gatefold) has the robot extending its hand to snatch up the petrified fleeing audience in the shattered auditorium where the corpses were removed. Freas said he was a classical music fan and did not know Queen, and only listened to the band after doing the cover "because I thought I might just hate them, and it would ruin my ideas", but eventually liked their music.
The original painting (also called The Gulf Between) features on the cover of Freas's collection of art As He Sees It (Paper Tiger, 2000).
The album cover was used as a plot for the Family Guy episode "Killer Queen", in which Brian Griffin uses the cover as a device to terrorize Stewie, who is frightened by the image. Throughout the episode Brian taunts Stewie with the record by painting the cover on his bedroom wall and placing it by his bed in the morning. By the end of the episode Stewie comes to realise that the robot is not real. This was based on series creator Seth MacFarlane's (who also voices Brian and Stewie) fear of the cover as a child.
Read more about this topic: News Of The World (album)
Famous quotes containing the word cover:
“There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers’ battle with the heavens that cover them. Snow, rain, and mist highlight, drench, or conceal the vast towers, but those towers, hostile to mystery and blind to any sort of play, shear off the rain’s tresses and shine their three thousand swords through the soft swan of the fog.”
—Federico García Lorca (1898–1936)
“Though the whole wind
slash at your bark,
you are lifted up,
aye though it hiss
to cover you with froth.”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)
“See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock; and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by;
then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.””
—Bible: Hebrew, Exodus 33:21-23.