The New Order: Republic Album Cover

Saville helped found the Manchester based Factory Records label in 1979 and went on to produce designs both for the label's Haçienda nightclub and for many of its bands. He is best known for his album cover art for Joy Division, New Order, Suede and Pulp.



The Republic cover marks a significant departure from Saville's earlier neo-modernist designs. Previous New Order releases had featured characteristically low-key cover art, often without the band name and album title included on the front cover. The Power, Corruption & Lies album for example, only displayed the band name in the form of a colour code in the corner of the cover, with a key provided on the back for decoding the band name.

With Republic, Saville embraced a different kind of aesthetic, appropriating the colourful and explicitly branded visual language of commercial advertising. He has put much of the inspiration for the juxtaposition of imagery on the cover down to the time he'd spent in LA at the time, describing it in an interview with Eye Magazine as "… a post-LA experience: television culture, mass-media overload, the irony and wild juxtapositions of channel-surfing, where you flip from CNN to MTV to the shopping channel to something really quite horrific on the news".

Republic went to number one in the UK album charts and was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize.
Peter Saville was appointed creative director for Manchester City in 2004.

Links:

» Peter Saville's website
» Saville Associates

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