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:
“Laid out for death, let thy last kindness be
With leaves and moss-work for to cover me:
And while the wood-nymphs my cold corpse inter,
Sing thou my dirge, sweet-warbling chorister!
For epitaph, in foliage, next write this:
Here, here the tomb of Robin Herrick is.”
—Robert Herrick (1591–1674)
“Many count on their disadvantages to cover for them.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“He is a stranger to me but he is a most remarkable man—and I am the other one. Between us, we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known and I know the rest”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)