50 years today: the cover that made Jerry Hall famous

It’s been acknowledged as one of the greatest record covers of all time, Roxy Music’s album ‘Siren’. The album was released on the 24th of October, 1975 and opened with what would become Roxy Music’s best-loved tracks, ‘Love Is The Drug’. The visually stunning cover had the 70s supermodel, Texan Jerry Hall posing as a mermaid in a blue-tinted photo taken by photographer Graham Hughes.

Sleeve artwork is one of the best encapsulations of the intersection between music and fashion, as they have been home to some of the most radical fashion photography of all time. The British glam rock band Roxy Music treated their cover art like a continuing runway show: not afterthoughts but integral, recurring performances that translated Bryan Ferry’s art-school sensibility into a serialized visual mythology. The photos featured scantily clad it-girls and models sporting daringly glamorous attire in highly sexualized poses, a parade of slightly dangerous goddesses that both helped sell records and encoded a specific kind of glossy late-modern glamour.

Roxy’s covers are an early, tight example of music and fashion operating as equal partners in mythmaking. From the very first LP the band used professional fashion photography, stylists and hand-picked girls, some but not all professional models to create an image system with The Roxy “girl” as recurring character. From Norwegian Kari-Ann Muller (“Debut”) to Amanda Lear (“For Your Pleasure”) Constanze Karoli and Eveline Grunwald (“Country Life”) and Marilyn Cole (“Stranded”), Ferry curated a rotating cast who functioned as a serialized gallery of glamour. Each cover refined a particular facet: exotic, dangerous, aloof, ornate with “Siren” symbolizing the femme-fatale end of that spectrum. Along with Bryan Ferry’s curatorial eye, worked photographer Karl Stoecker, and later Graham Hughes, and the designer/stylist Antony Price, who can be regarded as a silent, recurring “member” of the band’s visual team.

On “Siren”, Jerry Hall is presented as a mermaid: painted blue, posed on jagged rocks, wearing a crown and with elongated nails/ankle fins added. She is a hybrid of myth, pin-up and fashion editorial. The photo was shot on lava rock formations near South Stack, Anglesey by  Graham Hughes, after a sketch done by Antony Price, who also designed Hall’s costume, body-paint and styling. The photographer used lighting and filters that gave Hall an uncanny, slightly plasticized sheen. She can be seen both as a temptress and a victim as she lies on the rocks, an icon of myth and seduction, alluring yet vulnerable and stranded. The crown and blue paint transform her into archetype rather than person, continuing Roxy’s habit of using models as stylized avatars rather than portraits of real women.

As for Jerry Hall and Bryan Ferry they had begun dating in 1975 when Hall appeared on the cover, and they got engaged soon after. But Hall broke off the relationship when she started dating Mick Jagger in 1977 with whom she had four children, two of them, Elizabeth and Georgia May who have both become models themselves.