H.R. Giger: Debbie Harry Metamorphosis: Creating the Visual Concept for KooKoo

Product Information

Piss off, I love that record,” she later replied to a reader’s criticism in Q. “The mix is bad but the material is great.” It's a little incongruous, but I think it's fallen into place. People accept it. The imagery is sorta sci-fi, while the music was urban. It's up to everyone to interpret it as they will. A beautiful coffee table art book chronicling the extraordinary collaboration between Debbie Harry and H.R. Giger for Harry’s 1981 solo album KooKoo. Especially for Giger, because he has been such a major influence on modern style in general, in art and design and

You’ll know H.R. Giger’s work even if you don’t know his name. You’ve seen Alien, obviously. The monster was his work. In fact, he was clutching an Oscar for Visual Effects the night he met Debbie and Chris at an exhibition of Alien paintings in New York. Perhaps slightly less iconic, the cover of Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s 1973 album Brain Salad Surgery was his first LP design. KooKoo – Debbie Harry’s first solo album, released in 1981 – was the second. With photographs and words by Chris Stein, Harry’s long-term collaborator, artefacts and sketches from the Giger archive, and an introduction by Debbie Harry, this is an essential behind-the-scenes insight into the processes of an incredible creative partnership. All the other covers—those officially sanctioned, in any case—come from work Giger “made for myself, many years before, which the bands, later, licensed for their own use after seeing them in my books.” Though Giger himself is more of a jazz fan, his appeal to heavy metal is obvious. “Giger’s style of adding a surrealist twist to mechanical and biological scenes,” writes Allmusic, “often with twisted sexual undertones—was immediately identifiable,” and immediately identified a band as something seductively taboo and possibly deadly.Yeah, we just worked with J. H. Willams III who does Batwoman. He just did the last cover. I'd love to do more stuff with him. All the art that's popular now will connect to Giger at some point. He's so intellectual and he's influenced a couple generations of artists. I don't know why he's neglected in the arts world.' KooKoo was recorded while Harry and boyfriend Chris Stein were taking a break from the band Blondie. The album was produced by Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of the R&B band Chic, who had just had major success working with Diana Ross on her 1980 album Diana. Harry and Stein first met the pair at the Power Station recording studio in New York while Blondie were recording their 1979 album Eat to the Beat, and they remained good friends in the intervening years. KooKoo was one of three albums to be (co)written and produced by Rodgers and Edwards in 1981, the other two being Chic's fifth album Take It Off and Johnny Mathis' I Love My Lady, which remained unreleased until 2017.

His style is so unique that there is no way to categorize him simply. HR Giger was the designer of Alien, probably the most famous sci-fi character shown on silver screen. His strange, enigmatic artworks are a combination of industrial stylistics and apocalyptic vision of the future. His pieces are as beautiful and fascinating as they are scary and repulsive.It’s in that role that he has worked on this book, documenting the project to create an album cover and two videos in the studio of the famous Swiss artist. Watch Iggy Pop & Debbie Harry Sing a Swelligant Version of Cole Porter’s “Did You Evah,” All to Raise Money for AIDS Research (1990)