A Trick of the Tail

The cover works through restraint. Its pale ground leaves enormous amounts of open space, while the characters form a loose horizontal procession rather than filling the square. That makes every figure feel like an illustration pulled from a book rather than a conventional rock image.

Elgie's fine line work and muted brown palette create the impression of age without simply copying an antique engraving. The characters are theatrical but not polished into fantasy heroes. They are gawky, comic, sinister and melancholy in different measures, which mirrors the tonal range of the songs.

The design also rewards the physical gatefold format. The front is only the beginning; inside, the figures can be matched more closely to the songs and lyrics. The listener is encouraged to move between image and text, using the sleeve almost as a map of the record's miniature stories.

Most importantly, the artwork avoids trying to replace Peter Gabriel visually. There is no new frontman portrait and no attempt to recreate his costumes. Instead Genesis keeps the imaginative storytelling that had always surrounded the band and relocates it onto the page.

A Trick of the Tail arrived in February 1976 as Genesis's first studio album after Peter Gabriel left the group. Phil Collins, already the drummer and a backing vocalist, emerged as lead singer after the band had considered outside vocalists. The record reached number three in the UK and number 31 in the United States, proving that Gabriel's departure had not ended the band's commercial momentum.

The album was recorded at Trident Studios in London in October and November 1975 and produced by Genesis with David Hentschel. Its artwork came from Hipgnosis, the design studio already synonymous with some of the decade's most ambitious album packaging, with Colin Elgie credited for the sleeve design.

Elgie's commission became especially important in retrospect because it gave this transitional version of Genesis continuity without pretending nothing had changed. The storybook imagery still belonged to the imaginative world associated with the band's progressive years, but the cleaner, more spacious design pointed toward a different era.

Genesis returned to Elgie and Hipgnosis for Wind & Wuthering the following year, confirming that A Trick of the Tail had established more than a one-off visual experiment.

A Trick of the Tail remains one of the clearest examples of album artwork acting as connective tissue during a band's reinvention. Genesis had lost the member most closely associated with its theatrical image, yet the sleeve showed that the group's fascination with narrative and character did not leave with him.

The characters have endured because they make the album unusually easy to explore visually. Fans can identify the Squonk, trace the title song's creature and connect figures to individual lyrics, turning the cover into a small puzzle rather than a single emblem.

Its 50th anniversary in 2026 brought renewed attention to Elgie's role, including a new retrospective in Prog in which the illustrator revisited the commission. Half a century later, the cover still looks unlike the photographic surrealism most commonly associated with Hipgnosis.

That difference is its strength. A Trick of the Tail looks like a book of strange tales waiting to be opened, which is almost exactly what the record becomes once it starts playing.