Disraeli Gears

Three faces glow out of a riot of hot pink and acid green, fused at the brow like a single creature with three heads. This is Disraeli Gears, and the wall of fluorescent color hits the eye before any single detail resolves: only after a moment do the three members of Cream separate out of the heat, ringed by feathered wings, scrolling Victorian flourishes, roses, and a small painted woman cradled at the center of it all.

The man who built this was Australian pop artist Martin Sharp, and the way he came to the job reads like a lucky accident. Sharp met Eric Clapton in a chance encounter at the Speakeasy nightclub in 1967. They hit it off, co-wrote 'Tales of Brave Ulysses' together, and Clapton moved Sharp into a London studio apartment in The Pheasantry, the same Chelsea building where Clapton himself lived. From neighbor to album artist in a single year.

Sharp's method was scissors and paint. He got hold of a publicity shot of the band, cut it up, and combined it with cut-outs lifted from various books, arranging everything as a collage across a 12-inch square. Then he drew outlines over the assembled pieces and painted the whole thing in fluorescent inks and paints, reaching for what he called the 'warm electric sound' of the music. You can feel that ambition in the surface: nothing sits quietly, the pinks vibrate against the greens, and the band's photographed faces are stained the same molten red as the wings beneath them.

The word arching across the middle, 'DISRAELI GEARS', carries its own joke. The title is a malapropism from Cream's roadie Mick Turner, who, when Clapton talked about buying a racing bicycle, said 'Disraeli gears' when he meant 'derailleur gears,' accidentally invoking the 19th-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. The band kept the slip. Below it, the word 'CREAM' blooms in fat yellow letters spread across a pair of outstretched red wings, the most legible thing on a cover otherwise determined to overwhelm.

The imagery owes something to a detour. The inspiration came to Sharp while visiting Cambodia on his way to England, where he saw sculptures with faces carved on every side and huge trees bursting out of them. That sense of many faces emerging from one form, of growth swallowing structure, runs straight through the collage: the band's three heads sharing one mass, the ornamental scrolls sprouting into petals and feathers.

There is a second name on the sleeve worth pausing on. Photographer Robert Whitaker shot the band while they were on tour, but those images ended up on the back cover rather than the front. Whitaker was no stranger to a provocative record sleeve: he had previously photographed The Beatles, famously producing the 'butcher' photo used on the Yesterday and Today and Paperback Writer artwork. Here his contribution sits on the reverse, which Sharp also designed, while the front belongs entirely to Sharp's painted blaze.

Released on November 2, 1967, by Reaction Records, Disraeli Gears caught the moment Cream were turning from a blues-rock band into a psychedelic one, subduing their blues grooves under harder, stranger sounds, and the cover announces that shift in fluorescent ink. It reached No. 5 on the UK Albums Chart and broke the band wide open in America, where it became a huge seller. Decades later it landed at No. 170 on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums list, and the sleeve itself entered the Museum of Modern Art's collection, catalogued as a 12-inch lithograph credited to Sharp, Whitaker, and Reaction Records. Not bad for a collage assembled from a borrowed photo, a pile of book scraps, and a roadie's slip of the tongue.