Look closely at the cracked blue sphere and you'll find faces trapped inside it. Across a lattice of diamond-shaped cutouts, each opening like a window punched into the curve of a planet, small figures press their palms against the dark, fingers splayed as if testing the inside of a cage. Pale doves and seagulls drift through the cloud-streaked turquoise, and the whole image seems to hang in infinite space, a world turned over and over. This is Tommy, the early rock opera by The Who, and the people staring out from those black diamonds are the band themselves.
They weren't supposed to be there. When Pete Townshend went looking for an artist in September 1968, he had first considered Alan Aldridge before turning to Mike McInnerney, a fellow follower of the Indian spiritual teacher Meher Baba. Townshend reasoned that McInnerney, sharing that devotion, would understand what the album was reaching for. He was right.
McInnerney received cassettes of the finished songs with only a brief outline, and as he listened he recognised the story as rooted in Meher Baba's teachings. He set out to capture the world of a deaf, dumb and blind boy, deciding to depict, in his words, a kind of breaking out of a certain restricted plane into freedom. His painting was a single symbolic image: a diamond-cut sphere standing for Earth and the Self, suspended in endless space, overlaid with clouds and birds, with a star-spangled hand bursting from the darkness, its index finger pointing the way forward. There were no photographs of anyone. No band.
That purity didn't survive the Atlantic. While Track Records issued the album in the UK on 23 May 1969, Decca released it in the US on 17 May 1969, and Decca's executives wanted the group pictured for the American market. So a second version was made, and the small portraits of the members' faces were dropped into the gaps of the central sphere. The spiritual diagram became, almost by accident, the perfect visual metaphor for the album's hero: a boy locked inside himself, hands pressed to glass he cannot see through.
The package matched the ambition of the music. Released as a two-LP set, the artwork unfolded as a triptych-style sleeve, and a booklet inside carried the lyrics alongside stylised illustrations tracing the story. The sleeve even credited Meher Baba directly, listed as Avatar, an unusual line in a rock album's small print. Barrie Meller handled the photography for the package.
Whatever compromises the cover endured, the music endured longer. Tommy reached No. 2 in the UK and No. 4 in the US, then refused to leave, re-entering the Billboard charts for a combined 126 weeks, far outlasting any other Who release. The blue sphere with its trapped faces became one of the most recognisable objects in the band's history.
McInnerney never quite let go of it either. For the album's 50th anniversary he hand-painted the cover artwork onto a Gibson SG Special, and at Roger Daltrey's request he applied the same image to the bonnet of a Rolls-Royce Wraith, both raising money for the Teenage Cancer Trust. Half a century on, the diamonds, the doves and the pointing hand were still doing what the painting set out to do: breaking out of one restricted plane and into another. And the eye still goes first to those tiny lit windows, to the hands pressed flat against the dark, searching for a way through.
