Tommy

The painting is a single symbolic image: a diamond-cut sphere standing for Earth and the Self, suspended in endless space. It reads as a blue fence-like web of rhombus-shaped holes, a mesh laid over the curve of a planet so that the surface seems both solid and porous. The eye is caught by the geometry of that grid, then pulled inward through the gaps, and the tension between the ordered lattice and the void behind it is what gives the image its charge.

Colour does much of the work. Blue and white clouds streak the turquoise surface, cool and weightless, while the cutouts open onto pure black. That contrast turns each diamond into a lit window against darkness, and the eye travels from one to the next along the diagonal rows of the mesh. Pale doves and gulls drift across the field, softening the rigid grid and reinforcing the sense of open, infinite space rather than a flat surface.

Six of the openings reveal small black-and-white images: figures reaching out from a dark void, palms pressed flat against the inside of the sphere, fingers splayed. Set inside the cool colour and the geometric web, these monochrome faces become the focal points, the human note inside an otherwise abstract cosmos. They read as trapped, staring outward, hands testing a barrier they cannot see through.

Elsewhere in the composition a star-spangled hand bursts from the darkness, its index finger pointing the way forward. This is the gesture the whole picture is organised around: a breaking out from a restricted plane toward something beyond it. The inner triptych extends the same idea, showing a hand reaching out to light within a dark void, so the outward and inward panels rhyme with one another.

What the image means follows directly from how it is built. It is at heart a spiritual diagram, the sphere as Earth and Self, the pointing hand as release, the birds and open sky as freedom. But once the faces sit inside the diamonds, the same design becomes an almost perfect metaphor for the album's hero: a boy locked inside himself, hands pressed to glass he cannot see through, sealed off from the world outside. The picture works because these two readings do not fight. The cosmic web that promises escape is also the cage, and the eye's own movement, drawn again and again to those lit windows and the hands behind them, enacts the search for a way out that the story is about.

Townshend composed Tommy as a rock opera telling the story of a deaf, dumb and blind boy. When he went looking for a cover artist in September 1968, he first considered Alan Aldridge before turning to Mike McInnerney, a fellow follower of the Indian spiritual teacher Meher Baba. McInnerney was art editor of the underground newspaper International Times, and it was he who had introduced Townshend to Meher Baba's teachings, which shaped the developing opera. Townshend reasoned that McInnerney, sharing that devotion, would understand what the album was reaching for.

McInnerney received cassettes of the finished songs with only a brief story outline, and as he listened he recognised the material 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 first version carried no photographs of anyone and no band at all.

Kit Lambert strongly approved the artwork, and the company found it more sensible than The Who Sell Out, making only one concession: that the band should be pictured. Decca's executives wanted the group shown for the American market, so a second version was made, dropping small portraits of the members' faces into the gaps of the central sphere.

The album was issued as a two-LP set, its artwork unfolding as a triptych-style sleeve whose panels were spanned by McInnerney's painting, with a booklet inside carrying the lyrics alongside stylised illustrations tracing the story. The sleeve 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. Track Records issued the album in the UK on 23 May 1969, while Decca released it in the US on 17 May 1969.

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. Acclaimed on release as the band's breakthrough, its critical standing diminished slightly in later years, though several writers still regard it as an important and influential album in rock history.

The blue sphere with its trapped faces became one of the most recognisable objects in the band's history. It is cited among the all-time greatest classic rock album covers, described as a blue fence-like web of rhombus-shaped holes, six of which reveal black-and-white images of the band reaching out from a dark void. The Album Cover Hall of Fame profiled it as a 'Cover Story,' calling it arguably the finest of the early rock-opera album covers. Later remastered CD reissues were repackaged with McInnerney's original cover artwork, restoring and continuing to value the original illustration.

McInnerney never quite let go of it either. He hand-painted the cover image onto a Gibson SG Special used by Townshend on the first US stadium tour of the opera, and, at Roger Daltrey's request, applied the same image to the bonnet of a Rolls-Royce Wraith for a Teenage Cancer Trust charity auction.

For the album's 50th anniversary in 2019, McInnerney co-authored the retrospective book 'Tommy at 50: The Mood, the Music, the Look, and the Legacy of The Who's Legendary Rock Opera' with Chris Charlesworth, carrying a foreword by Pete Townshend and showcasing about 200 images, including original art from the album's designer. 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.