Well good old Switzerland also produced H R Giger, a-1 nutboy and biomechanical artist whose dark sexual paintings can’t help but affect anyone who sees them.
My father used to play darts at a local pub. Apparently there was some sort of recording studio nearby, and some young lads who worked there would often bring in LPs to use as prizes in competitions. Dad picked up a few of these, so you would have the anomaly of flicking through his record collection of Roy Orbison, Tom Jones, Englebery Humperdinck, Marty Robbins, endless Max Bygraves sing-alongs and suddenly come up short with something like Ahh The Name Is Bootsy Baby (funk?!?!?) or Brain Salad Surgery.
I miss LPs in that they were a lot bigger than CDs so you could get the full effect of magnificent artwork, such as that of Giger for the ELP album. A biomechanical skull embedded in earthy metalwork, topping a circle that revealed what appeared to be a normal woman’s mouth. The cover opened up to reveal an odd cobra woman. This painting was as startling as the music.
Of course, at the time I didn’t know this was by Giger. It wouldn’t be until Alien that his weird world would properly come into focus. I did have The Book Of Alien and the Cinefantastique Alien edition that drew one into his world. Can vaguely remember the controversy surrounding the Dead Kennedys inclusion of a poster of HRG’s Penis Landscape with their album Frankenchrist, and something like Time Out printing the picture, in those halcyon pre-Internet days.
The obvious tribute (Should I be so maudlin and pretentious) would have been to watch Alien, but, me being me, I watched Species, an hilarious B Movie with A Movie ambition, featuring Sir Ben Ghandi, Forest Twitaker, Alfred Molina as a Harvard anthropologist with a marvellous fruity Brit accent and Michael Madsen as the requisite bit of rough to deal with the action sequences. Giger’s alien design is used sparingly and is inevitably derivative, but the film as a whole is ludicrous fun, teetering on the brink of (possibly intentional) comedy.
