So a lot of people (my ex boyfriend) have been saying I look like Mylene Klass on the cover of our record. While I grapple with the aesthetic ambiguities of that, here's the story and background to the cover's true star - the gingerbread factory.
When I first sat down with Alex Lake, who shot and designed the cover, we talked about the album's themes and decided that in some way there would be a collection of objects, each relating to the songs. Alex spent time working out how to not make it random, and doing things like building boxes out of scrap wood and sourcing ostrich eggs (Stef Lake is a teacher and apparently has everything). Then I sent him a few of the photos that I'd taken while writing the album, including two of an old factory by the M1 and one of a gingerbread house, and the idea fell into place.
For fun, we approached two architects to draw up the plans. Jane Larmour and Patrick Wheeler are a married couple from Belfast, and they decided to split the task, with Jane designing a traditional gingerbread house in the style of William Morris, and Pat designing the factory. I volunteered to make Jane's and ballsed it up, so in the end we used just the factory, heroically made in an afternoon by Alex.
The rest of the objects are pretty obvious - microscope, dinosaurs etc. I bought most of the dinosaurs on eBay, from a man called Johnny who needed the money for phone credit, and met me on Brick Lane to pick up his 99p. The T-Rex came from the Ulster Museum in Belfast.
The plans for Pat and Jane's gingerbread houses, plus some of the starting points, are here.
Alex Lake, mastermind, can be found here. He took some photos of the gingerbread house too, one is above.
The colour scheme of the cover art was lifted from this photo of the mummified remains of St Zita, patron saint of domestic servants.
