Shooting The Wombats album cover for A Guide to Love, Loss & Desperation

Published on Tue Oct 10, 2023 by David J Colbran

In 2006 Liverpool based band, The Wombats released their debut single, the Japan-only issued "Girls, Boys and Marsupials." Soon after I was contacted by a design agency here on Merseyside to help them photograph their forthcoming debut album cover. Exciting times !

Rather than the usual people portraits of a band looking moody they had decided to represent their music using found items and various junk, built in to a small model. Each item related to a particular track on the release. The model itself was to be the album cover and the items within needed to be shot individually. These became stickers which were included inside early copies of the album and also distributed as a guerilla marketing campaign tool.

Arriving at the designers to collect the model, I had to photograph and take notes on the positions of the various items. Then it was a task of carefully packing everything away in bubble wrap and taking to my studio to get the job done. After some experimentation with a multi-light set up I had a good selection of images of the completed model and these were sent to the designers and the band for approval. Next up was the more straight forward product style shots of the items for the stickers. I also supplyed cut outs of the item images with a pure white background.

Several singles followed before the release of the band's 2007 debut album, A Guide to Love, Loss & Desperation. Back then it was heavily promoted around the UK with a major billboard campaign and various promo features in the music press - NME remember them? Also the album featured for a while in the Museum of Liverpool as a reference to new music and artists that the city was producing - it's not all about the Beatles lol. Below is a small selection from the archives from a really interesting commission back in the day soon after I moved to Liverpool.

The Wombats album cover