The 1987 release of Scum, the debut album from English grind progenitors Napalm Death, was both curious and monumental in almost every respect. It ramped up the snarling d-beat crust-punk of Crass and Discharge to as-yet-unheard levels of speed and violence, laying the foundations (along with Repulsion's Horrified) for both grindcore and death metal; it earned a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records for "You Suffer," the shortest song ever recorded up to that point (1.316 seconds); the album's two sides featured almost entirely different lineups (drummer Mick Harris was the only constant); and the musicians who played on it went on to form such legendary bands as Godflesh, Cathedral, Jesu, and Carcass.
It was the latter connection that would lead to the album's now-infamous artwork, when Napalm Death guitarist Bill Steer, who had already started playing in Carcass with singer-bassist and sometime graphic artist Jeff Walker, asked the frontman to create the cover. "Mick gave me a brief on what he wanted—kind of a hierarchal thing with skulls at the bottom, starving kids, corporate logos, and businessmen as overlords," recalls Walker, who designed the logo for England's Earache Records, which was releasing Scum.
Harris' art direction was a direct reflection of Scum's anticorporate stance, as embodied by song titles like, well, "Multinational Corporations." "But I tried to make it a bit more metal, I guess, by ripping off Celtic Frost," Walker says of the album's old-school pen-and-ink cover. After appropriating the wings from old Celtic Frost and Dark Angel flyers for Scum's angel of death, Walker lifted a few other choice graphic elements. "I ripped off the skulls from a Siege flyer and the Reagan Youth EP," he says with a laugh.
Copying aside, there was no Xeroxing involved in the creation of Scum's cover; Walker rendered it all freehand. "I did a sketch in pencil and did the shading by stippling, which is just making a load of really fine ink dots and then erasing the original pencil marks," he explains. The finished piece was 19-by-19 inches square. "It took fucking ages to do," Walker says. "I actually didn't think I was ever gonna get it finished. Back then, things like artwork and recording were labors of love. Nowadays, everything's a piece of piss."
Walker specifically chose the logos scattered along the bottom of the image as timely examples of corporate malfeasance. "Those companies were involved in dodgy dealings in the Eighties," he alleges. "Nestlé was selling powdered baby milk to African countries, telling mothers it was healthier than breast-feeding. Coca-Cola had some dodgy investments in South Africa [which was then under apartheid rule], and McDonald's were up to the usual—dodgy labor practices, union-busting, plus whatever shit they were shoving in the food."
Despite the fact that the stuffed suit on the cover's far left looks vaguely like Richard Nixon, Walker says none of the overseer figures were based on specific politicians. "They're actually the chairmen of the board for a company that sold bicycles, the poor bastards," he chuckles. "I found the picture in a book at my parents' house. Napalm didn't know it, but I guess they were railing against the evils of the bicycle business as well."
