' At first we couldn't think of anything for this cover. Slowly we amassed a collection of otes and pencil roughs. But they were mostly silly jokes and didn't feel sufficiently strong to work on their own.
In the end we got so attached to them that we decided to use them all. Nice Pair is, essentially, eighteen individual sleeve designs and it took, therefore, a very long time to do.
The inner spread comprises numerous Floyd photos from the archives and shows how the rigid layout began to ore the pants off the designer - his concentration flagged and he simply made a mess of it at the end.
The Floyd have a good sense of humour so many of the ideas were jokes, pictures, puns or aphorisms like 'laughing all the way to the bank' (Bob Lawrie), 'nip in the air' (Colin Elgie), 'fork in the road', and a 'frog in the throat'.
Other pictures are just ones we like, for instance, the cinema foyer (one of our favorite locations, see 10cc 'Sheet Music').
Some are a bit wry like the paranoid peephole in the dook of a family called Fear, and the spectacles out of focus.
The latter belong to the photographer taking the picture. When he took them off to shoot them, he couldn't see to well, and so was unable to focus correctly.
The completely stoned freak with his kaftan and psychedilic goggles is a reference to the Floyd's psychedelic past.
The one of Po and I in our studio is about discussing this Floyd sleve ('Dark Side' has gone, or is disappearing).
We are in the process of rejecting an all pink cover as a solution. We're no fools. The Floyd's own football, PFFC, is an oddity. In fact it's a replacement for a photo of Floyd Patterson, the boxer, painted pink all over. But he wanted five grand for the privilege so it was quickly forgotten.
You'd think he'd pay to be on a Floyd sleve. '