ParlophoneFear not, that isn't some monstrous alien creature, it's just the album cover of Queen's thirteenth studio album The Miracle, home to classic songs like Breakthru, The Invisible Man and I Want It All. Recording the album is said to have lasted for a whole year, beginning shortly after Freddie Mercury was diagnosed with AIDS and while Brian May was going through substantial marital issues. The cover art depicts the faces of all four members merging into each other using a then state of the art piece of image-manipulation software known as Quantel Paintbox. What may have been striking then today looks like a fairly crude piece of photo-shopping, and renders each individual member looking like some sort of goofy alien firmly situated in the uncanny valley. The cover's origin, however, is rather interesting. According to Derek Riggs the man responsible for illustrating many Iron Maiden album covers the band actually stole the idea for the cover from his artwork for the single The Clairvoyant. While this may sound unlikely, Riggs specifically cites Freddie Mercury as the one who took the idea, who Riggs claimed was a "headbanger" and a huge fan of metal. Riggs claimed Mercury had purchased the single, which was released the year before, and decided to depict the exact same visual image.
