The new UK sleeve, not banned
Lee Templeton:
"The critically acclaimed album Trouble Pilgrim -- the first Radiators from Space album in many a year (See the great review by Boz of Steampig) -- is due for an upcoming UK release. But it won't be featuring the album artwork that the band wanted it to have.
The controversial cover provides a glimpse into one of those mid-century American moments of synchronicity that Don Delillo would savor: James Dean and Ronald Reagan co-starring in some forgotten TV drama of dubious artistic quality.
According to my pop-culture sources:
It's from a 1952 TV playhouse thing in which Dean is rather good as a drunken beatnick and Reagan is, well, Reagan as a Doctor who has been held hostage by Dean until he can fix up his friend who is badly wounded - they can't go to a hospital because the wounds occurred in the course of a robbery or whatever. It's called "The Dark Dark Hours" and is mostly rubbish, Dean's fascinating hep-talking beatnik excepted.
Classic network cheese. A black/white simplistic moral situation, decent society vs degenerate 'other' and then everyone's perennial favorite: guns. It wouldn't be more than a footnote in either actor's history, except that one of them became the President of the United States at the time when the national Chevrolet was taking a hard turn to the right.
And the other become the international icon of that streak of raw American rebellion that's always there and ready and doesn't even need to wait for a cause.
So for some reason, England doesn't want its own record-buying public to see this. Instead, the more topical images will be on the CD. Powerful, yes, but it isn't what the artists wanted.
And who knows why? Could it really be that after all these years, Albion still thinks of Reagan as playing Heathcliff to Margaret Thatcher's Cathy?
I am releasing these images without authorization and encouraging you to pass them on because I think they deserve to be seen. People should know about the forces that are mediating our culture and our freedom of expression. People should start talking about it."
