Uncovered: Baltic Fleet - ‘The Dear One’ designed by Claudia Arnold
The search for the best record cover design of the year is underway with Best Art Vinyl 2016 and we focus on some of the nominated sleeve designs in more detail - starting with Baltic Fleet’s critically acclaimed third album ‘The Dear One’
Baltic Fleet’s rapid rise from relative unknown to the talk of Merseyside’s music scene and beyond is a credit to the brains behind the music, Paul Fleming’s creative and personal journey. For his third album ‘The Dear One’ released on Blow Up Records in November, his own bereavement after the loss of his mother may have caused the diary of a local man to strike a chord with Fleming.
He explains; “I was in a local church – middle-of-nowhere Lancashire – and I was learning about the man who built it,” he recalls. “He’d built schools nearby and other places and he’d done it all for his wife. I found this diary of his in the church and he called his wife ‘the dear one’. As their story progressed through these pages, she became ill and on the last page he called her by her name – Frances – and it revealed she passed away shortly after. I was very intrigued by his total dedication to her. He’d done all of these amazing things for this one person, and I used my imagination to translate all of these other names and places in the diary into what appears on the record.”
In an interview with Paul Fleming the critically acclaimed album, ‘The Dear One’ is said to “scale more heights and traverse more peaks..” so it was fitting that the cover design by Claudia Arnold, depicting a mountain range was chosen to represent the new album.
Claudia Arnold explains the thought behind the artwork, “The Dear One artwork was a conscious continuation of the theme developed on the previous Baltic Fleet album Towers (also designed by Arnold) but shifting away from the dark brooding post-industrial man-made landscape to the vast open scale of mountain ranges and glacial horizons indicative of the new album.”
Baltic Fleet’s ‘The Dear One’ is Nominated for Best Art Vinyl 2016. See the full nominations and design credits: BAV16. The winners will be announced at The Hari hotel on 5th January 2017.
