The weird worlds of Roger Dean, prog rock's artist in residence | Music

Space was not the final frontier for artist Roger Dean, best known for his album covers for the band Yes. He went far beyond the galaxies for his fantastical images. Roger Dean: Somewhere Near Here, is at Trading Boundaries in Sheffield Green, East Sussex, until 3 November

The weird worlds of Roger Dean, prog rock's artist in residence – in pictures

Space was not the final frontier for artist Roger Dean, best known for his album covers for the band Yes. He went far beyond the galaxies for his fantastical images. Roger Dean: Somewhere Near Here, is at Trading Boundaries in Sheffield Green, East Sussex, until 3 November

Wed 21 Oct 2015 16.14 BST Last modified on Wed 19 Oct 2022 16.05 BST

  • The 1973 Yes album Tales from Topographic Oceans became a symbol of overblown prog rock. Dean said of its cover: ‘The landscape comprised some famous English rocks taken from Dominy Hamilton’s postcard collection … Jon Anderson wanted the Mayan temple at Chichen Itza with the sun behind it, and Alan White suggested using markings from the plains of Nazca. The result is an incongruous but effective mixture’

  • Dean became so closely associated with Yes that he is still providing them artwork, including this image for their most recent album, the 2014 live set Like It Is

  • Geologically unlikely formations? Classic Roger Dean, from the cover of the Yes album The Ladder, in 1999

  • But it’s not just geologically unlikely formations – trees take on new forms on the cover of the Yes box set Progeny

  • Double album Tales from Topographic Oceans might have come as a relief to some listeners, given that it had been preceded earlier in 1973 by a triple live album, Yessongs. This image, Awakenings, was the third of four panels continuing a theme begun on the 1971 album Fragile

  • Yes weren’t the only prog band to use Dean’s art: his work became as sure a signifier of prog as cut-up lettering and collage covers did for punk. This painting was for the Octopus LP by Gentle Giant

  • When former members of Yes, ELP and King Crimson came together in 1981 to record their first album as Asia – veering much closer to American AOR than the music they had made before – they still needed to signal the lineage they came from. What better way than a Roger Dean cover on their self-titled debut album?

  • Dean didn’t specialise only in album covers – he was the in-house artist of the UK progressive movement, supplying the original Virgin Records logo in 1973

  • Apparently, the cover for Uriah Heep’s 1972 album Demons and Wizards contain a hidden ‘erotic’ image of male and female genitalia. So hidden we can’t see it

  • Dean later said of his work for the 1974 Yes album Relayer: ‘I was playing with ideas of the ultimate castle, the ultimate wall of a fortified city. That was more of a fantastical idea. I was looking for the kinds of things the Knights Templar would have made or what you’d see in the movie Lord of the Rings. The curving, swirling cantilevers right into space’

  • It wasn’t just prog that Dean illustrated for – he also did lots of work for the pioneering British afro-pop group Osibisa. These ‘tankheads’ would appear on their 2015 Ultimate Collection compilation

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