Blind Faith-Self Titled

Blind Faith-Self Titled

Cover has normal wear and tear for the age. Cover is graded VG. Record is graded VG. ORIGINAL SHRINK WITH HYPE STICKER.

Blind Faith is the only studio album by the English supergroup Blind Faith, originally released in 1969 on Polydor Records in the United Kingdom and Europe and on ATCO Records in the United States. It topped the album charts in the UK, Canada and US, and was listed at No. 40 on the US Soul Albums chart. It has been certified platinum by the RIAA.

The cover was a photo by Bob Seidemann of a topless 11-year-old girl, Mariora Goschen, holding a silver-painted model of an aircraft, sculpted for the album shoot by Mick Milligan. The cover was considered controversial, with some seeing the model airplane as phallic. The American record company issued the album with an alternative cover, with a photograph of the band on the front, as well as the original cover.

The cover art was created by Seidemann, a friend and former flatmate of Clapton, who is primarily known for his photos of Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead. In the mid-1990s, in an advertising circular intended to help sell lithographic reprints of the famous album cover, he explained his thinking behind the image.

I could not get my hands on the image until out of the mist a concept began to emerge. To symbolize the achievement of human creativity and its expression through technology a spaceship was the material object. To carry this new spore into the universe, innocence would be the ideal bearer, a young girl, a girl as young as Shakespeare’s Juliet. The spaceship would be the fruit of the tree of knowledge and the girl, the fruit of the tree of life. The spaceship could be made by Mick Milligan, a jeweller at the Royal College of Art. The girl was another matter. If she were too old it would be cheesecake, too young and it would be nothing. The beginning of the transition from girl to woman, that is what I was after. That temporal point, that singular flare of radiant innocence. Where is that girl?
Seidemann wrote that he approached a girl, reported to be 14 years old, on the London Underground, asking her to model for the cover. He eventually met her parents, but she proved to be too old for the effect he wanted. Instead, the model he used was her younger sister, Mariora Goschen, who was reported to be 11 years old. Goschen recalled that she was coerced into posing for the picture. “My sister said, ‘They’ll give you a young horse. Do it!’” She was instead paid £40.

The image, which Seidemann titled “Blind Faith”, became the inspiration for the name of the band itself, which had been unnamed when the artwork was commissioned. According to Seidemann: “It was Eric who elected to not print the name of the band on the cover. The name was instead printed on the wrapper, when the wrapper came off, so did the type.” That had been done previously for several other albums.

In America, Atco Records used a cover based on elements from a flyer for the band’s Hyde Park concert of 7 June 1969.