I would like to claim that I was the only kid in Darlington that had a Wu Wear jersey in 1999. It’s probably not true, but I never saw another. I developed an intense fascination with the Wu-Tang Clan in my later secondary school years. Must have been the undeniable parallels I felt, in my formative years on the Grange Estate in Hurworth-on-Tees, with the Park Hill project in Staten Island that birthed the legendary group. To this day, my brother and I can recite the infamous skit from their debut album that precedes the absolutely phenomenal M.E.T.H.O.D. Man (“I’ll just keep feedin’ you, and FEEDIN’ you…”) word-for-word. And often do.

So imagine how nuts I went when I was contacted about the possibility of pitching a cover concept to RZA’s 36 Chambers Record Label for a new album being prepped by long-time group DJ Mathematics. The record was to be themed around Blaxploitation movie scores and tracks, forming the bedrock of each song. I was sent a huge cachet of posters from the era as inspiration, as well as concept art by Mathematics himself – fucking daunting given that he is the man who created the famous W logo. I’d been contacted after posting my Coffy alternative poster. The designs leaned heavily into a busy image of besuited badasses and babes, the draft I saw modelled mostly on 1973’s Black Caesar. Given that this had already been covered, I thought, why not swing for something a bit eye-catching in the same vein? So I cobbled together a direct riff on the brilliant Super Fly poster, a little on the nose of course, but I had a really clear idea of how a white, pink, and purple colour scheme could absolutely jump off the shelves (actual, and digital) in a genre that perhaps shied away from this particular look.

I rushed this placeholder draft out in watercolour pencils, adding a Wu-Tang logo that was hewn out of two tower blocks from that same Park Hill neighbourhood that so fascinated me when I learned how they dubbed the area Shaolin, with the members of the group posed in front of it. On the back cover, I wanted to evoke the nostalgia so many aficionados of cult films feel for the faded fleapits and grindhouses of New York’s 42nd Street. While, for me, this was something I didn’t even know I’d missed until it was long, long gone, the members of the group would have really experienced those cinemas, discovering the Kung Fu gems that so influenced their lexicon.

But, my preferred design sought to reference the brief more tangentially – I saw many posters that used a stark black, yellow, and white colour scheme:

…and figured, what if I could avoid the cliche and the visual overload, while keeping the feel? Many posters include a cityscape, so I grabbed a vintage 1970s photograph of the New York skyline taken from the perspective of the Staten Island ferry as it approaches – figuring, it could evoke the journey the group’s members may have taken into Times Square to see these same, infamous features. I ran a risoprint filter of the image, after isolating the buildings and adding a more highly-contrasted photograph of clouds, to allow for some additional texture.

I ran the filter over the skyline separately, then manually lined up the two images, so that the black and white buildings stood stark against the yellow and white sky.

I used the Wu-Tang W to create a cutout against the buildings, and separately against the sky, and then finally utilised the detailed buildings and bridges to cut off the solid yellow background at the horizon line, leaving the lower third free for ‘credits’ in a font that I felt straddled the line between 1970s-appropriate, with a modern edge. You can see the struts of the bridge at the outer edges if you look close enough.

For the back cover, I repurposed the same image of a broken-down awning, the album name emblazened on it. The work here is extremely rough as it was only intended to be a very indicative, low-res concept pitch, but I thought the overall piece looked like something that brought the right feeling of the 1970s, without seeming too try-hard or tacky. Bold, but not fussy.

Ultimately, of course, this was as far as the job went – I was super happy for the opportunity, a bit bummed out that I didn’t get to contribute to one of my favourite musicians of all time, and fired up to try again.