Our friend Antonello tells us: “A very beautiful book featuring some of Kate’s record covers has been recently published. The book is called ‘Cover Stories’ and it includes hundreds of photos of record covers that were made by Bill Smith Studio. The book is truly beautiful. High quality and definitely recommended.” Thanks, Antonello!

This 12-inch square book features original album art produced by Bill Smith Studio and the stories behind them. Across five decades Bill Smith Studio worked with more than 200 bands and artists, creating hundreds of album covers, singles bags, and CD covers. This design house worked with Kate for her album and single releases from 1985-1990 and included sleeves for singles like Running Up That Hill, Cloudbusting, Hounds of Love, The Big Sky, Experiment IV, The Sensual World, This Woman’s Work and Love and Anger, and for the albums Hounds of Love, The Whole Story, The Sensual World and the 1990 This Woman’s Work box set. The book can be ordered here.

We got a call one afternoon from Steve Davis, the Head of Marketing at EMI, he asked us if we would like to work on the next Kate Bush album, Hounds of Love. This would have been around April/May of ’85 and it was full steam ahead from that phone call on. We attended several meetings with Kate and EMI to discuss the cover concept. We must have produced more visuals for that project than just about any other. This was pre-Mac, everything by hand with finished visuals using colour photo prints and rub-down transfers for type etc … working with Kate was always a joy, she had the whole picture in her head for each project, the photos were normally ready for us to work from, we’d discuss ideas on layout and typography and then she would let us get on with it…

Bill SMith 2021