In the office with Steve Averill

Of all the enduring relationships that have characterised U2’s career, the most obvious has been with their graphic designer, Steve Averill.

Drop into the Temple Bar offices of his company and you’re immediately struck by a succession of familiar images, testament to the fact that Averill has played as big a part as any in shaping the past twenty odd years of the band’s history. The beginnings of their relationship, though, were fairly humble.
“My brother was in the same class as Adam and Edge and he came home one day and said that these guys in his school wanted to talk to me because I’d been in the Radiators. That was how the first contact was made. They were looking for someone with any sort of experience. What was different about them to other people was that they were very keen to listen and take from what you knew.
“They didn’t just blindly follow what you said, they’d go away and think about it. You knew straight away that there was a thought process going on there. Pretty much from the very first poster they’d be hands-on and wanted to see where the whole thing was going.”
From that first poster, the band and Four 5 One have worked constantly alongside each other, building the band’s image into a globally recognised brand. “It’s one of the few relationships where the development of the band’s identity has been committed to one group of people. The only other one I can think of is Pink Floyd and Hypnosis. Having said that, they made it quite clear early on that if we don’t come up with the goods then they have the right to go elsewhere. You can’t sit back on your laurels, you have to be as good as your last cover and work hard at what you do. It’s good for us too.”
Having worked on every sleeve up to and including The Joshua Tree, Averill moved into the role of art director and designer Shaughn McGrath stepped into the breech for the Achtung Baby album, just in time to help the band go through the most radical shift of their career. “I don’t know if that was by accident or design. They changed from a certain style of music and look. There was a reverential feel to their sleeves in the late ‘80s. We can all remember Bono at the Point talking about dreaming it up again and when they came back it was in hyper colour. For me what had gone before had never had any great meaning and that allowed me to explore new things in new ways.”
It was an interesting time for all concerned, as he remembers. “They utterly embraced the new version of themselves, the sound of four men cutting down the Joshua Tree. In many ways they changed their destiny, they realised it had to be done in order to expand and move on. The visuals had to change with them. Our job was to look threw the plethora of images they gave us and discover what would give them a new spark.”
How has Shaughn approached their recent work, when everything about the music and images have seen them return to a simpler, more direct feel?
“It’s a funny one. Sometimes you have to supplant your ego and come up with something that is a core communication both for ourselves and particularly them. We try to get to a place where they can all be happy with it. I suppose that being who they are and the kind of band they are there is a certain long term, classic view. It’s not pop and it’s not disposable, it’s how it’ll stand up in the future.
“They think about how a shot will work within the overall landscape of the album rather than just do they look good. It’s an act of communication. This time round we tried to build a piece of packaging that would have a strong elemental force to it. There’s less art and more a tough, stripped down feel to it. We were harking back to late seventies - the Ramones, Talking Heads, Television. It’s not necessarily beautiful but is about saying something in a powerful way.”
There has been more to Averill and co.’s work than just their most famous clients. As a designer, did Steve mourn the passing of the LP? “You did when it happened but you got into CDs and forgot about it. What you miss most about an album is the tactile nature of it, I don’t think that the graphics have suffered that much. A lot of the U2 covers look as strong as CDs as they did in twelve inch form. Everybody’s coming out with the death of the CD as more people download music but I don’t think that graphics and music will ever disappear; they’ll find a new format to do something with.
“If people just take music from the internet there’ll be more scope for bands to sell tour programmes or whatever at their gigs. The graphic will always be part of the package. It’s been proven that there are a certain percentage of sales that are always based around spontaneity, whereby you see the cover and buy it, hoping that the music lives up to the image.”
Yet, as with the music of the band themselves, Steve’s work with U2 has cast a lasting shadow over the Irish music scene in more ways than one. “It’s very obvious when you start working in a small market like Dublin, the next band who come in want to look nothing like U2. When I started working with them, shortly after that I started with the Virgin Prunes and they didn’t want to look anything like U2 at all. You immediately have to come up with a whole different way of doing things. Each band has its own idea of where it’s going. You have to bring the identity of the band forward, rather than that of you as a designer.”

photography Cathal Dawson