Golden Earring – To The Hilt(1976)

Biography

Golden Earring is a Dutch rock band, founded in 1961 in The Hague as The Golden Earrings (the definite article was dropped in 1967, while the “s” was dropped in 1969).They achieved worldwide fame with their international hit songs “Radar Love” in 1973, which went to number one on the Dutch charts, reached the top ten in the UK. During their career they had nearly 30 top-ten singles on the Dutch charts; over the years they produced 25 studio albums. The band’s lineup consists of co-founders Rinus Gerritsen (bass and keyboards) and George Kooymans (vocals and guitar), along with Barry Hay (vocals, guitar, flute and saxophone), and Cesar Zuiderwijk (drums and percussion). All musicians in the present lineup of the band have been continuous members of the band since 1970, although other musicians have joined and left the band during the intervening years.

Album & Cover
To the Hilt is the eleventh album by Dutch rock band Golden Earring, released in 1976. On this album, Golden Earring fully gives themselves over to the prog rock tendencies that they had toyed with throughout the 1970s. The resulting album has a strong prog feel but lacks the characteristic sound and the solid material that defined the group’s best efforts to that point. The band puts in a typically energetic and thunderous performance, but their strong instrumental chops can’t overcome the self-indulgent nature of much of the album’s material. http://www.allmusic.com/album/to-the-hilt-mw0000462444

The idea for the artwork for this album came from George Hardie. The man is a colonial-type detective who gets into all sorts of scrapes but always escapes to be caught again, his demeanor never changing-he survives to fight another battle…

Richard Manning describes the process:
I cut out the three prints of the man and stripped the edges as thin as possible. I lightly greyed the edges and montaged them in position with Columbia Cement. The chap hanging upside down from a building was just spotted. The chap laying in front of the saw was shot in situ and so only a bit of spotting. The chap on the railway line was montaged and a cast shadow airbrushed onto the rail and then spotted. The fourth chap was cut out to fit into the block of concrete. I darkened the chaps suit to seat him in the block and then drew in some bubbles with a combination of paint and photo dye.
http://www.richardmanning.co.uk/hipgnosis-album-cover-art/golden-earring-to-the-hilt–1975/41

Cover Location: 
Who Did What: Cover Design – Hipgnosis/G. Hardie. Photography – A. Powell. Retouching – R. Manning
Label: MCA MCA2183(US), Polydor Super 2480330(UK)
Source: Vinyl. Album. Cover. Art, The Complete Hipgnosis Catalogue: Aubrey Powell

Tracklist

Credits
Bass – Rinus Gerritsen
Guitar, Vocals – George Kooymans
Keyboards, Synthesizer [Arp, Moog] – Robert Jan Stips
Producer – Golden Earring
Vocals – Barry Hay
Drums, Percussion – Cesar Zuiderwijk
Engineer – John Kriek
Engineer [Assistant] – Robert Ash
Executive-Producer – Fred Haayen
Producer – Golden Earring
Written-By – Barry Hay, George Kooymans