“Moving Target” cover artwork

…One of the very few occasions when the actual artwork was decided on even before we had a title for the album…actually, the cover dictated the title.

I generally like to go through some old books in smaller, kind of hidden-away-from-main-streets secondhand book stores: you never know what you might find… but at that particular time I was going through the books that my dad (who passed away a couple of years earlier) had left on his personal shelves.

Everything was mixed: history books, political stuff, maps, old newspaper articles, his own quick sketches and notes, letters and a lot of random pictures from his countless travels (not organized in any way, mostly just falling out of books as I´ve been quickly going through pages).

One of them grabbed my attention: obviously an older one with handwritten “Copenhagen, 1945” on the back. I liked it instantly – a single figure surrounded by a sea of rubble. For some reason I thought that there must have been very quiet the second this picture’s been taken… planes are gone, the sound of explosions faded away, dust has settled…it´s over… the guy is passing through: going somewhere in particular or maybe just wandering, looking for something?

While I really liked the picture I felt that it needed some urgency somehow – it was very “post factum” and was lacking some suspense/action yet without it being “too loud”… and that´s when the idea of putting crosshairs on the man´s figure came about: settled yet disturbing.

Surprisingly, in some countries Moving Target´s cover was considered being too “morbid” and – in one particular instant – even “cynical”. I guess that all the way back in 1995 it might have looked like it to some (although we all have seen covers from that period which were way more disturbing) but I digress.

– André

P.S. On that photo you can see the remains of The Institut Jeanne d’Arc a French-language Roman Catholic school at Frederiksberg Allé 74. It was destroyed accidentally during Operation Carthage, on 21 March 1945, which was a British air raid on Copenhagen, Denmark during the Second World War. It caused significant collateral damage. The target of the raid was the Shellhus, used as Gestapo headquarters in the city centre. Unfortunately a few bombs hit the nabouring buildings including the school.

🇩🇰 Check out “Skyggen i mit øje” by director Ole Bornedal – a film about the bombings on the 21st of March.