You all know I collect Peter Blake album cover art and I’ve been lucky, over the years, to get many covers signed by Sir Peter. However, as I live in Sweden, it has not been easy to get covers signed.

Some time in March 2024, my friend — and Beatles expert — Ken Orth wondered if I cuold help him try to solve a mystery. There is a shadowy figure from the Sgt. Pepper photo shoot that has not been identified and Ken has asked just about everybody, including Jann Haworth, if they could identify the person.

The only person Ken hadn’t asked was Peter Blake and so Ken asked mwe if I could pass the picture on to him to see if he knew who the person was. I wondered how this would work and decided to ask Sir Peter to sign some album covers for me and I would enclose the picture of the mystery person in the hope that he mighty remember.

So — at the end of March I assembled a package of six record covers and one CD booklet and printed a large copy of the mystery person. I wrote a long letter asking several questions about the covers and posted the package by registered mail. I received notice that the package had been delivered on April 4th and the waiting started.

One month went by. And then another… And I began to give up hope. I reckoned that I had lost the covers and managed to find replacements. Then, at the beginning of July I received and email from Blake’s gallery saying that Chrissy Blake had delivered a parcel addressed to me for the gallery to forward. I confirmed my address and the gallery sent the package off only for it to be returned after a couple of days as being “undeliverable”. The gallery director emailed my telling me the package was once again at the gallery but for some reason this email didn’t arrive until the 26th July. So I arranged a new shipment where Royal Mail would collect the package and send it registered to me. They tried to collect the parcel on August 1st but the person on the gallery’s front desk didn’t know about the collection, so had to reshedule collection for the following day. That worked and the package was on its way.

It arrived at the Swedish customs on August 12th and I collected it yesterday. In the parcel were my six record covers, on CD booklet and the poster of the Mystery person, now with an inskription by Peter Blake.

So the Mystery person is still a mystery.

Sir Peter had signed all four album covers and the CD booklet but had not commented on my questions.

I would still like to know how The Fall came to use Peter Blake’s Nadia painting on the cover of their promotional EP, and I still wonder where the original painting for the Gershwin cover is now? And how did A Stranger Shadow get their Colours CD cover designed by Peter Blake? The final mystery is why Landscape (or their record company) rejected Peter Blake’s cover for their Manhattan Boogie Woogie album?
These mysteries, too, remain unsolved.