.Richard Evans (born 1945) is a designer who began his career with the legendary design group Hipgnosis before starting his own company. He has designed record covers for many bands including Robert Plant, Van Morrison and World Party. But he is best known for his covers for the Who and Pete Townshend, including “Who’s Missing”–with it’s nod to Peter Blake’s “Got a Girl” painting and its companion “Two’s Missing”

The first Who cover he worked on was their 1981 “Faces Dances” LP. This was the first Who album after Keith Moon’s death and the band had recruited former Small Faces drummer Kenney Jones to replace him. Pete Townshend met Peter Blake on the set of the television show “Ready, Steady, Go!” in 1965 and they became friends, which is how Townshend came to ask Blake to design the cover for what would be the Band’s nineth album. Evans also designed the cover for “Filling in the Gaps” the promotional album for “Fasce Dances”, a recording of Pete Townshend discussing the album.

Blake’s four-by-four square layout with four individual portraits of the band members has become a classic cover. Blake got fifteen of his artist friends to each paint one band member.

 Gavin Cochrane took a photo of each member of the band, which the 16 artists used to paint on 6 in × 6 in (150 mm × 150 mm) canvases the portraits of each member of the band for the front cover , although it seems that Jo Tilson based his painting of Kenney on Blake’s portrait  rather than the photograph.

Pete Townshend on the top row, painted by Bill Jacklin, Tom Phillips, Colin Self and Richard Hamilton.
Second row: Roger Daltrey by Michael Andrews, Allen Jones, David Inshaw and David Hockney.
Third row: John Entwistle painted by Clive Barker, R. B. Kitaj, Howard Hodgkin and Patrick Caulfield.
Bottom row: New member Kenney Jones painted by Peter Blake, Joe Tilson, Patrick Procktor, and David Tindle.

Richard Evans provided the graphic design of the back cover that featured Clive Barker’s 1967 sculpture of a gold-plated, bronze paintbox. Barker had been one of four pop artists shown in a joint exhibition at Robert “Groovy Bob” Fraser’s Duke Street gallery in 1967 together with Peter Blake, Jann Haworth and Colin Self. I suppose the paintbox was on show there and Blake acquired it. Evans had Blake write the portrait credits on a card and he designed the paint tubes creating a typeface reminiscent of the one Windsor & Newton used on their paint tubes. Once again, Gavin Cochrane photographed the paintbox at his studio with Blake and Evans in attendance.

The ”Face Dances” album has become a classic Who album and has been reissued several  times. The 2021 reissue included four prints of the cover portraits.

One of the limited edition prints.

The prints included in the 2021 re-issue of Face Dances.