Hallelujah Trial - Sleeve Design
Hallelujah Trial · VIO-088 · The sleeve
Of the Rose
The front of Hallelujah Trial's debut album carries a rose from a herbal printed in Cologne in 1568. It's been turned into negative and John Canning Yates painted its five blooms by hand at his table. Finding it took Tom Roberts and John longer than making the record.
Tom Roberts had roses saved in folders. Hundreds and hundreds of them by his count and every one came with a problem attached. Some were under copyright and some would've cost more than a pressing of 250 records can carry. They were running out of time to decide and whatever rose they picked, somebody had almost certainly used it already.
"I had it the wrong way round," Tom says. "I'd assumed the sleeve was the last job on a record, the bit you sort out once the important work is done. On this record it took longer than the actual recording."
The recording wasn't quick either. Tom and John had recorded hours of songs in John's front room and got stuck. It was John who suggested taking them to the Gustav Adolf Church on Park Lane in Liverpool, the Scandinavian seamen's church W. D. Caroë built in red brick in 1883 and 1884. Tom decided before they went in that whatever they got there would be the record, mistakes and all. John produced and mixed it and Jason Mitchell mastered it.
Flowers in the songs
Tom's been writing flowers into his songs for years. Side A of the album opens with 'On Each Branch' and goes straight into 'Flowers In The Ruin'. 'Rain For Roses' turns up late on side B. He cheerfully admits he has no idea what he's going to write about next.
They tried the obvious direction first. Robert Mapplethorpe gave most of the 1975 cover of Patti Smith's Horses over to the white wall behind her. They wanted one bloom with that much space around it. Every version they made came back looking like a cliché of romance. That was never what this record is.
A herbal
John found it in the end, after what he calls "far too long looking at roses". They'd ruled out anything modern and anything conventionally romantic, which pushed them towards botanical illustration. By a route John can't now retrace, that led to a sixteenth-century herbal by William Turner in the collection of the RHS Lindley Library.
Turner was from Morpeth in Northumberland, a physician and a clergyman who went into exile twice over religion and ended up Dean of Wells. His A New Herball came out in three parts, the first in London in 1551 and the second and third from Arnold Birckman's press in Cologne in 1562 and 1568. It's the first original herbal written in English. Turner chose English deliberately so that apothecaries and ordinary readers could use it. He fully expected to be accused of giving away knowledge that belonged to the profession. The rose on the sleeve comes from the entry Of the Rose.
What struck John first was how plain it was. "There was something slightly strange and imperfect about it." Turner's picture shows the whole plant, roots and thorns and stems and leaves and flowers drawn at the same flat weight. A herbal was a working book for someone who had to find the right plant in a hedgerow and make a medicine out of it, so the root needed to be as legible as the bloom. It looks like a rose taken apart and laid out for inspection and a Tudor apothecary would've wanted exactly that.
"Roses, flowers, branches, growth, ruin," John says. "All those things were already there in the songs. The picture just seemed to pull them all together visually."
Most of the pictures in Turner's herbal were copied from Leonhart Fuchs's De historia stirpium, printed in Basel by Michael Isingrin in 1542. Fuchs paid a painter called Albrecht Meyer to draw each plant, Heinrich Füllmaurer to copy the drawings onto woodblocks and Veit Rudolf Speckle to cut them. He put self-portraits of all three on the final leaf of the book. Hardly any illustrated book of the period named its artists at all. The printout John worked on still has the Latin name Rosa across the top. So the rose on the front of VIO-088 most likely started as one of Meyer's drawings in the early 1540s. Since then it's been traced and cut and copied for Turner, coloured by some owner's hand, photographed, printed out, painted over and turned into negative.
Into negative
Then Tom started messing about with the files he was getting together for our designer Pascal Blua and inverted the image for fun. The line work dropped into negative and the whole thing went dark. It put him in mind of Unknown Pleasures.
The stacked lines on that sleeve are radio pulses from the pulsar CP 1919. In 1970 the radio astronomer Harold Craft plotted them for his doctoral thesis using data from Arecibo. The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy reproduced the plot in 1977. That's where Bernard Sumner famously found it. Peter Saville reversed the plot to white on black, against the band's stated preference for the original black on white, because he thought it looked better dark. Tom did the same thing to a woodcut from 1568 with nobody asking him to and sent it to John for a laugh.
"I loved it," John says. "We both thought it all had a bit of a Joy Division feel to it. Something had changed. It went from being this old botanical picture we both really liked to something where we both just thought, yeah, that's the sleeve."
Five blooms
From there it was a matter of taking things out. The copy they'd started from had been coloured by hand in greens and reds a very long time ago, the way those books often were. The green went completely. John kept the roses and painted them himself with a brush and a pot of red on a printout at his table. There are five blooms on the finished sleeve and you can still see where the bristles dragged.
Seven words
The brief to Pascal ran to seven words. "Pascal, work your magic. Make it beautiful."
Pascal says he was looking for something timeless, a historical evocation of botany as the science of living things. He set the type in Garamond. Claude Garamond was cutting type in Paris from the 1530s until he died in 1561, a year before the second part of Turner's herbal came off the press in Cologne, so the lettering on the sleeve and the plant under it come from the same few decades. The sleeve is card so the ink has paper to sit in and the thing feels organic in the hand. Every lyric on the inner sleeve is in Tom's handwriting for the same reason.
All three of them named Talk Talk's Spirit of Eden as their reference without comparing notes. They liked the simplicity of the 1988 sleeve and the inner sleeve especially.
A rosebush against the church
The launch has artwork of its own. Pascal drew the Scandinavian church from a photograph and grew a rosebush up the side of it in the building's shadow. He calls it an allegory for the birth of the album. He submitted one proposal and everyone accepted it on the spot.
The album is out on Saturday 17 October as twelve songs on 180g vinyl in an edition of 250 copies. It won't be going on the streaming services. That evening Tom and John play it in the Gustav Adolf Church where it was recorded and everyone who comes is handed a copy with John's five red blooms on the front.
- Release
- Hallelujah Trial, Hallelujah Trial · VIO-088
- Format
- LP, 180g vinyl, 250 copies. Vinyl only.
- Released
- Saturday 17 October 2026
- Sleeve
- Pascal Blua, after Of the Rose from William Turner's A New Herball, 1568. Roses painted by John Canning Yates.
- Recorded
- Gustav Adolf Church, Park Lane, Liverpool. Produced and mixed by John Canning Yates, mastered by Jason Mitchell.
- Launch
- The Scandinavian Church, 138 Park Lane, Liverpool L1 8HG. Saturday 17 October, doors 8.00pm.