Mariora Goschen: The Young Girl Featured on the Controversial “Blind Faith” Album Cover in 1969Sheesh, Clapton could have bought her a horse with his immense fortune!
August 29, 2018The cover art was created by photographer Bob Seidemann, a personal friend and former flatmate of Clapton’s who is primarily known for his photos of Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead. In the mid-1990s, in an advertising circular intended to help sell lithographic reprints of the famous album cover, he explained his thinking behind the image:
“I could not get my hands on the image until out of the mist a concept began to emerge. To symbolize the achievement of human creativity and its expression through technology a spaceship was the material object. To carry this new spore into the universe, innocence would be the ideal bearer, a young girl, a girl as young as Shakespeare’s Juliet. The spaceship would be the fruit of the tree of knowledge and the girl, the fruit of the tree of life.
“The spaceship could be made by Mick Milligan, a jeweler at the Royal College of Art. The girl was another matter. If she were too old it would be cheesecake, too young and it would be nothing. The beginning of the transition from girl to woman, that is what I was after. That temporal point, that singular flare of radiant innocence. Where is that girl?”
Seidemann wrote that he approached a girl reported to be 14 years old on the London Underground about modeling for the cover, and eventually met with her parents, but that she proved too old for the effect he wanted. Instead, the model he used was her younger sister Mariora Goschen, who was reported to be 11 years old. Mariora initially requested a horse as a fee but was instead paid £40.
Bizarre rumors both contributed to and were fueled by the controversy, including that the girl was Baker’s daughter or was a groupie kept as a slave by the band. The image, titled “Blind Faith” by Seidemann, became the inspiration for the name of the band itself, which had been unnamed when the artwork was commissioned. According to Seidemann: “It was Eric who elected to not print the name of the band on the cover. The name was instead printed on the wrapper, when the wrapper came off, so did the type.” This had been done previously for the Rolling Stones’ 1964 debut album, the Beatles’ albums Rubber Soul in 1965 and Revolver in 1966, and Traffic’s self-titled 1968 debut album.
In 1994, more than a quarter of a century after her one-off photo shoot, a 36 years old Mariora Goschen said in an interview: “The nudity didn’t bother me. I hardly noticed I had breasts. Life was far too hectic. I was mad about animals and much taken up with family and friends. But now, when people tell me they can remember what they were doing when they first saw the cover, and the effect it had on them, I’m thrilled to bits.” She added, “By the way, I’m still waiting for Eric Clapton to ring me about the horse.”
Fascinating story. Thank you.
Thanks for that background story! :-)