My Famous Dad

At the weekend I got a gleeful call from my father, telling me about the car full of people who'd turned up at the house asking for his autograph. This confuses me. As far as I'm aware, my dad — who spends most of his time 'pottering in the garden' — isn't famous.

Oh god, I thought, he must have been on some horrible reality TV show without any of us knowing. Ack! There is nothing worse than reality TV. If he had really wanted to parade all his character flaws in front of potentially millions of viewers, why didn't he just start a blog?

"No, no," he said. "It was about the record covers."

Hmm. Way before my dad was making illustrated guides to walks around rural Wales, he worked on record covers with trendy London-based art studio Hipgnosis — back in the seventies, of course, when album art 'actually meant something'. This was a very exciting claim-to-fame for me as a teenager, especially when everyone at school went through their compulsory five-minute Pink Floyd phase and I was able to say 'my dad worked on that record', giving a little shrug as if I didn't care — but of course really I did.

Last month, Classic Rock magazine published an article about some of these covers, including one by a band called Wishbone Ash picturing my famous dad standing on a cliff dressed in some kind of surreal roman soldier outfit. "To this day," stated the article. "The identity of the person wearing it remains unknown." Of course, as soon as one of his old friends from the seventies read this he immediately sent it to my father, who immediately sent a letter to Classic Rock magazine setting them straight...

"I am pleased to be able to tell you that it was me in the cloak and helmet. I was working for Hipgnosis at the time and we all shot off to the south of France for the photosession. In the uncropped version you can just see my trainers sticking out from the bottom of the cloak. We also took a large sword with us that was used in Polanski's Macbeth but in the rush to catch the train north we left it on the clifftop. We heard later that he was very displeased and wanted it paid for. Funnily enough as we were setting off from London we took out a 10p insurance ticket with British Rail so they ended up settling what I think was a rather large bill."

...which immediately prompted a car full of aging rockers to turn up on my parents' little Welsh doorstep waving their vinyl about and demanding autographs.

The best thing about the article, though, is that it says the artwork was George Lucas's inspiration for the Darth Vader character in Star Wars. Oh. My. God. My dad is Darth Vader? Does this make me Luke Skywalker?

"So did you invite them in then?" I asked him, wondering enviously what it must be like to have a car full of people from Birmingham ask for your autograph.

"No," said Darth Vader. "Of course not. I had gardening to be getting on with."