Joe Petagno

Who is Joe Petagno?

Joe Petagno is an artist known principally for creating images used on rock album covers for bands such as Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Nazareth, Sweet, Motörhead, Roy Harper, Marduk, Bal-Sagoth, Demonic and Illdisposed.

Petagno was born in Portland, Maine and left the United States in 1972. He worked with Hipgnosis before meeting Motörhead's Lemmy in 1975, he designed "War-Pig" for the band's Motörhead album and has continued to design the majority of the album and single sleeve covers for the band. Petagno refers to Motörhead's mascot as The Bastard. Joe Petagno came with the concept after studying skulls of wild boars, gorillas and dogs.

He is also known for his science fiction book covers, notably for the Corgi SF Collector's Library edition of Ray Bradbury's The Silver Locusts aka The Martian Chronicles.

He also did non-heavy metal album covers. When Graeme Edge left The Moody Blues he teamed up with Adrian Gurvitz to form The Graeme Edge Band. Their two releases Kick Off Your Muddy Boots released on the Decca subsidiary label Threshold released in 1975 as a gatefold depicted a rider on horseback in a desert coming across a dead man in American Western-style garb and even included a rendition of the Threshold swooshing face icon. Paradise Ballroom issued in 1977 was also illustrated by Petagno, this time depicting a dancing woman using mainly blues.