Things did not start so smoothly, however, as having received the first email from the production company, Dameon dismissed it as spam until they called him later directly. He had initially been proposed by an old friend that he had not seen for over 40 years but was aware of his work over the years, and as they were looking for an artist who specialized in socio-political commentary, Dameon’s work seemed to fit the bill nicely. The fact that Dameon was born less than a mile away from Van Morrison in East Belfast was probably a deciding factor. “The album is about loss of freedoms, government
control, which is up my street, not in any conspiratorial way, but in a factual way, where there is a smokescreen of supposed democracy, which is not always the case across the globe.” Without hearing any of the tracks but knowing the title was What’s It Gonna Take? , he had a pretty good idea of what might work as far as imagery. But what he focused on in the artwork was this illusion of government control. Dameon sought to paraphrase Tony Benn, a late lamented Labour minister in the UK Government during the 1960s and 70s. “An educated, healthy, and confident nation is harder to govern.” He is also quoted
as saying, “I think there are two ways in which people are controlled. First of all, frighten people and secondly, demoralize them.” Having had a few buzz words thrown his way by the production company initially, he had a good idea of the message that he wanted to get across. “I remembered the propaganda movies and posters from the 1950s; I was always a fan of early sci-fi, and Invasion of the Bodysnatchers , for example, was a direct reference to the ‘reds under the beds’ and McCarthyism of this time. The existential threat that didn’t really exist in any meaningful way.”
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