In the Soviet underground, album art wasn’t just for show—it was a key part of getting music out there. Striking covers and band portraits helped bootleg reels travel, stick in people’s minds, and spark word-of-mouth. Usov was one of the main people responsible for shaping that visual language.

He was a close friend and collaborator of the Leningrad Rock Club crowd, and he photographed and designed most of Aquarium’s and Zoopark’s releases recorded at Andrei Tropillo’s AnTrop studio. Before the Rock Club was even a thing, Usov was jamming with future Aquarium members and capturing the scene with a practical, hands-on approach that matched the era’s all-analog limitations.

Early years

Usov’s musical awakening hit in the mid-1950s when he caught Finnish radio and heard “Rock Around the Clock.” Back in ’58, his grandpa gave him a Lubitel camera—the USSR’s version of the Voigtländer Brillant—and he got into serious experimentation. He studied French and linguistics but wanted to be a musician, so he tried violin until an injury forced him to stop. Then, at 14, he taught himself seven-string guitar. “I tuned it like a six-string and played solos. I didn’t know chords, so I played it like a violin,” he recalls. Later on, he picked up the flute (Jethro Tull was a big inspiration for him).

He got the nickname “Willi” while he was in the military and used it professionally to avoid putting his full name on covers (remember, his work was illegal!). After performing in an army ensemble, he formed a band with the knowingly absurd title “The Association of Those Mourning the Winter Holidays,” which in winter flipped to “…the Summer Holidays.” The group was around until 1978 and included some of the scene’s most prominent members, like Dyúsha Romanov and Seva Gakkel, at different times. The steady gig income funded a growing collection of western LPs, and with it—an education in sleeve design.

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Design philosophy & influences

For Usov, good art depends on craft. He admired sleeves that made technical choices work hard for meaning and mood. Among his touchstones:

• Simon & Garfunkel – Bridge Over Troubled Water: “cheeky, grainy, hyper-enlarged—brilliantly done.”
• U2 – The Joshua Tree (Anton Corbijn): “a photographer with a real black; that deep, impenetrable black stunned me.”

DIY sleeves in a no-design environment

Back in the 1970s, when the USSR was still around, top-notch graphic design and photography were mostly in foreign magazines, not local ones. Usov subscribed to or hunted down England, Nous les garçons et les filles, America, and others. He’d often take clippings of logos, ads, and layouts from Hungarian, German, Polish, and Czech magazines and stick them on Melodiya sleeves, then seal everything under film. It was a practical solution and a visual manifesto: if the system wouldn’t provide modern design, the underground would make it.

Aquarium, Zoopark, and AnTrop

Usov’s sleeves for Aquarium featured surreal, graphic, and staged imagery, paying homage to Angus McBean and Storm Thorgerson without outright copying them. Titles and visuals were added after the record was tracked, and they were sometimes random at first, then they got more in sync with the music.

Boris Grebenshchikov got Usov into the heart of Leningrad’s rock scene. There was a big book of LP-sized cover reproductions that was passed around among friends (think Grateful Dead-level iconography). Along with foreign magazines, it gave Usov a solid foundation in pacing, grid, and sequence.

When Grebenshchikov and Mike Naumenko decided to record the acoustic set “All Brothers Are Sisters” (1978), they asked Usov to create a proper reel-box design, not just a title scribble — they were the first musicians in the USSR who wanted a specific album cover!

He did a sunset shoot with a bronze Buddha figurine held between the two musicians in profile. It was quietly transgressive in an officially secular state, but safe within a tiny private run of 10–20 copies.

“We lived a separate cultural life,” Usov says of that late-Soviet underground. “If you wanted to, you could avoid the ‘official’ Soviet world entirely.”

In 1982, he also made the first logo for the Antrop studio.

Learning pro technique by necessity

Usov used to be an airport mechanic, and then he got a staff photography job at an institute, where he got access to professional gear and materials. He was a master of color printing, large-format, and flat films. He even repurposed industrial black-and-white stock—meant for high-contrast technical work—into subtle halftone masters by controlling chemistry. He made master transparencies combining images and text, then printed small runs on 13 cm reel boxes (slightly larger than a CD). When LPs were later issued, those masters scaled up cleanly.

Each sleeve was made by hand. First, the master was printed onto photographic paper. Then, it was developed, dried, trimmed, and mounted. All of this was done at home, in a closet, without ventilation. No computers; just cut, paste, reshoot, repeat. It was like endurance art and production design all in one.

“We wanted to make rock seriously—music and presentation both. We overdid it a bit,” Usov jokes. “Now those underground reels sit on my shelves as heavy German-pressed vinyl.”

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Beyond the Rock Club

Usov kept a broad practice. In the 1990s, he worked in film (casting stills, unit photography), did commercial shoots, and in 1995 mounted what was billed as Russia’s largest photo exhibition (488 prints). He documented Paul McCartney’s visit to Russia in the 2000s, and recently he’s been doing books, lectures, and workshops.

He’s not tied to any specific tools. A lot of his iconic photos were taken with a cheap Lubitel camera, and some of the stuff he’s shown recently was shot with a basic digital compact. This shows that the way you do things and what you’re trying to achieve is more important than the gear you use.

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© 2025 Artur Netsvetaev, interview with Andrei Usov