Country Life Girls - Fri 1st Feb

Country Life Girls
02 January 1991

From Q Magazine:
They're not in the band. They're not the band's manager. Mostly, though not always, they're in no way related the band, yet they've somehow snuck on to some of the most famous album covers ever( So who, to coin a phrase, the hell are these anonymous icons? How did they get these timeless gigs? And what are they doing now? Martin Aston meets the anonymous models.

COUNTRY LIFE
COVER STARS:

Evaline Seelig
and
Constance Lantemenn

'That sleeve was such an accident," explains Evaline Seelig, referring back to when she and her equally scantily-clad best friend, Constance Lantemann ("the very brutal~looking one to the right of the photo," the latter giggles) had adorned Roxy's fourth album. The pair had had a chance meeting with Roxy Music mainman Bryan Ferry and his creative director Anthony Price in Portugal. '~We were on holiday there at my parents' summer house," Evaline remembers, "where a friend ran a bar and disco. We'd taken him some Roxy Music albums to play there, and he
started looking at them, and said, Re's here, you know'. you have to meet him, and he introduced us to Bryan."
There was already common ground. Roxy PR Simon Puxley knew the girls as he was also working for Can guitarist Michael Karoli, Constance's brother and Evaline's boyfriend. "Brian liked our shoulders and German outlook," Constance picks up the story, "so they proposed, just for fun, to make this photo session. We didn't think it would actually be used!" The creative angle, she continues, "was meant to be an ironic version of the magazine Country Life, with two ladies being surprised in a delicate situation. We didn't talk much about it, we just had to look weird and surprised."
So did the American retail trade, who decided that if the flimsy, see-through knickers weren't enough, the possibility that Bvaline was in self-abusing mode was beyond the moral pale. The album was subsequently released Stateside under a green wrap. "People thought we were lying down and masturbating but that was never the intention!" shrieks Evaline. "Neither did we choose the photo, but Bryan did ask us if we were d'accord with it. We didn't think it was scandalous anyway."
Both agree that the cover wasn't one of Roxy's best; in fact, they don't especially like the finished result "I didn't even recognise myself under all that make-up," Constance complains. But the music is understandably special to them: "Some songs, like The Thrill Of It All, were worked out on the piano at my parents' house," Constance says. 'We also did the German translation for Bittersweet there."
After art school, Evaline lived in London for three years, teaching at a Berlitz language school and working in a design studio. She moved back to Cologne, got married, and is currently studying to be an art historian as well as teaching art.
Married and a mother of two girls, ages 10 and 13, Lantermann has been a qualified psychotherapist for the last 15 years. How would she analyse the sleeve now?
"Impulsive behaviour, perhaps, or lustbestimmt, the lust principle," she decides. Did her children know about their mother's 'lusty' past? "They've seen the cover, and the elder one recognised it, saying, That one looks like Mummy and Evaline, but I denied it," she laughs. "I doubt that
I'll deny it forever though."

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