The photograph became familiar to millions when the album topped the charts in 1999 and her face was plastered on billboards up and down Britain, and it is arresting for a particular reason. There, in front of the photographer Scarlet Page – the daughter of Jimmy Page – she would kiss a young male model for the cover of the Stereophonics’ Performance and Cocktails album (pictured above). Our young brunette was headed for a football pitch under the Westway, the bleak elevated stretch of the A40 in west London. Me and my boyfriend had been up all night on absinthe and opium, and that faraway look in my eyes couldn’t have been achieved any other way! I feel like the world’s biggest porn star”. Spencer Elden, who was the Nirvana baby and is now a teenager, recently said he finds it “kind of creepy that many people have seen me naked. Years later, they often have mixed feelings about the appropriation of their identity in the name of rock’n’roll. These people are the modern equivalent of the Mona Lisa and the Laughing Cavalier: characters we know well for their appearance but whose identities are often shrouded in mystery. Today she would join an exclusive and mysterious club, whose members include the swimming baby on Nirvana’s Nevermind album, the glamorous girls on the Roxy Music sleeves, and the burning businessman on Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. She was about to become a recording star, of a sort: one of those famous-and-yet-unfamous people who adorn the covers of rock and pop albums. She rummaged on the bedroom floor for some clothes, put on some eye make-up and jumped into a waiting car.
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A beautiful but bleary-eyed 23-year-old brunette model hauled herself out of bed, remembering that she had an appointment to face the camera – and to kiss a stranger. On a chilly autumn day in 1998, an alarm clock shattered the peace of a flat in Twickenham. Who’s the burning man on that Pink Floyd album cover? Who’s the model on Roxy Music ’s Stranded? Tony Barrell tracks down some of the mysterious people who have adorned great album sleeves THE SUNDAY TIMES, 2007