Pete Townshend – Let My Love Open The Door

‘Let My Love Open The Door’ was the second single from Pete Townshend’s 1980 solo album Empty Glass.

For the cover design I used a black-and-white photograph of Pete by Brian Aris and hand-coloured it using my DeVilbiss airbrush and Dr. Ph. Martin colour dyes, and then cut the figure out using a Swann-Morton surgical scalpel and applied it to the illustrated background. That’s how it was done back then in the days before the invention of personal computers and Adobe Photoshop. The background was drawn using a Rotring pen and then the colour airbrushed in. The walls to left and right of Pete were created using dolls-house wallpaper which I collaged onto the artwork.

‘Let My Love Open The Door’ was a pretty good hit single for Pete, managing to make the top ten in the US and Canada. He still sings it in solo shows and Roger Daltrey has also recorded it as a charity single and performs it in his solo shows too. In 1996 Pete released a re-mix of the song as a bonus track on a ‘best of’ album and this remix, named the ‘e.cola mix’ appeared in the 1997 John Cusack film Grosse Pointe Blank and the subsequent soundtrack album.

In 2023 Universal Music reissued the e.cola mix of ‘Let My Love Open The Door’ as a digital single available on all streaming platforms – Spotify, Apple Music, Prime Music etc. and for this I designed an updated cover for the song. This time round, I had no need for the scalpels, the airbrush or the dyes.