Mick Milligan

Mick Milligan, also known as "Micko," is a British jeweler and miniature sculptor who primarily worked in Art Nouveau and Art Deco styles. He designed jewelry for Liberty & Co. high-end department stores and collaborated with fashion designer Zandra Rhodes; Milligan is best known for sculpting a prop spaceship model that appeared in 1969 on the controversial front cover of [url=https://discogs.com/artist/269050]Blind Faith[/url]'s self-titled LP. In December 2014, the model went for £7,500 at the Bonhams 'Entertainment Memorabilia' auction in Knightsbridge, London.

Milligan began making jewelry in the early 1960s while living in Paris; after returning to England, Mick honed his technical skills at [url=https://discogs.com/label/361247]Sir John Cass College[/url] before entering the Royal College Of Art. He was a close friend of Eric Clapton, who purchased his RCA diploma piece, a ruby-sapphire-diamond enameled pendant that appeared in [url=https://discogs.com/label/1038271]Vogue[/url] December 1972 issue (photographed by Lester Bookbinder); Clapton gifted it to his wife, Pattie Boyd, and commissioned more jewelry from Milligan in the early 1980s (two pieces sold at Christie's "Pattie Boyd Collection" 2024 auctions.)

The infamous 69841 LP artwork, released in August 1969 by Polydor in the UK and ATCO Records in the USA, was created by music photographer Bob Seidemann (1941—2017), another of Clapton's close friends. According to his artistic vision, a shiny metallic spaceship was a material object, a "tree of knowledge" fruit symbolizing the "achievement of human creativity and its expression through technology." Carrying it would be a "naked young girl of [url=https://discogs.com/artist/348179]Shakespeare[/url]'s Juliet age," in Bob's words, which precisely captured the "beginning of the transition to a woman." She would symbolize the "tree of life" fruit, an innocent bearer of "this new spore into the universe." According to Ginger Baker, however, who summarized Bob's sophisticated concept much blunter, the band mostly welcomed a perfect opportunity to put a "young naked chick holding a winged phallus" on the album. Seidemann immediately thought of Micko Milligan, soon-to-be Royal College of Art graduate, and suggested that Polydor, the band's label, commission the aspiring jeweler to design and mold the spaceship; he made it from wood painted in high-gloss silver lacquer.

After the photoshoot with 11-year-old Mariora Goschen (b. 1957), who ended up posing for Seidemann by sheer coincidence (Bob planned to photograph Mariora's teen sister at first), the spaceship appeared as a stage prop during the band's historic first concert. In early June 1969, shortly before the announced album release, Blind Faith played a free show at London's Hyde Park, which attracted a 150,000+ crowd due to numerous ads in major UK publications, like [url=https://discogs.com/label/15335]NME[/url] and Top Of The Pops Magazine. The spaceship sat on Steve Winwood's keyboards, as seen on the [url=https://discogs.com/master/1075795]DVD concert film[/url] released in 2005. After the show, Milligan gifted the "winged phallus" to Ginger Baker (1939—2019); the band's drummer kept it for many years, subsequently passing the memorabilia to his first wife, [url=https://discogs.com/artist/2392388]Elizabeth A. Baker[/url] (1939—2014).