This article originally appeared in a 2010 issue of Revolver Magazine.
Swedish artist Thomas Holm has done a total of nine album covers for Danish metal shrieker and face-paint enthusiast King Diamond, but the pair’s longstanding creative partnership happened completely by accident. “A colleague of mine was commissioned to paint the cover for Mercyful Fate’s Melissa album back in ’83, but he ran out of time and asked me to do it,” Holm tells Revolver. “The band liked it—being a very dark and aggressive-looking image, it worked well with the music—and I was asked to follow it up with Don’t Break the Oath the next year.”
By 1985, Diamond had temporarily dissolved Mercyful Fate and formed his eponymous band with guitarist Andy LaRocque, future Motörhead drummer Mikkey Dee, and Mercyful Fate members Michael Denner (guitar) and Timi Hansen (bass). Holm got the call to create the cover art for the band’s 1986 debut, Fatal Portrait, and its 1987 follow-up, Abigail, an elaborate concept album Diamond had conceived. “King wanted a different approach than the earlier covers I had done—something from the story,” Holm says. “In my recollection, he came up with the idea for the artwork.”
As the Abigail story goes, a young couple—Miriam Natias and Jonathan La’Fey (no doubt a reference to Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey; Diamond is a longtime member of the Church)—move into an ancient mansion that La’Fey has inherited. On their first night there, La’Fey meets the ghost of Count La’Fey, an ancestor, who shows him a casket containing the Count’s stillborn child, Abigail. The Count then tells Jonathan that Miriam is pregnant, and that the unborn child is inhabited by the spirit of Abigail. As it turns out, the Count’s wife had been pregnant with an illegitimate child, so the Count threw his wife down the stairs, killing her and the unborn baby. When it becomes clear that Miriam is pregnant, Jonathan considers throwing her down the stairs, but Miriam turns the tables and ends up pushing Jonathan down the stairs instead. She then delivers Abigail, only to die in childbirth.
It’s unclear if the horse-drawn hearse on the album’s cover (driven by two men in top hats, the preferred headgear of Diamond himself) is carrying the corpse of Jonathan or Miriam—or is on its way to the house to pick up one of the two—but in any case Holm was forced to complete the 20×20-inch acrylic in record time. “I finished the cover in a couple of hours one night because it had to ship to Roadrunner Records the next day,” he recalls. “The guy I shared a studio with at the time helped me paint it, using acrylic colors, which dry quicker than the oil paint I usually work with. When the sketch was done we put the canvas on a table and painted it at the same time, switching sides occasionally so that one of us wouldn’t have to paint upside-down the whole time. We also used an airbrush to fill larger areas like the sky. It is by far the fastest I have finished a painting.”
In 2001, Holm was asked to create a sequel painting for King Diamond’s 2002 album, Abigail II: The Revenge. “The result was a painting on the same theme but from a different angle and coloring,” Holm says. “This had the same feel to it, but King wasn’t happy with it and settled for another image by another artist.”
Unfortunately, the whereabouts of the original Abigail painting are unknown. “In those days I used a photographer and sent a slide to the printer’s, but in this case there wasn’t time and I had to send the original,” Holm says. “I never got it back, so maybe some guy at the company still has it pinned to his bathroom wall.”