Bring Me The Horizon Frontman Oliver Sykes Accuses Coldplay of Ripping Off Their Cover Art
So in 2013, Bring Me The Horizon released Sempiternal, which had this cover art:
The design at its center is a geometric pattern called ‘flower of life.’
Recently, Coldplay announced their new album A Head Full of Dreams, which includes the following art:
Interesting. There are obviously similarities here — the concentric circles, the oval-like shapes in the middle — but overall they seem to be very different interpretations of a pattern.
But according to BMTH frontman Oliver Sykes, there’s no coincidence in the similarities. Last month, Sykes took a seemingly playful dig at the popstars:
https://twitter.com/olobersyko/status/660036529209933824
Kind of funny, actually! Or would have been, had he left it at that.
But in a recent interview with NME, he took it one step further, claiming that Coldplay must have known about Sempiternal while creating their own album cover:
“They might not have known at first, but obviously if you Google ‘flower of life’ the first thing that comes up is ‘Bring Me The Horizon – Sempiternal‘. Someone’s gonna have said something to them, so whether it was intentional or not, it is the same.
“At the end of the day it’s not our symbol, it’s a very old symbol. It’s kind of cool really, that a band that big are also gonna be sharing that with people”.
This all feels like Sykes is reaching a little hard. First of all, his claim about Googling ‘flower of life’ isn’t true. Second, the covers are significantly different in so many ways that whether or not it’s the same symbol, it’s an entirely different version of it (I mean, how many different pentagrams have bands used?). Third, while Bring Me The Horizon are a huge band, especially in Britain, I’m not sure they’d be on Coldplay’s radar. Coldplay are a massive pop outfit whose lead singer bangs superstars–those kinds of guys live in their own world. If I had to guess, the Coldplay dudes came upon the flower of life pattern during some sort of soul-searching trip or personal meditation.
Finally, while Sykes admits he doesn’t own the pattern, he does take a moment to express his excitement that his band have used the same image as a band as big as Coldplay. The thirst feels a little strong with this guy.
We’ll see if Coldplay responds at all, though we doubt they will. Meanwhile, the dudes in BMTH might want to change their most recent cover art for fear that they’ll get called out by Smalls, Tufnel, and St. Hubbins.
