Stanley Kubrick and me: designing the poster for A Clockwork Orange

Philip Castle’s airbrushed art features on album covers for David Bowie and Pulp but his lurid imagery for A Clockwork Orange remains his most infamous work – he remembers his friendship with the director

Philip Castle shows me into his front room to see the naked woman on her knees next to the family piano. The plaster sculpture is battered and fragile and turning yellow with time, but I would recognise those nipples anywhere. This is one of the nude statues that serve as furniture – and serve up drinks from their breasts – in the sinister, darkly funny opening scenes of Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film A Clockwork Orange. “There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening.”

In Kubrick’s pessimistic parody of British youth culture, Malcolm McDowell’s futuristic ultraviolent mod antihero sets the scene in voiceover as the camera pans back from him and his bowler-hatted, white-codpieced droogs, taking in one obscene statue after another, just like this one I viddied with my own eyes, O my brothers, in Castle’s house.

Kubrick sent people to the cinemas where A Clockwork Orange was showing to make sure the screens were clean

Related: Tune in, freak out: take Latin mass with Stanley Kubrick and 114 radios

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