I thought you voted for the UK cover art (the one with the naked ladies, in my opinion the most iconic one), so I replaced the info about the photographer. It was Karl Ferris who shot the picture of the US cover.Holden wrote: ↑Sun Sep 20, 2020 2:21 am 136 | The Jimi Hendrix Experience | Electric Ladyland
Cover — David King
Photography By [Cover] — David Montgomery
Did you fix the image size with Live in Phoenix tip or not? I'm asking, because I think the images are too small for a visuals based poll like this. I know loading a page full of big pictures can be cumbersome, but these are so small that the beauty and sometimes the whole point of the covers are lost. There is no way someone can guess why Pure Comedy is here with the help of the current picture size.
The idea is the earlier covers are smaller than the higher ranking ones, but if you think they are too small I can change thisRob wrote: ↑Sun Sep 20, 2020 7:06 pmDid you fix the image size with Live in Phoenix tip or not? I'm asking, because I think the images are too small for a visuals based poll like this. I know loading a page full of big pictures can be cumbersome, but these are so small that the beauty and sometimes the whole point of the covers are lost. There is no way someone can guess why Pure Comedy is here with the help of the current picture size.
Otherwise a good presentation and I appreciate the credits to the designers.
"This photo captures Björk at the start of her solo venture, and is the most stark and simple of her career." (Harriet Gibsone for The Guardian)
"The ubiquitous cover art by Anton Corbijn perfectly symbolized the sound — the image of a flower but filtered to leave only black and red. Gothic and pretty." (Ron Hart for Billboard)
"A mysterious, striking monochrome image — a tilted grid of imperfect white dots against a black background. As it turns out, the pattern is from a photograph the group took at the Mexico City airport." (Douglas Wolk)
"The car, a Lancia Flavia, was owned by the designer Storm Thorgerson of Hipgnosis. It was sprayed with water from a hose (…). Originally in black and white, the artwork was then hand-coloured and each droplet highlight patiently scraped clean with a scalpel." (petergabrielstore)
"In the album's title track, John dreams of returning home to the countryside (…). In the illustration, Elton John steps through a poster onto the Yellow Brick Road in his typically extravagant attire, leaving the hustle and bustle of the city for the peaceful escape of the country." (Juxtapoz)
"The single eyes of the two faces looking at each other become the two eyes of a single face looking at you, the viewer. It was intended that the viewer should not see both at the same time. One saw the single face or the two profiles. If one saw both it was alternating, like an optical illusion." (Storm Thorgerson for 'Mind Over Matter- The Images of Pink Floyd')
"Nagel captures brilliantly a look that not only screams 1982 but also says News Romantic and Duran Duran. With her perfect features, lipgloss, huge earrings and flowing clothes, the Rio in the illustration could easily have stepped straight out of a Duran Duran video." (simplymarvellousmusic blog)
"Photographer Susan Titelman is married to Ry Cooder, & her shots of him show up on many of his albums. She is probably best-known for the Havana photo, used on the front & back covers of Buena Vista Social Club." (Deny Fear on Twitter)
"The crying child betrays the emotion and noise just being held back by Gira and Swans on "To Be Kind." The peaceful, beatific moments give way to primal noise as the tracks buckle under the weight of basic human emotion, but there's also a certain tenderness at play on the record and — admittedly to a lesser extent — in the artwork." (Andrew Hannah for The Line of Best Fit)
"All five of the covers for Johnny Cash's (…) American series are fantastic (…). However, the coolest is for "IV: The Man Comes Around," as it juxtaposes that strength with the visible weakness of the Man In Black himself: nearing death and reflecting on his life he looks downward and prepares to fade to black himself." (Brad Rosenberg for Do YouRemember)
"The spare sound, impressionistic introspection and consciously morose mood of "Seventeen Seconds" is perfectly captured by the blurred, anonymous, fragment-of-a-rainy-afternoon cover art, created by photographer Andrew Douglas." (Damien Love blog)
"The album's cover is a photo of a Komondor, a rare Hungarian breed of dog with a heavy, corded coat. The original photo was shot by canine photographer Joan Ludwig (1914–2004) for the July 1977 issue of the American Kennel Club's Gazette." (Wikipedia)
"An image of racing greyhounds from a sports picture library was eventually chosen as the iconic final design. "Bob Thomas (photographer) couldn't believe we wanted it for a record cover," recalls O'Connor. "I'm sure if he'd thought about it he'd have asked for a bit more money." (Rewind/Fast Forward blog)
"Romano combined his inspirations in a 52-by-52-inch oil painting that deifies Melville's white whale, Hindu-style (…) Many of the painting's more elaborate elements, like the Japanese Hokusai wave, harpoon-wielding Indonesian puppets, and the mystical Pharos (or Lighthouse) of Alexandria—one of the original Seven Wonders of the World—aren't visible on the CD cover but appear in the booklet." (J. Bennett for Revolver)
"That's a shot Van Etten took from the passenger seat, of her friend Rebecca leaning out the window and screaming into the onrushing wind. You can't really see that she's screaming in the photo itself — for all we know, she’s leaning her head out the window, eyes closed, meditating on the feeling of the wind in her hair, in revery (…) Is she screaming out of frustration? Or catharsis? Or joy or fear?" (Ryan Leas for Stereogum)
"The cover artwork was photographed by Daniel Kramer several weeks before the recording sessions. (…) Dylan wears a Triumph motorcycle T-shirt under a blue and purple silk shirt, holding his Ray-Ban sunglasses in his right hand. Photographer Kramer commented in 2010 on the singer's expression: "He's hostile, or it's a hostile moodiness. He's almost challenging me or you or whoever's looking at it: 'What are you gonna do about it, buster?'" (Wikipedia)
"Yauch's nickname was The Techno-Wiz because he would come up with all these crazy ideas. He said, 'I heard about a camera that shoots these 360-degree photographs,' and I thought it would be cool to go down to the LES and just stand in the street and have this full gatefold with a cool view of the city. (…) I love this album cover. Jeremy Shatan helped Yauch shoot it. Even if this were from another band, I would love this album cover " (Ad-Rock for Yuxtapoz)
"The illustrations come from the mind of a 33-year-old Oslo-based illustrator, designer and comic book artist named Bendik Kaltenborn. (…) "He said he wanted a portrait," Kaltenborn remembers. "Something that played with the idea of a cheesy '70s album cover." The result is an image of Terje slouched lecherously over a piano bar with his shirt open and a Spring Break's worth of tropical drinks clustered in front of him." (Mike Powell for Resident Advisor)
"Led Zeppelin's front cover, which was chosen by Page, features a black-and-white image of the burning Hindenburg airship, photographed by Sam Shere in May 1937. (…) In 2001, Greg Kot wrote in Rolling Stone that "The cover of Led Zeppelin … shows the Hindenburg airship, in all its phallic glory, going down in flames. The image did a pretty good job of encapsulating the music inside: sex, catastrophe and things blowing up." (Wikipedia)
"This particular cover featured October 1974 Playboy Playmate of the Month Ester Cordet nude holding a large, sticky jar of honey in one hand. At the same moment, she is lasciviously swallowing a dripping spoonful of honey being held by the other hand. The inside cover photo was even more um, sticky. It shows the cover model lying on her back in the nude with honey poured all over the exposed parts of her body." (Toni Marino for Pure Music)
"The album was Townshend’s big statement about commercialisation and the demands on himself and the band to be presented as a product — and they certainly had some fun with it. Behind the bold front cover images of Pete with his Odorono deodorant and Roger Daltrey with his bathtub of baked beans, the record featured mock commercials." (Paul Sexton for UDiscover Music)
"The cover art of Autobahn has become one of Kraftwerk’s most recognizable motifs, but the famous white-on-blue convergence lines where merely an afterthought as the first edition rolled into production. Those iconic parallel stripes didn’t even appear on the original 1974 artwork by Emil Schult, although they were added to the sleeve in sticker form." (Jeremy Allen for Eye on Design)
"The album's cover, photographed by Daniel Kramer with an edge-softened lens, features Sally Grossman (wife of Dylan's manager Albert Grossman) lounging in the background. There are also artifacts scattered around the room, including LPs by the Impressions ("Keep on Pushing"), Robert Johnson ("King of the Delta Blues Singers"), Ravi Shankar ("India's Master Musician"), Lotte Lenya ("Sings Berlin Theatre Songs by Kurt Weill") and Eric Von Schmidt ("The Folk Blues of Eric Von Schmidt")." (Wikipedia)
"Andy Earl made the instantly recognisable photograph of Johnny Cash that was used on the cover of the (…) album "American Recordings." That photograph is now one of the best known images of Johnny Cash and became an instant icon. It shows Cash dressed in a long black coat, with his guitar case in front and a dog at either side, a wheat field as the backdrop and drama in the skies." (Snap Galleries)
""The Atomic Mr. Basie" was released in 1958 and was a move in a more modern musical direction by the Count and his big band. What was more modern than having a mushroom cloud on the cover?" (First Draft blog)
"The photo on the cover was of “Hood”, one of the detonations from Operation Plumbbob, a series of tests that took place in the Nevada Desert during the summer of 1957." (John Coulthart for Feuilleton)
"Manager Brian Epstein brought Robert Freeman into the Beatles' orbit after becoming enamored with his black-and-white pictures of John Coltrane. For inspiration, they showed Freeman a series of early '60s-era photos taken by their friend Astrid Kirchherr in which they were shown in half light. Freeman achieved a similar effect in the most offhanded of ways, shooting them in the dining room of a hotel in the coastal town of Bournemouth." (Nick Deriso for Ultimate Classic Rock)
"The cover features a photo of the self-immolation of Thích Quảng Đức, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, in Saigon in 1963. The monk was protesting President Ngô Đình Diệm's administration for oppressing the Buddhist religion. The photograph drew international attention and persuaded U.S. President John F. Kennedy to withdraw support for Ngô Đình Diệm's government. It was taken by Associated Press correspondent Malcolm Browne." (Wikipedia)
"Dookie's colorful, chaotic cover image is, first and foremost, a nod to the trio's Bay Area roots — the setting was modeled off Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue, with depictions of various local characters — but the collage-like image also features a few of Green Day's musical heroes. "The robed character that looks like the Mona Lisa is the woman on the cover of the first Black Sabbath album," Billie Joe Armstrong revealed." (Brittany Spanos for Rolling Stone)
"The album cover image was taken from a discarded Polaroid discovered by Vampire songwriter Rostam Batmanglij — the band was quite taken by the enigmatic look of the blonde-tressed subject. A few month after Contra’s release, the band was named in a $2 million lawsuit filed by the girl in the photo, Ann Kirsten Kennis. (…) In August 2011, Kennis dropped her suit after receiving an undisclosed settlement from the band and label." (Wook Kim for Time)
"The representation of what we all know as the 'White Album' — in a plain white gatefold sleeve, each copy with an individual serial number — was by pop artist Richard Hamilton. (…) The idea of the serial number was, said the artist, done with the intention "to create the ironic situation of a numbered edition of something like five million copies." Hamilton further commented: "Paul McCartney requested the design be as stark a contrast to Sgt Pepper's day-glo explosion as possible. He got it!" (Paul Sexton for UDiscover Music)
"This ease with which human beings can forsake reason for ignorance is perfectly reflected in 'Joy's album cover, which depicts a joyful occasion (a wedding) devolving into an animalistic brawl. "I saw the image on Instagram on Awkward Family Photos (side note: every image on this account would make a great album cover) and it summed up everything that we're about," Joe Talbot recalls" (Josh Gray for Clash)
"Two [of the men] are my uncles, to the far right, it's my grandpa, (…) And the eyes blacked out, that's for my own personal reasons, you'll probably hear about that on the album. That photo says so much about my life, and about how I was raised in Compton, and the things I've seen, just through them innocent eyes. You don't see nobody else's eyes, but you see my eyes are innocent, and tryna figure out what is goin' on." (Kendrick Lamar for Hot New Hip Hop)
"Lou Reed's blackened eyes on the cover of his "Transformer" album are vacant. Lou looks like a superstar with his powdered white face, although his star had not yet risen. (…) The iconic Mick Rock photograph is a live shot taken at Reed’s gig at London's King's Cross Cinema on July 14, 1972. The striking, slightly out of focus image became the avatar of glam rock. Lou's faraway, borderline sarcastic look portrays a prescient boredom for the fame he might possibly achieve." (Madeline Bocaro for Madelinex blog)
"The cover was designed by "Eddie and Jules + Stiff," with a photograph shot by Cameron McVey. Singer and songwriter Suggs recalls: "Because there were so many of us, it was hard to get us in the photograph for the album cover. We had to get really close together. Ian Dury’s old band Kilburn and the High Roads did the duck walk on the back of their album. So we did the same for a laugh — and it became iconic." (Bart Solenthaler for Fonts in Use)
"The photograph from which Aubrey Powell developed the cover was taken by Keiron Murphy, most notably responsible for some the most iconic images of John Lennon. (…) The iconic stance of Bolan in the photograph accentuated by the heavenly, electric glow that surrounds him seems to us to be a homage not only to T. Rex but to rock music in general." (Hypergallery)
"We got into a hospital with the camera and were filming all kinds of things. (…) I wanted to find an iron lung because of one of the song titles on the album but iron lungs are not very interesting to look at. In the room where the staff practice resuscitation were some mannequins, and one of them in particular had a facial expression like that of an android discovering for the first time the sensations of ecstasy and agony, simultaneously. And that was the cover of the record." (Stanley Donwood for Yuxtapoz)
"Though it is beset on all sides by towering waves, black clouds and a menacing leviathan lurking in the depths below, the ship at the center (…) is steady and undisturbed. Even amidst the fiercest storm, its cabins feel like home, illuminated from the inside, and from above, where the faintest hint of sunlight shines through. (…) Kilian Eng's illustration would be satisfying if only by virtue of its symmetry and use of light, but its detail and thematic alignment with Simpson's music make it an album cover to remember." (Scott Russell for Paste Magazine)
"The album's cover stands apart from many of Motown's traditional, formulaic album covers. Jim Hendin shot a series of photos of Gaye on an early Spring day in the singer's Detroit backyard, including one up-close shot of Gaye gazing into the distance with snowflakes gracing the top of his hair. (…) Thematically it joins "What's Going On" in capturing both the optimism and struggle of not only the singer but also the entire country in tumultuous times." (Yuxtapoz)
"I was heavily into Art Deco and Art Nouveau, and also into (…) psychedelic art, I combined elements of all of that. I put all their heads together and I made their hair like a design element, and the skin color was, like, solarized, so that the shadows were green and the white part was red or something (…). And that record later became like an iconic record, because people used it —you know, because it had a white background— to do their cocaine things." (Bob Pepper interviewed by Lara Kristin Herndon for Cover Our Tracks)
"The album shot of three young black men at the counter of an American diner, staring into the camera in a less than humble way was, in 1960, an open challenge to white America. As the men wait to be served —by a white attendant— the album design for drummer Max Roach's "We Insist!" clearly alludes to the sit-ins of the civil rights desegregation movement. Frank Gauna's design specifically refers to a sit-in that took place earlier in the same year, at the whites-only lunch counter at Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina." (Mike Hobart for Financial Times)
"The images made in the studio were pure fiction created from an imagined world. The aim of the "Doolittle" series was to explore this concept in a greater depth and the images were built with elements carefully researched and sourced that related to specific references in the lyrics to individual songs kindly provided by Pixies frontman Charles Thompson in a handwritten fax. (…) The elements of this image were simple: a monkey, the numbers ‘5’, ‘6’ and ‘7’ and some reference to Heaven." (Simon Larbalestier for Snap Galleries)
"For me, artist Robert Longo's drawing for the cover of The Ascension perhaps best describes Branca's music. It depicts two men in suits against a white background. One of them is Branca, lifting another unconscious man off the ground. It’s hard to tell whether Branca is rescuing the other figure, or has just committed some act of violence on him and is trying to work out what to do with the body. When I see this ambivalent image I can't help but think of Branca in the early 1980s, (…) making classical and post-punk share a stage, whether they wanted to or not." (Dan Fox for Frieze)
"The front cover features an image of a large quantity of the noxious weed kudzu, which grows so rapidly that it overtakes the landscape and kills other plants by completely shading them." (Wikipedia)
"Housed in a suitably enigmatic sleeve depicting a field covered with kudzu vines (known locally as "the vine that ate the South") (Tim Peacock for UDiscoverMusic)
"One of the most iconic album covers of all time, the cover shows Costello shooting photographer Chris Gabrin's Hasselblad 500 from the hip. Costello's seeming self portrait (…) makes it look like he's snapping away in front of the mirror. Gabrin told an interview Costello had asked to listen to "Hotel California" by The Eagles while Gabrin shot him – he hated the song so much he thought it would help him adopt a suitably spiky pose." (Stephen Dowling for Kosmo Foto)
"The artwork for "Night Time, My Time" was photographed by Argentine director Gaspar Noé at Hotel Amour in Paris, and was unveiled by Ferreira on October 10, 2013. It depicts the close-up of a topless Ferreira, whose left breast is exposed and is wearing a cross necklace, inside of a green-tiled shower. She was (…) encouraged by Capitol Records to choose an older photograph where she was seen with "long blonde hair [...] sitting on a bed looking cute [...] in a black dress looking pretty". Ferreira ultimately selected the topless image because she felt it more accurately reflected the nature of the record." (Wikipedia)
"All they needed now was an album cover. Enter Billie Jo Campbell, a three year old who was walking down the street with her mother in California. A stranger approaches and asks the mother whether he can photograph the girl for an album cover he’s working on and pays her $100 for the privilege. He then tells the girl to look into a derelict building where he assures her they'll be loads of animals roaming inside. So, without posing or even really knowing what was going on, she gets on her tip toes and peeks through the window." (Ruth & Martin's Album Club)
"Peter Saville had originally planned to use a portrait of a prince to reference the album title more literally. While perusing an art gallery, however, his girlfriend mockingly asked if he was going to use this painting for the cover. After consideration, he decided it wouldn't be a half bad idea! (…) The painting is by Henri Fantin-Latour and is cleverly entitled Basket of Roses. (…) Saville discussed that the flowers "suggested the means by which power, corruption and lies infiltrate our lives. They're seductive." (Thelastnoelle for Album Design Class)
"For his debut album, which was essentially an autobiography set to a soundtrack, Nasir Jones employed a very personal touch: a close-up picture of himself as a kid, superimposed over the project buildings that informed so much of his existence. (…) Illmatic's poignant cover matched the mood, tone, and qualities of this introspective album to such a high degree that it became an instant classic, hailed as a visual full of meaning and nuance. It remains one of the most remixed album covers of all time. When a rapper aspires to greatness, "Illmatic is the cover format." (Rob Marriot)
"The artwork features an example of illusory motion, a type of optical illusion which is based on the works of Japanese psychologist Akiyoshi Kitaoka. It was compiled and packaged by Robert Carmichael of SEEN studio." (Wikipedia)
"I can't stop staring at it. See, it looks like it's moving…but then when you look closer it's not moving at all…yet if you try looking again out of the corner of your eye it is totally moving, man! So mesmerizing." (Simon Vozick-Levinson for Entertainment Weekly)
"Björk explained her vision for the "Homogenic" cover, which carries a resemblance, as "someone who is put into an impossible situation, so impossible that she has to become a warrior. A warrior who has to fight not with weapons, but with love. I had 10 kilos of hair on my head, and special contact lenses and a manicure that prevented me from eating with my fingers, and gaffer tape around my waist and high clogs so I couldn't walk easily." (Wikipedia)
"Taken by resident crazy-dude Will Oldham, the cover of Slint's masterful "Spiderland" captures the joyous fear and violence of the album so precisely it shakes souls. The group — submerged in a lake to their chins with deranged smiles — seems to be stalking you, hovering out of the black-and-white façade. But what's happening below the surface is the mystery. Are they sinking? Are they kicking slowly to stay afloat?" (Chris Gaerig for Michigan Daily)
"The artwork for Funeral was designed by artist and photographer Tracy Maurice, depicting a scrawling quill with foliage growing from its feathers, painted onto a piece of a wooden planter. (…) Chassagne and Butler took a liking for Maurice's drawings and commissioned her for the task. The design was inspired by Maurice's own collection of antique photographs and early 20th-century illustrated books, as well as the aesthetics of Japanese woodblock prints." (Wikipedia)
"The cover art is a detail of the 1559 painting Netherlandish Proverbs by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Vocalist/guitarist Robin Pecknold notes that: "When you first see that painting it's very bucolic, but when you look closer there's all this really strange stuff going on, like dudes defecating coins into the river and people on fire, people carving a live sheep, this weird dude who looks like a tree root sitting around with a dog. There's all this really weird stuff going on." (Wikipedia)
"What makes the album cover such a classic, though, is the transformation of the source material. Replacing the bathing beauty's head with a drum and cropping the image so tightly recasts a mundane early 20th century "greetings from our seaside vacation" postcard as a surrealist painting. Are the cover's protagonists waving at the "aeroplane over the sea"? Are they survivors of a ship (or plane) wreck? Why do the two figures in the background seem distressed?" (James Stafford for Diffuser)
"The album is a testament to music as an artform (…). The accompanying cover art represents a brooding, pensive Sinatra against the backdrop of an eerily deserted night-time streetscape, streetlights receding into the background, awash in the aqua and black hues of suicidal depression. Both album and album cover are annihilating meditations on heartbreak and desolation, the record sustaining its mood for its entire length" (Kara for Teen Sleuth)
"The nude model, who looked like she stepped off a Ohio Players cover, dabbed in Paddy Crofton's vibrant fluorescent makeup splashes off the sleeve much like Steely Dan's "Aja" did. Meant to be eye-popping, it's that as well as alluringly Afrocentric. The use of red and green phosphorescent explode off the black background. Illustrative of the group's music affirmation, its culture colorfully distinguishable." (le0pard13 blog)
"To make the black and white photo pop out from the cover, bold graphics in bright colours were used. The word 'Elvis' runs top to bottom of the right side of the frame in pink capital letters with 'Presley' in lime green running across the bottom of the frame. The dynamic photo captures The King (before he was crowned that) belting out a tune and shows an intense Elvis doing what he did best." (Toni Marino for Pure Music)
"White is a bit of a trickster who will never let a good story get in the way of the truth. For the sake of argument, though, let's take him at his word on this one. Draper quotes the musician (…): "If you study the picture carefully, Meg and I are elephant ears in a head-on elephant. But it's a side view of an elephant, too, with the tusks leading off either side... I wanted people to be staring at this album cover and then maybe two years later, having stared at it for the 500th time, to say, 'Hey, it's an elephant!'" (James Stafford for Diffuser)
"The "Loveless" album cover is a fine example of perfectly synchronized simplicity. The cover artwork is a photograph of a guitar taken by Angus Cameron, heavily distorted and obscured with the band’s name barely visible in the bottom left corner. It may seem unremarkable at first glance, but upon hearing the music it comes together in perfect harmony as a completed piece." (Yuxtapoz)
"The final concept was, unusually, designed by Waters. At the time he lived near Clapham Common, and regularly drove past Battersea Power Station, which was by then approaching the end of its useful life. A view of the building was chosen for the cover image, and the band commissioned (…) to build a 12-metre (40 ft) porcine balloon (known as Algie). The balloon was inflated with helium, (…) broke free of its moorings and disappeared from view. The pig flew over Heathrow, resulting in panic and cancelled flights; pilots also spotted the pig in the air." (Wikipedia)
"Yo La Tengo's atmospheric 2000 release, "And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out," proceeds gradually, almost insidiously — like night falling on a small town cul-de-sac, this expansive record is as much about what we cannot quite make out, as what is on display. The album, then, is perfectly matched by photographer Gregory Crewdson's beguiling tableaus of banal suburbia — here, our gaze is focused on the far right of a sleeve, where a floodlit figure stares upwards where we cannot follow their gaze." (Claire Marie Healy for AnOther)
"According to a 2009 interview with The New York Times, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs came across Swiss artist Urs Fischer after he did the cover art for New York band Services' puntastically titled album "Eat Prey Love". And if you've ever wondered, that is indeed Karen O's hand doing the squishing." (Tom Hawking for FlavorWire)
"As far as the album cover? Lots of protein." (Brandon Stosuy for Stereogum)
"Just about everybody bought a copy of Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours" in spite of (or maybe because of) its bizarre album art. Singer Stevie Nicks dances around in dark robes, holding hands with drum Mick Fleetwood, who rests his foot on a stool and displays two wooden balls dangling in front of his crotch. What does it all mean? Well, Nicks is in character as Rhiannon, the mythical Welsh witch she came about in the band's hit "Rhiannon." Fleetwood's little balls were his personal good luck charm. Years earlier, he saw them dangling off of an old-school chain-flush toilet in a bar and stole them, and adorned his drum kit with them." (Portable Press)
"The 19th-century rustic oil painting on the front of the album was purchased from an antique shop in Reading, Berkshire by Plant. The painting was then juxtaposed and affixed to the internal, papered wall of a partly demolished suburban house for the photograph to be taken. The block of flats seen on the album is the Salisbury Tower in the Ladywood district of Birmingham. Page has explained that the cover of the fourth album was intended to bring out a city/country dichotomy that had initially surfaced on Led Zeppelin III."(Wikipedia)
"It all came out of that 60s art school thing," McLaren remembered of the sleeve's genesis. "Anarchic, nihilistic, intellectually looking to change life, (…) something that artists and criminals have in common." Fitting, then that the "…Bollocks" sleeve combined its lurid colours with lettering arranged in the style of a ransom note. That process may have caused Reid "enormous aggravation," (…) but it nailed punk's much-touted DIY ethos as succinctly as any of the three-chord anthems within, and was duly adopted by countless bands in the movement." (Team Rock for Louder)
"To create the album cover, Hipgnosis took a color Polaroid of Gabriel, re-photographed the photo in black and white, and then physically manipulated the image as it developed. As Thorgerson and Powell wrote (…):"Merely by applying pressure via a blunt pencil to the Polaroid while it was developing produced a painterly effect, caused by the moving about of the developing chemicals sandwiched between the plastic coverings of the Polaroid. Dead simple but uncontrollable to the degree in that one couldn't see the image fully because it was still processing." (David Deal for Festival Peak)
"Monáe dropped her debut album "The ArchAndroid" with cover art that harkened back to Fritz Lang's Metropolis as well as the beauty of Nefertiti." (Andy Healy for Albumism)
"The Egyptian headdress she sports on the cover of "The Archandroid" (plumed with the copper-green skyscrapers of Metropolis) is in homage to free-jazz pioneer Sun Ra (the moniker 'Ra' taken from the eponymous Egyptian sun god), who also declared himself a messianic saviour and whose aesthetic was the first example of a black musician overtly appropriating sci-fi iconography." (John Calvert for The Quietus)
"The cover artwork depicts a screaming black woman's head coming out of the earth; it was photographed by Joel Brodsky and features model Barbara Cheeseborough." (Wikipedia)
"In the photo, Cheeseborough is buried up to her neck and appears to be screaming, with the band and album names printed above and below her head. This outright spooky imagery is enough to get anyone's attention, leading them on a journey that touches on the sadness, joy, and passion of a landmark funk album." (Juxtapoz blog)
"Gerhard Richter’s Two candles (499-4) 1982 belongs to a series of vanitas-inspired images that were a focus for Richter in the early 1980s (…) The candle is a familiar vanitas motif, reminding the viewer of their mortality. The candle's flame will burn for a finite time, then, as the wax melts away, the light will be extinguished. A similar painting Candle 1983 was used by American band Sonic Youth for the cover of their 1988 rock album Daydream Nation and references the name of one of their songs." (Qagoma blog)
"Photographer Pete Turner's album cover of a running giraffe is in a saturated red and purple, as was the original, though some may have noticed that through the 80s and 90s it was released in green and blue." (Elliot Marlow-Stevens for Jazz Journal)
"Relaxing, soft music with the underlying rhythm and sway of the breeze or the water upon the sand. (…) I'm not sure how the giraffe photo fits into the picture, but I first found the green cover and a little later came across the red one. A good record in either shade." (Tralfaz Archives blog)
"The cover is a slick and rather simple design, it's just black and white parallel lines with the band in front. A confrontational Debbie Harry in a white dress standing out in front of the smiling boys of the band dressed in black suits. The band logo and album name in red. It's just that. Despite its simplicity (or precisely because of it) the cover was an instant success and has become iconic. Sometimes less is more and the cover has stood the test of time as it’s still wildly popular in its simplicity." (Album Covers Galore blog)
"The photographer took about 600 pictures in roughly two hours, most against a white background (…). He immediately developed the pictures and found a specific sequence that took up half a roll of film. One in particular stood out, where Springsteen, with an arm perched on Clemons' shoulder, smiles in reaction to what his friend is playing. "Other things happened but when we saw the contact sheets, that one just sort of popped. Instantly, we knew that was the shot," Meola said." (Dave Lifton for Ultimate Classic Rock)
"The OK Computer artwork is a computer-generated collage of images and text created by Yorke, credited under the pseudonym the White Chocolate Farm, and Stanley Donwood. (…) Visual motifs in the artwork include motorways, aeroplanes, families with children, corporate logos and cityscapes. The photograph of a motorway on the cover was likely taken in Hartford, Connecticut, where Radiohead performed in 1996. The words "Lost Child" feature prominently on the cover, and the booklet artwork contains phrases in the constructed language Esperanto and health-related instructions in both English and Greek. (Wikipedia)
"The iconic cover photo of two little boys, one white and one black, is often mistakenly thought to be of Milton and Lô as children. Metaphorically, maybe. But the picture was taken from the window of a Volkswagen Beetle in rural northern Rio de Janeiro state by Cafi, one of the group (…) Bastos and Cafi were driving around shooting photos of clouds when they noticed the two boys sitting on a sort of dirt hill by the road. Cafi saw the potential for a good shot and snapped their picture. (…) Cafi recalls: "It was like a lightning bolt. It's a strong image…the face of Brazil." (Brasill(inois) blog)
"I wanted to find an interesting location outside of the studio. We went to the west side (…). At the time it was the meat packing district of New York and I liked the look of it. It was freezing and we were very cold. The frame he chose for the cover is blurred and out of focus. Of course everyone was trying to interpret the meaning, saying it must represent getting high on an LSD trip. It was none of the above; we were just cold and the two of us were shivering. There were other images that were sharp and in focus but, to his credit, Dylan liked that photograph." (Jerry Schatzberg in Thin Wild Mercury: Touching Dylan’s Edge)
"The album cover is a live shot by Ed Caraeff documenting the Stooges' opening show of their residency at L.A.'s Whisky A Go Go (…). The Stooges are on fire — their faces glowing. They are engulfed in a blaze of red, orange and yellow flames, generating a blazing heat. The lyrics include, 'I'm burning inside / and I'm the fire of life'. Iggy in flames accurately depicts the human inferno who taunted his cowering audiences to such an extreme that they were paralyzed in awe." (Madeline Bocaro for Madelinex blog)
"On the cover of "Fun House," Iggy Pop's body contorts as if undergoing an exorcism. Bathed in a hellish red light, this composite is a terrifying sight, but it's only a taste of what horrors lay within. "Fun House" is exactly what its name and cover art suggest; an ungodly labyrinth of jagged and unexpected sounds." (Happy Mag)
"TPAB's cover has come to be one of the most powerful and representative pieces of iconography of the Obama era. The photo—taken by famed photographer Denis Rouvre under the direction of Kendrick Lamar, TDE CEO Dave Free (…) and Vlad Sepetov—depicts a group of primarily black men and children in a celebratory display in front of the White House, with the rapper in the center holding a child. At their feet lies a white judge with his eyes crossed out, the presumption being that he's dead." (Jabbari Weekes for Vice)
"Lamar's cover art (…) situates the rapper within a long history of African American musicians using their medium to engage explicitly, and often controversially, with issues intersecting along the lines of civil rights and race relations." (Ashley Clark for The Guardian)
"The cover a trippy image of the Sun created by Paul Cannell, another of the band's associates who was allegedly inspired by a damp patch he'd seen on the Creation offices ceiling after taking acid." (Caspar Llewellyn Smith for The Guardian)
"One of the great things about seminal album covers is how, purely by chance, they can capture a movement and time perfectly. "Screamadelica" is a great example of this, released in 1991 as the band’s early indie rock sound headed onto the dancefloor and collided head-on with euphoric, pilled-up house tunes. (…) The visual accompaniment to this groundbreaking collection of tunes reflected this ‘newness’ perfectly. Bright, joyful and naîve, the happy bursting sunshine was a re-coloured detail taken from a painting by Paul Cannell, the in-house artist at Creation Records." (Matt Dolphin for NME)
"The album cover was photographed by Björk's former boyfriend, the French director Stéphane Sednaoui. It shows Björk standing in a London street, her pale skin and dark hair contrasting with the vivid colours of the Japanese-inspired signs behind her. (…) Designer Paul White of Me Company —who had been a frequent collaborator since The Sugarcubes— "surrounded her with giant postcards to represent communication with friends and family" (Wikipedia)
"This cover was Björk's postcard to herself. (…) The garishly colorful blur of a background (orange and pink are notoriously difficult for designers to bring off) is meant to symbolize both flying postcards and a tumbling house of cards. Meanwhile, Björk remains still, with the airmail braiding around her jacket communicating her longing for home." (Bill Demain for Mental Floss)
“I got these huge canvases for what became "Kid A" and I went mental using knives and sticks to paint with and having those photographed and then doing things to the photographs in Photoshop. The overarching idea of the mountains was that they were these landscapes of power, the idea of tower blocks and pyramids. It was about some sort of cataclysmic power existing in landscape. I was really chuffed with it.” (Stanley Donwood interviewed by Lucy Jones for NME)
"In 2000, when we did the artwork for our album "Kid A," our designer Stanley Donwood and I spent a disproportionate amount of time on the net. We came across the Worldwatch Institute's website, which was full of scary statistics about icecaps melting, and weather patterns changing. (…) We became obsessed with it, and it ended up inspiring us to use an image of a mountain range on the cover of the record." (Thom Yorke for The Guardian)
"The album cover was designed by Martyn Atkins and Peter Saville, with a photograph of the Appiani family tomb in Genoa's Monumental Cemetery of Staglieno adorning much of the sleeve. The image itself was taken by Bernard Pierre Wolff in 1978. In a 2007 documentary on the band, designer Peter Saville commented that he, upon learning of singer Ian Curtis's suicide, expressed immediate concern over the album's design as it depicted a funeral theme, remarking "we've got a tomb on the cover of the album!" (Wikipedia)
"I think the choice of the black and white photograph of this beautiful Appiani tomb was perfect for the album cover, sepulchral, melancholy and Gothic it fits the mood of the music, the lyrics and the overall mood surrounding the band, not to mention the coincidence that the front man of the band also committed suicide two months after the album was recorded and two months prior to its release. It's almost like the veil of death and gloom lay over the making of "Closer," like the fingers from another world, the ghostly world, participated in its making." (Byron's Muse)
"The album cover art is a photo of what appears to be the four members of the band in various stages of urination on a large concrete piling that is surrounded by rubble. Taken at Easington Colliery, the concept for the photo came from band members John Entwistle and Keith Moon. The pair had been discussing Stanley Kubrick and the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. The photo was taken by photographer Ethan Russell who claims it was only Townshend who had actually urinated on the piling. Water poured from film canisters was used to produce the desired visual from the other members of the band. The sky was added later to the photo to give it the effect of being "other worldly." (Toni Marino for Pure Music)
"We did a lot of different poses, including some based on the 2001: A Space Odyssey idea of the apes gathering around the black obelisk. Then Pete started to piss on it, and I went with the flow, as it were. The others also tried to take Pete's lead, but couldn't actually do it. It was all a spur-of-the-moment thing." (Ethan Russell interviewed for Louder)
"Upon the album’s release in the late winter of 1999, it arrived with five different covers. Each cover features a historical photograph meant to show the interior of human suffering — five moments frozen, and laid out in black and white. The photo which appears on most album covers circulated is a one from a riot during the Civil Rights era, where riot police chase two teenagers in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. One of the teenagers looks back at the police while in mid-stride. The other, who is most prominently featured on the cover, has on a white dress and wears a look of terror on her face. The other four covers included images that were similarly visceral, haunting or heartbreaking. (…) As the '90s were winding down, many found themselves eager to see what advances waited for humanity on the other side of the millennium. But for art director Kenny Gravillis and the Roots, the idea was to use images showing societal failures from the past." (Hanif Abdurraqib for Red Bull Music Academy)
"Barry Godber, a computer programmer, painted the design for the album cover. Godber died in February 1970 from a heart attack, shortly after the album's release." (Wikipedia)
"How do you visualize a song like 21st Century Schizoid Man? Godber sat himself in front of a mirror and started painting. Whatever went through his mind as he was applying the watercolors to canvas, it worked. When completed, Sinfield brought it to the recording studio and laid it on the floor for the group members to look at. All but one were flabbergasted. Greg Lake recalls "We all stood around it, and it was like something out of Treasure Island where you’re all standing around a box of jewels and treasure… This fucking face screamed up from the floor, and what it said to us was 'schizoid man' — the very track we'd been working on. It was as if there was something magic going on." (The Music Aficionado blog)
"The cover was drawn by underground cartoonist Robert Crumb after the band's original cover idea, a photo of the group naked in bed together, was vetoed by Columbia Records. Crumb had originally intended his art for the LP back cover (…). But Joplin—an avid fan of underground comics, especially the work of Crumb—so loved the "Cheap Thrills" illustration that she demanded Columbia place it on the front cover." (Wikipedia)
"Crumb's original idea for the front cover was a cartoon of the band performing on stage with the band’s faces pasted on them. The band was less than overwhelmed by this, but then they looked at what Crumb delivered for the back cover and they saw the light. A comic strip with a panel for each of the songs plus band members credits. They immediately decided to make it the front cover and forever cemented the iconic status of that comic strip among album covers." (The Music Aficionado blog)
"Okay, throw the baby in the pool now." With those words, uttered by photographer Kirk Weddle, 4-month-old Spencer Elden was on his way to fame (though not fortune) as the baby on the cover of Nirvana's chart-topping album, "Nevermind." You know the picture: The little fella is submerged in chlorinated depths, his baby penis protrudes beneath his chubby tummy, and his arms are outstretched in that "please pick me up and carry me out of the store" kind of way. Inches away, a dollar bill on a fishhook tempts him. The image has been interpreted by fans as a metaphor for Nirvana, a neophyte band being reeled in by corporate rock's big bucks." (Michele Romero for Entertainment Weekly)
"I was marketing myself as the underwater photography guy at the time. But when they asked me to shoot the sleeve I had no idea whether I could do it. Shooting a baby was new for me. I really didn't want to drown the little guy!" (Kirk Weddle interviewed by Tim Jonze for The Guardian)
"Everyone out there in the world has already seen my penis." (Spencer Elden)
"No more songs about girls, cars, or surfing. This new world-conscious Beach Boys attitude is duly reflected in the choice of album art for "Surf's Up." This most un-Beach Boys of covers is a painting based on the sculpture End of the Trail, by James Earle Fraser. Fraser is probably best known as the designer of the famous Buffalo nickel. He had witnessed the increasingly futile resistance by Native Americans against the expansionist white man, and created End of the Trail as his way to honor their struggle. (…) It would be really easy to suppose that this image of an exhausted warrior whose people is on the brink of extinction was chosen as an analogy to the Beach Boys' commercial and artistic plight." (Chris Holmes for The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit)
"Surf's Up's cover art says all that needs to be said about the mood: painted in mournful blues and greens, a Don Quixote-like figure slouches heavily on an emaciated horse." (Hefner Macauley for Pitchfork)
"The cover has since become a timeless icon, gaining as much notoriety as the content of the actual album (…). The image, a photo taken by Roberta Bayley, depicts the band members leaning against a brick wall, not far from famous club CBGB's. Joey, Dee Dee, Johnny and Tommy are wearing ripped jeans, worn trainers and black leather jackets. It is a shot that did not only unknowingly immortalise the origins of the band, but also managed to capture the spirit of an entire age. (…) Like all phenomena of this scope, the risk was that opening up to a more mainstream public would undermine the original importance. The cover, loaded with the pathos of a revolutionary era, was handed down to us and naturally didn't escape the merchandising machine." (Sound Identity blog)
"The photo that ultimately became the album cover image was just one of those perfect moments when everything came together. The frame before it and the frame after it aren't that great, but for that one moment everyone looked right — exactly like the Ramones. Then when I was changing film, Dee Dee stepped in dog shit." (Roberta Bayley interview for Rolling Stone)
"In 1965 the German-born musician and graphic artist Klaus Voormann (b. 1938) received a phone call from John Lennon. Voormann had been a friend of The Beatles since their early Hamburg days but the phonecall still came as a surprise. "Do you have any ideas for a cover?" Lennon asked the illustrator. (…) Before beginning work on the cover, Voorman went down to the studio to hear some of their tracks. (…) His decision was to try and reflect a similar avant-garde feel through his imagery. The resulting work was part photo collage and part Aubrey Beardsley-influenced ink drawing. The four members were drawn from memory with their hair swirling together to form a jungle of strands that enveloped the collaged elements. Rendered completely in black and white it stood out strongly amid the popular coloured sleeves of the day." (Philip Kennedy for Illustration Chronicles)
"In choosing to work in black and white, I wanted not only to shock, but I wanted also for the work to stand out in a muddle of colour." (Klaus Voorman interviewed by Robin Stummer for The Guardian)
"I had spent the day on a fashion shoot, and my apartment was littered with clothes and props. My girlfriend jumped out of the shower while I was messing around with a Big Shot Polaroid, a clunky, plastic box camera that I found in my parents’ attic. She was pretty beat, but I had 10 Polaroids that needed using, I had found this amazing Chanel glove and so she agreed to pose.
(…) When she slid the glove on and bent forward, I knew it was the perfect shot – simple, straightforward, graphic and just so sexy. When I developed it, I stuck it in my portfolio and thought nothing more of it." (Colin Lane interviewed by Edward Siddons for The Guardian)
"I asked Julian if he wanted to look at my book. The 'ass shot' was in there. I'd shot it the year before. It's my ex-girlfriend. When Julian saw it he was like, 'That would be a cool cover, would you mind if we used it?' I was speechless for a second but of course said yes." (Colin Lane interviewed by Jonathan Heaf for CQ Magazine)
"Some album covers are memorable because they perfectly express an artist's image (…). When "Sticky Fingers" was released in 1971, the album created controversy for its Andy Warhol-designed close-up of a man's crotch, featuring a functional zipper that dared the listener, "Go ahead, unzip me." Nearly 50 years later, the cover for "Sticky Fingers" expresses the essence of Rolling Stones at their peak: salacious, impossible to ignore, and rough around the edges." (David Deal for Festival Peak)
"Given that Jagger was regarded as the sexiest man in rock, it was commonly assumed to be his crotch. But the true identity of the well-endowed cover model has been a mystery for more than 40 years. It all began when Warhol arranged to photograph several men from the waist down. After the photo shoots, he never told anyone the identity of the man on the cover, or even whether the jeans model and the underwear model were the same person. (…) "He probably took these Polaroids, put them on the table, and picked ones he liked. I don't think it mattered to him [who it was]," says Glenn O'Brien." (Larry Getlen for New York Post)
"Mati Klarwein, a German painter, created the gatefold cover for the original LP, which works to not only represent the music inside, but also the thematic elements. There's the push and pull of the light and dark worlds Klarwein depicts on the cover, part examination of racial tensions, part illustrated depiction of jazz fusion, where seeming opposites are brought together to form a new whole. While it's easy to see this album cover as an exercise in contrasting opposites to expose contradictions and illuminate similarities, "Bitches Brew," the music and the cover art, is more about tandems than dichotomies, about how shared experience coupled with the acknowledgement of individual perspectives can create an otherworldly experience." (Kyle Fowle for Esquire)
"The late Mati Klarwein never once painted while on psychedelics. His polychromatic landscapes and surreal images sprung directly, it seemed, from the man's own fervid imagination (…). On this, he was wont to quote his acquaintance, Salvador Dalí: "I don't take drugs. I am drugs." (Min Chen for Proxy Music)
"A simple portrait to the waist of a woman in a crisp white shirt, a black ribbon draped over her shoulders, dark jeans. Her jaw is jutting out proudly, defiantly. A jacket is slung over her shoulder. The wall she is leaning against is as brilliant a white as her shirt, a blank and blinding canvas. It is the cover of Patti Smith's debut album "Horses," taken in a Greenwich Village apartment sometime in 1975 by Smith's longtime friend, Robert Mapplethorpe. Mapplethorpe and Smith were both in their late 20s and veterans of a bohemian New York art scene that had created the fledgling ranks of the city's punk rock scene." (Stephen Dowling for BBC)
"The outfit is something which does elevate the shot. Smith looks every bit the punk-crooner she'd show she was on "Horses." Complete with braces that mean business and the steely gaze of a determined soul. "I flung my jacket over my shoulder, Frank Sinatra style. I was full of references. He was full of light and shadow." (Jack Whatley)
"On August 8, 1969, on a street in north-west London and almost directly outside a celebrated recording studio, one of the most famous ever album covers was shot. Photographer Iain MacMillan took the photograph that would adorn the cover of the brilliant new record named after the street where he stood, Abbey Road. The zebra crossing, almost exactly in front of the studio where The Beatles had created the vast majority of their body of work, was about to become one of the most recognised sites in London." (Paul Sexton for UDiscover Music)
"In late 1969 a crazy conspiracy theory started doing the rounds that Paul McCartney had in actual fact been killed in a car accident in 1966, and had been replaced by a lookalike. Apart from Paul being out of step with his bandmates and walking barefoot, there were other "clues" on the sleeve (…). The white Volkswagen Beetles that bears a number plate saying "28IF" — Paul would have been 28 IF he'd had survived (he'd actually just turned 27); the police van on the cover is usually seen at traffic fatalities; and the four Beatles represent a funeral procession: George is the gravedigger, Paul is the corpse, Ringo is the congregation and John is the priest." (Radio X)
"The album was originally released in a gatefold LP sleeve designed by Hipgnosis and George Hardie. Hipgnosis had designed several of the band's previous albums, with controversial results; EMI had reacted with confusion when faced with the cover designs for "Atom Heart Mother" and "Obscured by Clouds," as they had expected to see traditional designs which included lettering and words. Designers Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell were able to ignore such criticism as they were employed by the band. For "The Dark Side of the Moon," Richard Wright instructed them to come up with something "smarter, neater — more classy". The design was inspired by a photograph of a prism with a colour beam projected through it that Thorgerson had found in a photography book" (Wikipedia)
"They hadn't really celebrated their light show. That was one thing. The other thing was the triangle. I think the triangle, which is a symbol of thought and ambition, was very much a subject of Roger's lyrics. So the triangle was a very a useful icon to deploy and making it into the prism — you know, the prism belonged to the Floyd." (Storm Thorgerson interviewed by Rolling Stone)
"The banana itself is, of course, the handiwork of Andy Warhol, who crafted the image and slapped it on the cover of his pet band's first record. Warhol served as the manager and patron saint of the now iconic art-rock band that surprisingly sold only 30,000 albums in its first five years. (…) The original album cover allowed fans to peel back the banana skin as a sticker, revealing the fruit of a nude-colored banana underneath. The sexually-charged effect was difficult for manufacturers to pull off (the time it took to perfect the peel was part of the reason behind the album's delayed release), but MGM deemed it warranted, since Warhol's stamp of approval was bound to go far in the 1960s" (Zuzanna Stanska for Daily Art Magazine)
"It is one of only two albums that I know of that names the cover designer rather than the band or the record's title on the front (the other being Swedish band bob hund's 1996 LP "Omslag: Martin Kann")." (rockdoc999 for recordart)
"It all started with a dying star. A pulsar data graph that Joy Division's Bernard Sumner fell in love with. The guitarist pulled the 1970 black and white graph by radio astronomer Harold Craft, which resembles digital mountain peaks, straight from the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy. A pulsar, the word a contraction of "pulsating star," is one possible endpoint of a star's life, much like a black hole. Sumner and his band, fronted by pasty, melancholic genius Ian Curtis, delivered the image to graphic designer Peter Saville, who had recently started designing posters and record sleeves for the band’s label, Factory Records. Saville used it for the cover of the band's debut album, inverting the colors and adding no identifying text. "They very astutely spotted this image as potentially a wonderfully enigmatic symbol for a record cover," Saville explained (…), and the artwork for Unknown Pleasures was born." (Cassidy George for HighSnobiety)
"The album art, for good or ill, has arguably surpassed the music in terms of ubiquity, if not necessarily influence, looming larger than ever. You can see it on the shirts of characters in major motion pictures, on shower curtains, full back tattoos and populating every last corner of the Internet." (Zachary Lipez for Washington Post)
"Its wonderful swirl of visuals, ranging from that most distinguished assembly of personalities on its front cover courtesy of Pop artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth (…). Art dealer Robert Fraser helmed the proceedings as art director, with the most legendary cover-art shoot in rock history transpiring 50th years ago on March 30th. The cover was lavishly pricey to produce, but it solidified the Beatles’ mythic status for all time." (Colin Fleming for Rolling Stone)
"The cover collage includes 57 photographs and nine waxworks. (…) The final grouping included Stockhausen and Carroll, along with singers such as Bob Dylan and Bobby Breen; film stars Marlon Brando, Tyrone Power, Tony Curtis, Marlene Dietrich, Mae West and Marilyn Monroe; artist Aubrey Beardsley; boxer Sonny Liston and footballer Albert Stubbins. Also included were comedians Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy; writers H.G. Wells, Oscar Wilde and Dylan Thomas; and the philosophers and scientists Karl Marx, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung." (Wikipedia)
"Hipgnosis co-founder Storm Thorgerson explained (…) "repeated exposure to the haunting brilliance of 'Shine on You Crazy Diamond' led inexorably to one point, led to one theme, in fact to the one word, 'absence.'" The team devised a concept for the cover involving two men — record execs fashioned in a style suggested by the album's "Have a Cigar" — shaking hands to seal some unknown deal. Hipgnosis explained a handshake is often seen as an empty gesture, void of meaning or purpose. And the flames? A visualization of people's tendency to remain emotionally withdrawn (or absent) for fear of "being burned."
"Two stuntmen were used (Ronnie Rondell and Danny Rogers), one dressed in a fire-retardant suit covered by a business suit. His head was protected by a hood, underneath a wig. The photograph was taken at Warner Bros. Studios in California, known at the time as The Burbank Studios. Initially the wind was blowing in the wrong direction, and the flames were forced into Rondell's face, burning his moustache. The two stuntmen changed positions, and the image was later reversed." (Wikipedia)
"With no shortage of irony, the most iconic sleeve of the 1970s was not a carefully conceived think piece from the studios of Hipgnosis, but an instinctive moment of rock'n'roll attitude captured without thrills or forethought. Two people were responsible for the striking black and white image on The Clash's "London Calling." The first was the band's statuesque bass player, Paul Simonon, who is shown driving his bass guitar into the stage of the New York Palladium on September 21, 1979. (…) The second person was British photographer Pennie Smith, who had made her name shooting for NME and was now accompanying The Clash on their US tour. Despite the accolades that have since been handed to her shot, Smith initially didn't want it to be used due to it being slightly out of focus because she was backing away to avoid being hit by Simonon. Even now, she's lukewarm about her best-known photograph. (…) "It's very pleasant to be praised, but I can't see that picture now," Smith said in 2003. "It's been used in various forms so many times that it’s a bit like wallpaper." (TeamRock fro Louder)
"Any music fan would love the sheer excitement it conveys. Aesthetically, it's just a beautiful thing to look at. Most of all it's a classic picture because it captures the ultimate rock'n'roll moment — total loss of control." (Paul du Noyer for Q magazine)
Thanks so much for voting and participating! This has been a super fun poll to host and rollout, and thanks again to Honorio for all of his help!"So there you have it. Musically, the quality is all over the place and there are a couple of albums that I'm not massively bothered about in terms of the actual tunes. When it comes to the sleeves however, the above list shows a few of the reasons why I love album cover designs and why I hope to see physical artwork on the front of records survive the digital revolution in one way or another.
With the creativity, thought, love, attention to detail and general weirdness poured into the design of these covers, it would be a tragedy for all future album artwork to be relegated to a tiny, pixelated square on your iPod or phone. Like me, there are plenty of designers, musicians, bands and record labels who continue to fly the flag for excellent record sleeve design and long may it continue." (Matt Dolphin for NME)
You're welcome, Holden! It was a pleasure to help (even if looking for the links and quotes was quite a lot of work). There were not many comments but surely people enjoyed the rollout. Thank you, Holden!
Indeed, great album artwork is not really tied to great albums, but if you look at the list above you'd think it is, as by far most of these albums rank in our top 500 and the further up we get almost everything seems to come from the top 100. I know that a legendary status for an album can make a cover iconic (indeed something like Dark Side of the Moon has undeniably one of the most recognizable images in rock history, but I don't find it particularly inspiring beyond that), but does that really make them the greatest covers? I wish the final results dug a little deeper, as for me I find great album covers everywhere."So there you have it. Musically, the quality is all over the place and there are a couple of albums that I'm not massively bothered about in terms of the actual tunes. When it comes to the sleeves however, the above list shows a few of the reasons why I love album cover designs and why I hope to see physical artwork on the front of records survive the digital revolution in one way or another." (Matt Dolphin for NME)
It will probably be like this for the music video poll, too. It's not proper, strictly speaking, but it's hard to blame people. You could say there is a synergy when the music and the artwork or video are all lifting each other up. (I'm now trying to imagine some alternate universe where albums like Dark Side of the Moon and London Calling are dog doo, and we subconsciously don't want to vote for them in these polls over "classic" artwork like More or Cut the Crap.)
