Great covers – Beatles

As a Beatles fan, I would be quite happy to display all their album covers on my wall, if decorating my humble abode with LP sleeves was my thing (the putative notion of such interior design innovation, of course, being the premise for this series). I imagine the Beatles would appreciate the pun in my [...]

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Great covers: Curtis Mayfield 1975

The message of the cover of Curtis Mayfield’s 1975 album There’s No Place Like America Today is unambiguously direct: the American dream is a lie when there is so great a disparity in the experience of comforts among Americans. The happy, white middle-class family is symbolically running over the (mostly black) poor on their way [...]

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Great covers: Satan Is Real (1960)

The Satan Is Real album cover routinely is included in lists of “worst ever covers”, alongside Millie Jackson fighting constipation, Orleans getting closer than close, and dirty old John Bult parking his cigarette as he seduces Julie on her 16th birthday. Of course the Satan Is Real cover is a bit naff — the dentally [...]

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Great covers: Josh Rouse – 1972 (2002)

Josh Rouse marked his 30th birthday in 2002 with an album inspired by the year of his birth. It might easily have turned out as a pastiche of the worst clichés. Happily, it didn’t: the sound is contemporary. Rouse evokes rather than recreates what he imagines were the sounds of 1972. Imagine the concept as [...]

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Great covers: Gil Scott-Heron/Brian Jackson – Winter In America (1974)

How many albums are there which bear the name of one of the artist’s most epic song which does not appear on it? Winter In America, the song, made its appearance a year later, on 1975’s The First Minute Of A New Day album, written at the decree of one Peggy Harris who created the [...]

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Great covers: Herb Alpert – Whipped Cream and Other Delights

I cheerfully admit that I like this album cover for all the wrong reasons. The picture is not exactly, to use the dreaded and misleading term, “politically correct” (less so in an age when the troubling terminology of bukkake is gaining mainstream currency). The woman is objectified, of course. The whipped cream is not supposed [...]

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Great covers: The Mamas and the Papas – If You Can Believe Your Eyes And Ears

In this series of album covers I would hang up on my wall, I previously featured the artwork of Dexys Midnight Runners’ Searching For The Young Soul Rebel album, which features a defiant looking Belfast lad named Anthony O’Shaughnessy. A couple of weeks ago, Anthony commented on that post, which marks the first time the [...]

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Cover art: The Smiths – Hatful Of Hollow (1984)

The Smiths released their debut LP, and seven months later a compilation. How’s that for audacity?  Hatful Of Hollow included singles, their b-sides and BBC session versions of songs from the eponymous debut album (and, it must be said, the BBC session tracks are not all superior). It was just the first of several albums [...]

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Great covers: Dexys – Searching For The Young Soul Rebels

Although Dexys Midnight Runners drew their influences widely, the debut album Searching For The Young Soul Rebels sounded like nothing before it. Certainly Kevin Rowland’s voice was unique, and his lyrics never far from idiosyncratic. Although Rowland took time with his songs, eschewing radio-friendly abbreviations in favour of giving songs the treatment he thought [...]

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Great covers: The Clash – London Calling (1979)

I cannot claim to be highly original when I big up the cover of The Clash’s 1979 London Calling double-album. It appears to features in every list of best cover art in rock. Still, the series is about my favourite covers, the kind of LP sleeves I’d display on my wall. If my taste coincides [...]

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