My top ten favourite album covers

Everyone else seems to be doing this at the moment (on Facebook mostly), so here I am to chip in with my 2 guilders' worth. In this boneheaded era of music streaming, album cover art probably seems fairly inconsequential or extraneous. But rest assured, there was a time when it was an all-powerful tool of music marketing (see the satirical cover of XTC's album Go 2 for further details on this), and not just a nicely-posed photo of the artist to make the record look good in-store. 

As such, there are certain album covers whose imagery stays with you, and cements itself with the musical content of the album in your mind, so that visual and audio become one. Much like that famous cover photo of four drugged-out hippie twits crossing a road in London, it is the first thing your brain provides to you when the album title or any of its songs are mentioned.

Here are ten such album covers that stand out for me. They were all released between 1988 and 1994. (Draw your own conclusions. If that conclusion is "No decent album covers were made after 1994", well, I won't argue with you).

Number 10
Throwing Copper
LIVE
1994

My enduring memory of this album is listening to it on the bus on the way to uni in my first year, when I didn't have a car. I didn't have the cover art on my taped copy, but I was familiar with it anyway; how it incorporates a gloomy painting titled Sisters Of Mercy by Peter Howson. The painting, depicting four glum 'working girls' walking a proselytizer off a cliff, was auctioned off in 2005 for 186 grand and now is part of some millionaire's trophy cabinet. Whatever. Like many bands who use a painting by a third party as their album cover, I am not sure what prompted the decision to use it, but despite the attire of the figures in it, it seems to evoke a bygone era and oddly seems to fit with the anthemic and powerful rock sounds and mystical lyrics as well. The significance of the album title eludes me though, as that phrase does not appear in the lyrics of any song.

Number 9
Hot Dogma
TISM
1990

For their second album, This Is Serious Mum commissioned an illustration of Chinese Red Guards in propaganda poster style. All the song titles on the back are written in Chinese, right to left of course, and the Chinese text on the cover translates as "The unification of the proletariat under the banner of TISM". You'd think TISM wouldn't list the proper titles in English at all anywhere on the package — like they did later with the Machiavelli And The Four Seasons album — but they do actually give you the titles here. There is no credited artist for the album cover, but knowing TISM, the artist's name probably is there and listed under something else. You never know with these guys. The liner notes are credited to 'E.J. Whitten', after all. I like the overall treatment here — much like the way the Butthole Surfers' album Hairway To Steven used weird cartoons to represent each song instead of actual song titles.

Number 8
Nonsvch
XTC
1992

Andy Partridge selected the title for his band's 12th album after seeing a drawing of the former Nonsuch Palace in Surrey, which was drawn in 1610 by cartographer John Speed (see the full map here – look in the top right corner). "(Non[e]such) is a very beautiful word," Partridge said. "It was the most marvellous castle ever, covered with gold, sculptures and paints. It was built by that tyrant, Henry VIII, who razed a village for it." John Speed's drawing — the title 'Nonsvch' in his own lettering is retained on the cover — is complemented nicely by the medieval-style lettering on the back cover, where each song on the album has its own illustration, chapbook-style. The whole visual design evokes 17th century art and typography: too bad it has been consistently ruined by mediocre reissues. It deserves much better.

 

Number 7
Zooropa
U2
1993

I don't know what to say about this cover for U2's 8th album. But just look at it! You can tell it was made at the time when rad computer graphics were becoming more prevalent (and hitting critical mass in 1995-96). The disjointed, experimental pop muzak on the record needed a similarly tech-heavy visual treatment (done by Brian Williams). So here we have nine images in a 3x3 grid of TV images, including one of Lenin and one of Mussolini, overlaid with distorted purple text, showing the partial song titles "Wake Up Dead Man", "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me", and "If You Wear That Velvet Dress", all ultimately withheld from Zooropa. On top of all that are twelve digitally drawn yellow stars from the European flag, with an 'astro-baby' in the centre. The whole thing was meant to depict a Soviet cosmonaut floating in orbit after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Did 15 year old me think of any of this when I bought the album? Nah. Although I do remember thinking "Hey, the CD tray is see-through" (they had always been black up until that point. Also, the CD booklet is notoriously difficult to slide into the jewel case, such is the volume of oversaturated images it contains.

Number 6
Apollo 18
THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS
1992

The provenance of this cover art was until recently a mystery to me. As a graphic design student I once wrote an analysis of this image, and was unable to cite the credited artist as anything other than Rolf Conant, which is a pseudonym for band member John Flansburgh. As you may have worked out from the album title, Apollo 18 has several songs with a space theme, and as it turns out, while the band were searching the NASA archives for graphics, they were selected by NASA as Musical Ambassadors for International Space Year. Flansburgh didn't paint the sperm whale and squid himself though. He nicked it from an issue of Fate, a pulp magazine dedicated to the paranormal, from August 1958.

Number 5
Pump
AEROSMITH
1989

This was the first album I owned. I received it on cassette for my 12th birthday. Ten tracks of headbangin' late '80s hard rock as served up by Boston's most enduring hell-raisers. So what's with this cover photo (by that famous artist, American Stock Photography) of an old International Harvester truck, with a smaller identical truck rear-mounting it? Is this some bizarre sexual reference? How did they happen on a stock photo in that 'pose'? And if you look closely you can see "F.I.N.E.", the title of one of the songs, on the side of both trucks in chrome. And then the album is called Pump. What's that all about? I can only assume that someone in the band thought it would be funny. As a result, the entire album feels like it is soaked in petrol.

Number 4
Parklife
BLUR
1994

The archetypal Britpop album detailing, as frontman Damon Albarn put it "The travels of the mystical lager-eater", needed a similarly typically British image as its cover. Food Records boss David Balfe thought that image should be a fruit and vegetable cart, with the album title London. 'Cause art can only get better when the suits get involved, right? The enduring shot of two greyhounds racing (the uncropped photo in the CD booklet shows a third dog, out of focus and cropped out) was the one chosen to embody the lager-and-betting shop lifestyle, taken by sports photographer Bob Thomas (who couldn't believe a band wanted it for an album cover) in 1988. One glance at those greyhounds and you know which album you're dealing with. "Southern England personified", as Oasis' Noel Gallagher put it, and that's right on the money.

Number 3
Nevermind
NIRVANA
1991

This must be a mistake, right? My favourite album of all time, the most iconic album cover of the 1990s, was not number 1 in this list? Well, yes actually. The story of how this cover image came to be is well documented. Kurt Cobain wanted an image that would represent his naive young indie band making their major-label debut and chasing the big bucks that record deal would entail. Except that's a lie, and what really happened is when Kurt shared an apartment with drummer Dave Grohl, they were sitting up one night watching a documentary about underwater births and they thought it would make, as Kurt put it, "a really neat image". He had by then scrapped his idea of calling the album Sheep and decided to use the baby photo as the album cover, adding the fish hook and dollar bill. A stock photo sourced by the label proved too expensive to use, so photographer Kirk Weddle took the photo at a kids' swimming pool. There is a snippet of footage in the video for "Come As You Are" that replicates the cover image, and that song's opening guitar riff echoes the watery theme of the cover art.

Number 2
Lincoln
THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS
1988

The cover of the band's second album, named after John Linnell and John Flansburgh's hometown in Massachusetts (Lincoln Calling was the original title), depicts a secular whimsical shrine built by Brian Dewan. He wanted to have Flansburgh and Linnell themselves in the framed portraits behind the podiums, but according to Flansburgh, "The general on the right side of the cover is my grandfather, and the man with the beard is John Linnell's great-grandfather. We felt funny putting our faces on it, so instead we put the faces of our ancestors on it. It's got this churchlike quality to it, so there's something reverent about it, and then something very twisted about it." 
Twisted indeed. The closer you look, the more questions you have. What are the clocks for? Why do they have thirteen hour markers on them? Why are the mics wired up? Is there going to be a press conference? Why is there no band name or album title on the cover? What is this thing just sitting in a field? Good art always provokes more questions than it answers.

Number 1
The Real Thing
FAITH NO MORE
1989

You might be looking at this thinking: really? This is his top choice? Well, let me explain. This was one of the very first albums I owned (third actually, after Pump and Technotronic's Pump Up The Jam). I still have the cassette. I know every song, every lyric, every funk-metal riff, every drum thrash, every wailing vocal on here, and all of it, every single bit of it, I associate with this image — which I can only describe as an upside-down shot of a cracked riverbed and a blood red sky, sun emerging from the clouds and three flames inside a splashing droplet of milk. As to what it symbolizes, you'll have to work that out yourself. I can't help you there. 

There is no credited artist on this album cover because it was designed by someone at Slash Records and assigned to the album without the band's creative input. It does however feature Harold Edgerton's famous milk droplet photo from 1937, titled 'Milk Drop Coronet'.