There’s so much mystery about this cover that perhaps it’s better to start with what we do know. The image was taken by London-based Jake Walters, a commercial photographer with an impressive portfolio across fashion, celebrity and editorial portraiture.

The adorable baby, with its cheeky little expression so at odds with Morrissey’s stern gaze, is the son of Charlie Brown, Morrissey’s assistant tour manager.

Design practice No Allegiances is responsible for the design and packaging. Having noticed the subtle Mexican sounds in the music, they took their cue from Mexican folk art and vintage California. The typography was inspired by the work of legendary illustrator and printmaker José Guadalupe Posada.

The packaging also features a still life, Bodegon Con Jarra de Vino (1914), by A. Fuentes.

Noting the chiaroscuro of both the cover photography and painting, No Allegiances ran the LP and special CD version on fabric-textured stock to “makes the record feel like an oil painting hanging in the Louvre that you shouldn’t have just touched.”

But what does it all mean? The arresting image on the cover of Morrissey’s ninth studio album caused an instant deluge of speculation when it was first surfaced late last year.

Widely reported as celibate, the image of an awkwardly paternal Morrissey seemed unlikely. It also followed two other popular covers where the indie icon held a gun and a violin.

The consensus opinion seemed to be that the title referred to his years of refusing sex and that the baby on the cover symbolically represented an absence born of this choice.

Complicating matters further are the symbols – one of which appears on the baby’s forehead and the other on his arm. When the image first appeared online the file size was too small to fully make these out. Was that a W on the baby’s forehead? Did it represent the outgoing president of the Unites States?

Um, no – the baby has a butterfly on his forehead, while Morrissey’s arm seems to feature a caterpillar. For me, this awkward symbolism is the cover’s one misstep and adds little to what appears to be an instantly iconic image.

If it’s meaning is opaque, it’s no accident. This is after all this is Morrissey – a cultural figure that has always defied easy categorisation. An artist that has referred to himself as being “a fourth sex”; that famously campaign for animal rights and vegetarianism. A man who has flirted with the nationalistic far right and in the nineties developed what Encyclopedia Brittanica described as “a growing homoerotic obsession with criminals, skinheads, and boxers”.

Anticipating speculation about his latest cover, he had already drafted a response on the sleeve notes to The Years of Refusal:

“If you ask why the new album has the title it has (‘Years of Refusal’) and why on the cover he is holding the baby, after holding on previous covers the violin and the gun, because after all people will want to know, or more rumours will spill into the world and its voracious, agitated internet shadow, the sigh will almost crack into real annoyance. If you sail close to the gale force wind and bring up the sticky situations he finds himself in when he talks of his mythical old England, its disappearance and/or cultural and commercial conversion, and heretically flirts with the flag, and faces expulsion from the entertainment scene, then the sigh and the awkwardness will know no bounds.”

But in the last few years I’ve been rediscovering the music of my teenage years and also how kickass the album covers were. It took me a while to whittle down my list to my favourite top 10. I’m sure I’ll come across a few later and wish I included them, but for now this is my definitive list in no particular order.

Warlock – Triumph & Agony
- Awesome painted cover: check.
- Chrome logo: check.
- Foxy blonde woman in leather being fondled by a demon: check.

Vinyl was king in the 80′s and hard core audiophile metal fans still prefer this format. The beauty of the large dimensions of vinyl covers is you can appreciate the detail and work put into painted artworks like this cover. This would look great on the side of a panel van.

Motorhead – The Bomber
This cover appeals to the plane spotter in me. Apparently there was a slight uproar that an English band would choose a German bomber, a Heinkel 111, over the English Lancaster bomber. Lead singer & bassists defended this decision: “Sure, it’s a filthy memory – but the fact is the bad guys make the best shit.” The scale of the band member to the aircraft is all wrong but I think it adds a comical air to the setting.

The Cult – Electric
The photo of the band is the only weak part of this cover and feels like a last minute add in. Sorry Ian Astbury, I’m sure that is your best raccoon hat.

But metal bands have the best logos, and creative use of typography and i think this cover is a great example of that. Metal band logo designs always seem to embody the nature of the group it is representing.

Def Leppard – Hysteria
This cover design is actually pretty cheesy and a good indicator of late 80′s graphix and that’s why i like it. The album is called ‘Hysteria’ so lets have a badly painted morphing of faces screaming. Overlay it on the plans to the Death Star from Star Wars IV and have a paint splattered album title, job done.

Judas Priest – British Steel
I’ve never understood the appeal of ‘The Priest’ but I’ve wanted to like them based on my fondness for some of their covers, which include Screaming for Vengeance & Turbo Lover. British Steel is my favourite.
This cover couldn’t be any more metal. A leather studded arm firmly gripping an oversized razor blade, all set on a “how more black could this be? and the answer is none – none more black” background. And their logo is just kick ass.

Kiss – Rock and Roll Over
I remember flicking through my friend’s extensive Kiss album collection for the first time and coming across this cover. It stood out in stark contrast to the direction of their other covers, and even other fellow metal groups cover designs at the time (1976). It feels like more of a designed cover then some artistic piece with it’s symmetry and very poppy japanese influence.

Poison – Open Up and Say.. ahh!
For me, this is the quintessential 80′s Hair Metal album cover. Day-glow colours, a Gene Simmons inspired tongue, big hair and a ridiculously unsubtle and misogynistic album title.

Aerosmith – Permanent Vacation

I love this for the great Sailor Jerry Tattoo inspired illustrations and the way they are placed in a repetitive wallpaper pattern. The red illustrations on black also balance really well with the yellow Aerosmith logo.

Iron Maiden – Somewhere in Time
It would be sacrilegious to not have a Maiden cover in this list. They’ve had some great covers but I guess this one stands out for me due to the fact it reminds me of Blade Runner. It came out around the time I started getting interested in metal, making this the first Maiden cover I came across. It also features one of my favourite incarnations of Eddie.

Van Halen – Fair Warning
This cover

I’ve loved Van Halen from the day I first listened to Van Halen 1. They’ve had a few interesting album covers after their first two releases, with Fair Warning being the standout for me. This cover is a little disturbing, which is fitting for what was hailed as Van Halen’s darkest album. But it wasn’t until I researched this cover that I discovered the complete painting “The Maze” created by the Canadian artist William Kurelek. The painting is a depiction of the artist’s  tortured youth and makes for a very bold and interesting choice for a so-called “hair band”. Then again, as fans of the band already know know, they were always so much more than that.

Now updated.

This striking cover from hip-hop maestro Jay-Z immediately caught our eye and we featured it yesterday. However our readers were quick to point out that we’d only scratched the surface in our review. So thanks to our learned, intrepid and (let’s face it) sexy readers, here’s an updated feature.

This month sees the release of The Blueprint 3 by Jay-Z . The legendary rapper is in top form, with the usual emphasis on slick production and collaborations with big names that include Kanye West, Timbaland, The Neptunes and Rihanna. In many ways, it’s business as usual for this consummate businessman – with the exception of the cover art.

It’s not a new thing to bemoan the paucity of quality hip-hop sleeves, which is what makes The Blueprint 3 so refreshing. Check out the behind the scenes video to appreciate the craft that has gone into making it.

Many have noted a passing resemblance to the muted cover of U2’s No Line on the Horizon.

While others point to Now Here is Nowhere by The Secret Machines.

Or Kingdom of Comfort by Christian rockers Delirious?.

But the album’s aesthetic and concept owes its biggest debt to the previous work of photographer Dan Tobin Smith. The assorted of junk is also reminiscent of his work for Athlete’s Tourist album.

Tobin Smith worked with art director Greg Burke and set designer Nicola Yeoman to create the mod, minimalist cover art for Jay-Z. With its gathered assortments of white instruments and electronic equipment, it makes me feel like I’ve stepped back into some avant-garde gallery in the 70’s.

And in a way, it turns out that’s the decade where Jay-Z wanted to take us.

Referring to the gathered instruments he says: “These things are like the forgotten pieces in hip-hop. It’s still about music. It’s not about radio, making gimmicks — it’s still about making music. Those things are piled in the corner. These are the forgotten things about music. It’s still about music. It’s not about radio, it’s not about making gimmicks, it’s about music.”

The three red stripes are also a symbolic call for a return to simpler times.

“The three stripes that everybody is asking about is made from the original [number] three. The first three they made on the wall was someone carving. If you look at [the number] 3, all they did was connect lines. The whole thing about this album, how I approached it, is that I wanted to make a new classic to start that all over again — to go back to making classic albums like the ones we grew up listening to.”

At this stage of his career, it’s a worthy goal to set out to make a classic. It’s also admirable that he would put so much thought and effort into a concept cover. After all, the sentiment that hip-hop needs to return to the ethos and integrity of a bygone era is nothing new – it’s just surprising to see it expressed in such a lateral and subtle way.

Update: there is a great interview with Dan Tobin on Itsnicethat.com who goes into great details about the cover and the process.

Here’s a quick excerpt.

This is one of the most anticipated albums of the year, and the first album Jay Z hasn’t appeared on the cover, how did you get involved in the project and what was the reasoning behind a much more sculptural approach?

Greg Burke, the creative director on the project at Atlantic records had seen the Letter ‘E’ I had shot with the set designer Nicola Yeoman and I guess he had it in the back of his mind when he was thinking of ideas for Jay Z’s new artwork for Blueprint 3. I think Greg and Jay Z had lots of ideas about what the album meant and it seemed to be about taking it back to the source, in terms of the music itself and then subsequently the artwork. For the album and the idea was it was very much about the music and all the things that make music. The 3 is represented by 3 bars which is of course the old way of writing ‘3’ so that seemed to work really nicely with the idea behind the album and the set design that evolved. We all liked the idea that the installation was almost machine like, like all these things were interlinked. That’s why everything is packed and jumbled together. Like it had kind of grown out of this corner.

I think it was a brave approach for Jay Z as all his previous albums have had him on them. I love still life, and the way I shoot is quite old school. It took 3 days to shoot, was all shot on 10×8 inch film, so the quality in the whites is fantastic, so much subtle tone. We worked long and hard on the colour work on the post and even in a single page mag advert I can see that effort. You could blow the image up to the size of a building and it would still hold up. It seems the album is about that old school crafted production so its nice that that same method went into the shoot.

Here is the letter E piece Dan refers to

I’ll leave it to the designers to argue over the merits of including the artist name, website and album title on the cover. This could simply be a clear case of Jay-Z the artist making one compromise with his old friend Jay-Z the businessman.

Note: This is the first album cover to not feature Jay-Z. Lucky as it would have been hard to quick change into this one.

And for those interested Alex Goose has released for free “The Blueprint 3 Outtakes” album with tracks that didn’t make the initial cut.

The lead singer of The Strokes will release his debut album sometime shortly, however the cover art has already emerged. It pays tribute to the iconic dog and gramophone image, best known today as the logo for various music companies, including Casablancas’ label RCA.

I’d always just assumed that the image had originated as a logo, perhaps because the owner of the company loved dogs or some such. However, the dog in question actually existed. His name was Nipper.

Nipper earned his name because he always tried to bite visitors on the leg, which makes him sound like exactly the kind of horrid little pencil-sharperner I hate encountering in other’s homes. But there must have been something really special about this dog because after the death of his owner Mark Henry Barraud in 1887 his brothers Philip and Francis continued to care for him.

Francis was an artist and not only did he inherit the little dog, he also took ownership of a cylinder phonograph and recordings of his late brother’s voice. When he played the recordings, he was taken by the way Nipper would look around and wonder where his old owner’s voice was coming from.

It inspired the painting “His Late Master’s Voice”.

It would later be changed to “His Master’s Voice” so that consumers weren’t made to feel too maudlin upon viewing it.

The painting became a logo and icon largely because Barraud himself recognised its commercial potential. He originally pitched it to the Edison Bell company but they thought it was a ridiculous notion that a dog would listen to a phonograph. However the Gramaphone Company ultimately purchased it for 100 pounds sterling after some modification.

Soon their US Partner Victor Records were using a simplified drawing as their logo and reminding consumers to “Look for the dog”.

By that time Nipper had past away, having been buried in 1895 in a beautiful park surrounded by Magnolia trees. And when the park was eventually built upon, a plaque was placed on the resulting building to commemorate Nipper’s resting place.

This pales in comparison to his ongoing status as the mascot for the HMV Group, the most impressive evidence of which is the four-ton Nipper that sits on a building in Albany, New York.

And the Nipper stained glass window.

Not only has this diminutive dog garnered enough large-scale public tributes to satisfy a third world despot, he’s inspired generations of impersonators and posthumously fathered a puppy called Chipper.

And now on the cover of Phrazes for the Young he sits intently at the feet of Casablancas, who seems blissfully unaware that he’s the second most famous guy in the photo.

In 1997 designer Peter Saville received a call from Jarvis Cocker. “They needed to reposition Pulp” he recalls, “They wanted to present Pulp more as a rock band. The music was a lot deeper, darker and moodier and they called it This Is Hardcore.”

The result was one of the most controversial album covers of the nineties.

This was probably assured the moment they invited American painter John Currin to direct it. Currin is known for his technically skillful paintings, which typically depict the intensely sexualized female form with heavily pornographic overtones. This meeting of high and low art has found a ready audience and Currin’s work routinely sells in the high six-figures.

The artist flew to the UK and worked closely with Saville to develop a concept for the shoot. In briefing the pair, Cocker explained that the title didn’t refer to pornography, but rather the “new, hard, resolute spirit of the band” says Saville, “Jarvis talked to us about fame and how it changes the world around you.” He was admirably blunt is admitting that the band “wanted to be taken more seriously.”

The eventual plan was to take photos of the band next to models. These models were carefully chosen for their “super-real characteristics”.

The final choice for the cover was shot on the last day in Saville’s apartment, after the original photos were deemed to be “not hardcore enough”. The woman is a Russian glamour model known only as Ksenia, who later told FHM: “The shoot was fun. Jarvis is very nice, very shy.”

While its an image that disturbed many, to dismiss the cover as empty provocation would be unfair. As Hugh Aldersey-Williams writes in New Statesman Magazine, pornography “is simply the most familiar visual language through which we appreciate the disparity between the intensity of imagined experienced and the disappointment or disgust of its realisation.”

The impact of the cover is heightened by it’s striking aesthetic, which manages to be at once grainy and high-gloss. Currin chose fashion photographer Horst Diekgerdes to take the images, before Saville used a Photoshop feature called Smart Blur to create a more painterly finish.

The final touch is the typography, with the album’s title stamped over the model in Helvetica Bold to resemble a message from the censorship board.

This is Hardcore might have flown under the radar as cover art but when the label released posters all over London they caused a scandal. Was the woman a sex doll? Had she just been raped? Was she dead? The strong opinion of many women was that she was certainly offensive.

Vandals took to the images, defacing them with statements that included “This Offends Women”, “This is Sexist” and “This is Demeaning”. Saville was unrepentant. “For the whole thing just to have passed without a murmur would have been a great disappointment.”

But is it even more disappointing if Pulp lost a potential audience that judged the book by its cover? This is Hardcore is in reality an at-times tender album with a mature detachment from misogynism. In the standout track ‘A Little Soul’, dedicated to Cocker’s absent father, a man begs his son not to repeat his mistakes:

“But everybody’s telling me
you look like me
But please don’t turn out like me.”

“Yeah, I wish I could be an example.
Wish I could say I stood up for you
and fought for what was right.
But I never did.
I just wore my trenchcoat and stayed out every single night.”

It’s an intensely sad portrait of a man that has made all the wrong, seedy choices and thrown away his opportunities for happiness. I imagine this now sentimental old geezer checking out at the cover of This is Hardcore, simultaneously fighting back both tears and an erection.

For more information on this cover, visit the excellent Pulp fan site Acrylic Afternoon.

RIP Jay Reatard (May 1, 1980 – January 13, 2010). This post was written before his tragic death and we were going to edit it (as it reads a little tasteless now). However, on reflection, we felt that this post was a suitable tribute to Jay’s formidable talent.

I was at a play the other week about an alcoholic 28-year old creative director who has it all but throws it away because of his addiction. The sick thing is that instead of feeling for his plight as his life spiraled further out of control, I found myself resenting how much he had to lose. “I’m 28” I thought, “How come I don’t own an apartment with harbour views?”

You know you’re getting older when you find yourself comparing your age with those that have achieved more.

So it is with Jay Reatard (born Jimmy Lee Lindsey), the precocious and prolific punk rocker that started making music when he was barely 15. He has since played with The Reatards, The Lost Sounds, The Bad Times, The Final Solutions, Shattered Records and the Angry Angles before releasing his first solo album in 2006.

Imagine my horror when I discovered that he was born in 1980. While that still makes him slightly older than me I’m unlikely to bridge the gap in a matter of months. Particularly as I can’t play an instrument.

And yet I can find it in my heart to muster goodwill for Reatard, largely because his one-man garage punk revival gave 2008 the soundtrack it so badly needed.

Remember back in ’08? After the bankers had sucked our coffers dry and we woke up to find that in our drunken state we hadn’t only started dressing like it was the eighties, we even managed to out-do that decade’s horrific penchant for unsustainable excess. But at least as we threw our harem pants and ray-bans in the bin and joined the unemployment queue, we had Reatard’s raw, essential music to remind us that it doesn’t take much to make things of beauty.

Reatard and his label Matador also found an incomparably terrific way to release his rough and ready pieces of punk-pop goodness. Throughout the year they released six limited edition 7”, all of which sold out upon release. Interestingly, aside from the circular mnemonic and consistent typography, the sleeves are all unique and distinctive.

While Reatard made this feverish creative output look and feel effortless, on the cover of the resulting compilation we see the exhausted reality. Weighed down by his singles, with vinyl crawling up the wall, the sweaty and uncomfortable musician looks much more than his 28 years. Serves him fucking right.

From the hard to make out lyrics (“They called the clip a two-headed cow / Your hate clipped and distant, your luck, pilgrimage,”) through to the murky, unattractive cover art – nothing is made too easy on R.E.M.’s debut album.

R.E.M. were clearly not interested in perfection but rather the interesting tensions that came from ambiguity, originality and raw energy. The producer was to be Stephen Hague but the band successfully fought to have him fired after they found his obsession with technical perfection stifling.

When Murmur was released, it was praised by critics as an instant classic and reinforced Athens as one of the most exciting music scenes in the country. Only the fifth largest city in Georgia, Athens was a student town experiencing a creative explosion. As Josh Jackson writes in Paste Magazine, while “Athens wasn’t a one-horse town, neither was it Greenwich Village or San Francisco…But there’s something about a college town nestled in some small corner of rural America that ignites creativity in kids who grow up in towns like Macon, Ga., or Collinsville, Ill., and discover that there actually are others out there who share their passion for music, film or art.”

“Other college towns… would eventually get their moment. But in 1983, the spotlight was on Athens, thanks to R.E.M.’s full-length debut, Murmur.” Bands to have come out of Athens include the B-52’s, Indigo Girls, The Whigs and Drive-By Truckers.

Murmer’s cover art is a grainy tribute to the Southern landscape – one that is slowly being swallowed by kudzu, the agricultural nuisance you see on the cover. Imported from Japan, kudzu was originally considered exotic until it took on the qualities of an indestructible weed.

On the back cover of the record, we see a sepia-toned photo of a disused trestle, which was once part of the Georgia Railroad line into downtown Athens.

Before long, it was referred to as the “Murmur Trestle” by proud locals and, much like other landmark covers we discussed recently, became a point of pilgrimage for loyal fans.

In 2000 moves were made demolish it. But after a public outcry, which stressed not only the trestle’s importance in pop culture but also heritage value, the Athens-Clarke County Mayor and Commission voted to save the trestle in October 2000.

If R.E.M.’s portrait of its hometown is far from flattering, depicting a milieu riddled with overgrowth and crumbling infrastructure, it also originated the band’s policy of avoiding their own portraits on sleeves. As Pitchfork notes, the “group pointedly didn’t appear on its album covers or inner sleeves; instead, R.E.M. remained confident that a kudzu-covered ravine or a folk-art painting could speak more strongly about their music than their own presence ever could.”

Murmur was considered a commercial disappointment upon release and to date has only been certified gold (500,000 units). At the same time, it was named by Rolling Stone as the Best Album of 1983, pulling ahead of competition that included Thriller and U2’s War.

In 1996 R.E.M. re-signed with Warner Bros. for a reported $80 million in one of the biggest recording deals ever. In 2007 they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Starting out small and exotic worked for the band, whose eventual dominance proved as irresistible as the kudzu claiming their homeland.

The moment I saw this cover, my first question was whether that hair was real. When close inspection indicated that it was real, my next question was: where did they find this guy? The answer is that these are not models –  they’re the group.

The gentleman you see before you, with his proud man-mane, is Jarrod Zlatic. He and band mate Nisa Venerosa are the Fabulous Diamonds, a Melbourne-based group that create soundscapes with reverbed vocal and dub and organ and saxaphone and lots of other noises. 7 Songs (they’re all untitled) was recorded over 2 days in a warehouse and represents the best stuff to come out of their acclaimed live gigs in 2007.

They’ve developed a loyal and passionate following and have recently toured the States. While the music isn’t exactly my thing, I love this cover. On the weekend I was talking to a girl who’d just told an ex that he should get his back hair lasered off. She said that this was a selfless service for the future women in his life.

It made me reflect on man hair a little. During my teenage years I waited for some facial hair to appear and elevate me to a new level of mature sophistication. Instead I remained doggedly hairless as friends around me transformed into veritable chia pets. Even now in my twenties I can skip shaving for weeks and simply develop one of those patchy Asian-man beards that just look shifty on a white guy.

So I’ve been too immersed in my own hairless existence to really think about life on the opposite extreme; that of the man covered in thick curly fur. So far as I know, Venerosa and Zlatic are not a couple, however this cover speaks beautifully of those couples that won’t allow a man’s “sadness sweater” to come between them.

The lovely portrait was taken by Karl Scullin, of the much admired Kes Band.

In researching the plight of the hairy gentleman, I came across a hilarious and self-deprecating post by a young man name Jason, who argued that: “Hairy men take women that the mainstream would consider “unattractive” and make them wives and mothers.” He goes on to name “Harry Truman, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Barbara, Robin Williams and an abundance of other notable people” who have “all shared in this dirty secret.”

By coming out of the hairy closet, Zlatic has not only struck a blow for the unwaxed but also created the best Aussie album cover I’ve seen in ages.

This is the fifth in our series of five seminal album covers by female artists

I’m pretty sure my Dad had a really big crush on Rickie Lee Jones. Her name resonates for me because he was a huge music fan and started buying CDs when the format was released. He bought all of hers as soon as they were reissued and I vividly remember looking at this cover when I was a kid and listening to her biggest hit Chuck E.’s in Love.

It turns out that my Dad was not alone in his affections. In researching this cover, I’ve come across plenty of love letters to the Jones that appeared on the scene in 1979, with her alluring air of hipster cool. Blogger Al Barger puts it this way: “Obviously, Rickie was THE ultimate romantic fantasy object of any cool guy my age…The time less spiritual of my classmates were spending concentrating on the Farrah Fawcett poster or some such, I spent enthralled with that album cover with the beret and chewing on the cigar.”

At the time she was in a relationship with one of the only guys on the planet who could match her in the cool stakes (and shot for shot). Jones and Tom Waits were known as rock music’s “bohemian couple”. The first sleeve she ever featured on was Wait’s 1978 Blue Valentine and the photos on the back cover make for an image that is even parts trashy and alluring.

A quote on the Tom Waits Library provides more detail about their romance: “The first time I saw Rickie Lee she reminded me of Jayne Mansfield. I thought she was extremely attractive, which is to say that my first reactions were rather primitive – primeval even. Her style onstage was appealing and arousing, sorta like that of a sexy white spade. She was drinking a lot then [1977] and I was too, so we drank together. You can learn a lot about a woman by getting smashed with her.”

Getting smashed was something that the young and beautiful Jones was extremely keen on and it would be naïve to suggest that her aura of cool wasn’t sustained by rampant self-destruction. In 1979 she staged a remarkable breakout, with a single and an album in the Billboard Top Five and five Grammy nominations. She even made the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine (the issue that sold like hotcakes).

Time Magazine dubbed her ‘The Duchess of Coolsville’. She was greeted with the kind of critical and commercial adulation enjoyed by Amy Winehouse – and I make that comparison in more ways than one. In recent interviews, she has talked about “using drugs to the extent that you know this time you might die. Whereas some people seem able to take dope a little bit for their whole lives, they are not going to take it to their demise. And those of us who are addicts are in great danger because nothing is ever enough.”

The photo and cover design are by Norman Seeff, who was responsible for Playing Possum sleeve and for the portrait of Mitchell used on the Hejira cover. I realise that this series of covers by women artists has also become something of a Seeff retrospective as well, which is testament to how incredibly in demand we was in the seventies. It’s well worth visiting his site to gawk at all the famous faces that he has helped to immortalize.

In this portrait of Jones, he creates a bohemian and jazzy atmosphere that evokes the music on the album. An article in The Guardian perfectly describes the appeal of this album cover, which “became iconic – the hollowed cheeks, beatnik beret, dangling cheroot; she looked so cool.” But for a beautiful woman in her mid-twenties her face is far too care-worn and gaunt. Her focus is exclusively on her smoke and the intensity with which she regards it tells you much of her compulsive nature. It’s not clear whether the beautiful light behind her denotes sunrise or sunset – but if it’s morning you assume she hasn’t been to bed and if it’s evening that she’s just woken up.

She could be Winehouse or Cat Power, or even Courtney Love, but perhaps she was one of the first women to realise (even subconsciously) that her weaknesses could become her brand; her addiction her hallmark.

Another famous cover from the 1979 was Marianne Faithfull’s Broken English, who had a substantial head start grappling with addiction.

Faithful seems to be holding the cigarette more out of habit than anything else and the blown out lighting and gesture instantly brings to mind the squinting pain we all feel doing the “walk of shame” after a big night. It’s just that her big night had been going for over a decade.

Today, both Jones and Faithfull are clean. They are still writing, recording and performing music. Former ‘it’ girls, they are now something far more admirable – battle-scarred survivors who have seemingly wrestled their demons and come out on top.

The most notable thing about Mos Def’s fourth solo album is that it’s available as a t-shirt. He’s become the first artist to endorse The Original Music Tee™, a concept that’s pretty damn clever. Basically, you buy the t-shirt with the cover art on the front and the tracklist on the back and it comes with a hangtag featuring a unique code that allows you to download the album in MP3 format.

This makes a lot of sense to me. The idea of being able to express your support for an artists’ new album by literally wearing the cover kind of works. You get to make an addition to your wardrobe and your iTunes at the same time. This combination of music and fashion might even serve to put an emphasis back on the importance of cover art design. If people are meant to wear it, designers won’t be able to dial it in.

It works for girls too, because they can slip one on and look just like this.

My only problem with the proposed format is that the t-shirt costs twice the price of simply downloading the album, which kind of defeats the purpose. After all, it’s always been possible to buy the album and then buy the official t-shirt – if they want to change music-buying behaviour they’ll probably need to offer better value rather than rely on novelty.

And while The Original Music Tee™ could hypothetically re-introduce the importance of cover art design, then it could also change it forever. After all, cover art has always been defined by the limitations of a square CD or record cover. T-shirt design is something else entirely.

The cover for The Ecstatic, which is also available through iTunes, sticks with tradition. The image is taken from the film Killer of Sheep, an underground cinema masterpiece set in an LA ghetto in the late seventies. Shot on less than $10,000, it’s gritty realism and low budget meant that it never gained a wide release.

Nonetheless, most who saw it became passionate advocates and, after it’s initial release in 1977, it went on the win the 1981 Berlin International Film Festival. In 2007 it was re-released in art cinemas and on DVD to mark its thirtieth anniversary.

It’s always good to see the designers behind classic album covers getting critical and commercial recognition. And few designers could boast of a career as celebrated and prolific as Storm Thorgerson.

Taken By Storm: The Album Art of Storm Thorgerson was published by Vision On in 2007. It’s a selection of some of his best work from the past 30 years. The book also spawned a traveling exhibition of the same name.

Sleeve lovers in Brisbane can still catch Taken by Storm, which is showing at Artisan Gallery until August 1.

The same show toured to Sydney at the Global Gallery last December. For more information about this legend of cover art, there’s a nice article in the Courier Mail and an interesting interview that featured in in Time Out Sydney from late last year.

This is the fourth in our series of five seminal album covers by female artists

Parallel Lines, the third album by Blondie, was released in late 1978. By 1979, when they were finally huge in the States, the band felt the need to start a “Blondie is a Group” button campaign. Even for those discovering the band’s considerable appeal today, it’s so easy to think of Blondie as Debbie Harry and her backing band.

This is of course disrespectful to the musicians that created some of the best pop songs of all time – but it probably has more to do with Harry’s diaphanous star quality than any shortcoming on behalf of the others. A talented songwriter, confident performer and irresistible vocalist, she’s one of those few that manage to genuinely walk the: “women want to be her, men want to be with her” tightrope. As Rolling Stone puts it, she “invented a new kind of rock & roll appeal that brought New York demimonde style to the mainstream”. I was reading a book about the birth of hip hop which suggested that if graffiti tributes were the measure, then Harry was certainly the number one sex-symbol in the Bronx.

When Parallel Lines was being recorded, Blondies’ Machiavellian manager Peter Leeds was well aware who his meal ticket was. “I was not fond of Peter” Harry told Q magazine “He told the boys that they could all be replaced, I was the only important one.” While the cover for Parallel Lines is widely regarded as an iconic classic, ironically for the band it’s a symbol of manipulation and contributed to the dropping of Leeds as manager. “I don’t think it’s a great design, personally” says Harry.

The story revealed in Q’s “The 100 Best Record Covers of All Time” is really interesting and not at all what you’d expect. Apparently the band were sold on the idea that they would fade in and out of the stripes, which was the one element they liked. The facial expressions – Harry’s sexy as hell scowl contrasted with the guys’ goofy grins – were also Leeds’ idea. According to Harry, he tricked them into pulling the expressions once and then proceeded to make the cover without showing them.

“Everyone just flipped out” Harry said “We were shocked that the artwork had been completed without our approval and that the decision had been made without the band.”

It was the final straw and Leeds was replaced by Alice Copper’s manager Shep Gordon. But at least the duo-chromatic cover, with the guys either predicting Reservoir Dogs or remembering the mod craze of the 60’s, featured the whole band. Singles artwork would be even more selective.

Much has been made of Harry’s influence on future female artists but it’s also interesting to see the “Blondie is a Group” dilemma replayed with such striking regularly. Should a band with a charismatic female lead singer resent the fact that she gets the lion’s share of the attention – or just be grateful for the attention?

Or is this just something that many bands have to deal with regardless of gender – after all, when most people think of Blur isn’t it Damon Albarn that comes to mind?

This is the third in our series of five seminal album covers by female artists

Much of Joni Mitchell’s best music concerns travel. Her classic record Blue opens with the line “I am on a lonely road and I am travelling”, while in the following tracks Carey and This Flight Tonight she leaves her lover for the allure of new adventures. In Court and Spark we meet the hero of Free Man in Paris, who misses life overseas when he was “unfettered and alive”. Hejira – a transliteration of the Arabic word for “journey” – takes this obsession with itchy feet to its logical conclusion. “I wrote the album while traveling cross-country by myself and there is this restless feeling throughout it” she explained.

The sleeve for Hejira is a great example of cover art that perfectly fits the music. Mitchell, who was a painter before she became a musician, designed it herself (we looked at a couple of her other covers in the post for The Shepherd’s Dog). “I trained as a commercial artist, as well as a fine artist. So when I began to record albums, I thought album art was a great way to keep both careers alive.”

For me, the photo  collage on the cover, with its empty road and forbidding but beautiful landscape, so aptly captures both the loneliness and glamour of solitary travel.

The icy background is from a 1976 Joel Bernstein photoshoot of Mitchell ice-skating on a frozen lake. She had just played a gig at the college town of Madison when a massive series of storms ripped through town. Mitchell decided to make the most of the misty, frozen surfaces of Lake Mendota for an impromptu shoot.

“When Joni awoke”, it recounts on her website “she donned a pair of black men’s skates, a long black skirt and a fur cape, took a limo to the lake’s edge and managed to conquer bitter winds and an already thawing, spongy ice while Joel took the pics.”

Images from this shoot would later be re-used for the 2005 compilation album Songs of a Prairie Girl.

The glamour shot of Joni’s face, with its impassive and confident expression, was taken in a studio later by Norman Seeff, the same photographer responsible for Playing Possum by Carly Simon. “Norman used a very difficult and strange psychological process,” says Mitchell. “He’d shoot forever and tried to get a shot of everyone he worked with crying. A lot of people cracked and didn’t go back. He could be a cruel overlord, but he took great photographs.”

Be it skating on thin ice or facing down an intimidating photographer, the road Mitchell travelled may have been at times lonely but it was seldom boring.

This is the second in our series of five seminal album covers by female artists

A lot of us have wanted to put Bono in his place from time to time. On the weekend I was reading a disturbing feature story on Bono, depicting him walking through Washington’s corridors of power, seemingly without the need for security clearance; every door on both sides of politics open to him. Fawning politicians lined up to tell the reporter that “you couldn’t say no to Bono”. Bono – who so happily mistakes record buyers for constituents and hates poverty as much as he does taxes – was depicted as half-saint, half-pop star.

So you would it would think it would have come as some honour when in 1997 Bono introduced Smith at a music magazine award ceremony as a “sister, lover, and mother”. Instead, accepting the award she said: “I’m not your mother, Bono. Do your own dirty work. Fuck you.” She later told NME that she found the statement “presumptuous”.

I recycle this minor controversy because this formidable attitude is embodied by the cover of Smith’s 1975 debut Horses. It’s an album that contains the unforgettable opening gambit: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine” and forever cemented her reputation as the godmother of punk.

A keen proponent of independent theatre and performance poetry, she moved to New York in the late 60’s. Shortly afterwards she met art student Robert Mapplethorpe and by 1970 they were sharing the smallest room in the legendary Chelsea Hotel.

“We used to stay up all night,” Mapplethorpe said, “and she would do her thing and I would do my thing, and then we’d take a break and smoke a cigarette and look at each other’s work.”

Mapplethorpe ended up making his mark as a photographer and I remember studying the controversy his work caused in university. By the 80’s his main theme was interracial homoeroticism, which naturally baited the “moral majority” so empowered by Reagen’s ascendancy.

(Why this shot wasn’t used as the sleeve for the 80’s hit Ebony and Ivory I’ll never know.) His confronting work inspired a heated debate about government funding for the arts, of which Mapplethorpe was a recipient.

But before all the furor, in 1975, he had only just acquired a Hasselblad medium-format camera and started taking photographs of his friends and acquaintances. In the case of this image, the same sense challenge to gender norms is present. The man’s suit and defensive posture work at contrast with the confidence of Smith’s gaze and the delicacy of her hands to create something new. This isn’t the glam, make-up wearing, cross-dressing androgyny that Bowie had popularised.

Taken with only natural light, the cover emphasises a stark reality. The record company tried to touch the photo up and remove Smith’s hairy upper lip but she wasn’t having it.

There’s also an electric sense that this was the last moment of quiet before both Mapplethorpe and Smith lost their anonymity. They would both see plenty more hotel rooms in their high-profile lives, but never the shared poverty, intimacy and inspiration of the Chelsea Hotel.

Mapplethorpe died of AIDS complications in 1989 (various prayer circles probably high-fived) and in 1996 Smith wrote a book called The Coral Sea dedicated to her dear friend.

Today she still continues to record, write poetry and tour. As Bono very graciously responded after her outburst in 1997, “she never let’s you down.”

This is the first in our series of five seminal album covers by female artists

Carly Simon lead the life of 70′s dreams. The daughter of Richard L. Simon, a cultural mogul and musician, and Andrea Simon, a civil rights activist and singer, she had the perfect lineage to take a leading part in an era of progression and creative explosion.

She dated Cat Stevens, Warren Beatty, Mick Jagger and Kris Kristofferson before marrying James Taylor, another successful singer-songwriter. In fact so prolific was her list of famous and egocentric ex-boyfriends that it still remains a mystery who she wrote “You’re So Vain” about.

As a multi-award winning chart topper, she was a part of the early 70′s group of important female singer-songwriters that included Carole King and Joni Mitchell.

1975′s Playing Possum was a commercial disappointment and the album that put an end her chart domination. Today it also doubles as one of the most important record covers of all time and a great example of the power of a talented photographer and a brave subject.

Simon’s previous covers had been forgettable, showcasing her good looks and natural appeal in unremarkable settings.

No one expected that one year after Hotcakes the happily-married mother of one would reappear in nothing but negligee, fuck-me boots and a pair of stockings. Oh – and in a rather suggestive pose that brings to mind fellatio.

As it happens, neither did she. Simon arrived at the studio of legendary photographer Norman Seeff wearing an outfit that was consistent with her previous image. As she tells it, after a couple of glasses of wines, “Norman said: ‘Well don’t you have something on under that?”

It all sounds a little creepy – like the beginning of a bad (or possibly really excellent) porno. But keep in mind that this was one of the world’s most famous pop stars: there was no imbalance of power. In the resulting shoot Simon got “caught in the moment. I was dancing, I was all over the place… I was being Martha Graham.”

A transformation from squeaky clean singer to uber-sexualised vixen has become a cliche for many female (and indeed male) pop stars. A couple of raunchy shoots and some suggestive lyrics and you’ve graduated to an “edgy, adult artist.” In 1975 it was something else entirely.

With the cover of Playing Possum, the personally contented Simon embraced her sensuality and gave expression to a key part of herself.

There was no stylist on hand or rack of lingerie to choose from, she simply peeled off a layer and let go. While the front cover’s clenched fists speak of power and containment, the back cover is an equally telling image. Her smile and joy seem far more natural than the previous covers.