2010 01 Royal Mail Stamps

UNDER THE COVERS

Every picture tells a story. Especially when it comes to classic album art...

Rolling Stones Let It Bleed

By the time Robert Brownjohn came to design the anarchic sleeve for Let It Bleed, the American-born graphic designer had already made his mark by working on large-scale commercial projects for the likes of Pepsi, as well as creating the title sequences for James Bond movies, From Russia With Love and Goldfinger. His pop-art sensibilities were brought to bear on the Stones’s 1969 effort, Brownjohn’s sleeve sculpture being based on the initial title of ‘Automatic Charger’ - hence the cover shot suggesting a fully stacked record player - and augmented by the cake imagery of then-unknown cook, Delia Smith.

Led Zeppelin Led Zeppelin IV

Guitarist Jimmy Page’s quest for “total anonymity" meant that the world’s biggest rock band released their fourth album without the merest of mentions of their name on its cover. One executive at Atlantic, the band’s label, described this as “commercial suicide”. In fact, 32 million people disagreed. The focal point of the gatefold sleeve was a painting of a faggot-bearing old man (found by singer Robert Plant in a Reading junk shop, according to Page), which was nailed to a wall of a partially demolished house overlooking a bleak Dudley landscape dominated by a high-rise. For all its alleged mystique, the sleeve was Zeppelin’s own ecological statement.

David Bowie The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars

These days Heddon Street, a cul-de-sac off Regent Street in London’s West End, boasts a number of gastro eateries. It is not the kind of place you would expect an alien to land. And yet, on a miserable, cold February evening in 1972, photographer Brian Ward helped to conceptualise David Bowie’s notion of the same-styled visitor seduced by the trappings of excess, fame and flamboyant ambiguity. The result is a sleeve - designed under the watchful eye of Bowie’s ex-King Bee bandmate and friend George Underwood, with artwork by Terry Pastor, both of Main Artery - that juxtaposes glam hedonism with backstreet grime, equally reflecting the pronouncements of ‘Moonage Daydream’ and ‘Starman’.

Mike Oldfield Tubular Bells

There was a vague notion of calling the album ‘Breakfast in Bed’. Then Mike Oldfield listened back to Vivian Stanshall’s spoken-word introduction of each instrument that closes Part One (and Side One) of this two-track effort. “Tubular bells!” enunciated Stanshall brightly, providing the album with its title and triggering Oldfield’s idea for the artwork. Designer and photographer Trevor Key - the man who scrawled the second and now ubiquitous Virgin logo on a restaurant napkin during a fortuitous lunch with Richard Branson - brought Oldfield's concept to life, creating a Magritte-inspired image from bent chromed metal piping, which he photographed then cut out over a melodramatic shot taken on the south coast. The effect, visually and musically, proved to be monolithic.

The Clash London Calling

While The Clash rode in on a punk ticket, their listening habits revealed them to be rock’n’roll purists armed with open minds. Their third album London Calling confirmed as much, serving up a heady brew of soul, reggae, funk and rock’n’roll swagger. As if to emphasise their traditionalism, maverick cartoonist Ray Lowry - who had joined the band on tour during their US tour in September 1979, where Bo Diddley was one of their support acts - designed this sleeve, paying homage to Elvis Presley’s debut album which captured him in full hip-thrusting form. Pennie Smith’s shot of Paul Simonon smashing his Fender Precision bass on stage at the New York City Palladium during the band’s legendary Take The Fifth tour remains one of rock’s defining images, and one that the perennially understated photographer has grown to like. “I just didn’t think it was right for a sleeve at the time," she says. “Now, after all this time, it’s OK.”

New Order Power, Corruption and Lies

A graduate of Manchester Polytechnic in 1978, Peter Saville’s love of both modernism and classicism was immediately evident on his seminal work which adorned Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures and Closer respectively - the first featuring a pulsing line image from the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy, the second a funereal scene of Christ entombed. As Factory Records’ art director he drew on minimalism and romance in equal measure, a point borne out on Power, Corruption and Lies via his juxtaposition of French realist painter, Henri Fantin-Latour’s A Basket of Roses and a colour-coded alphabet strip denoting the album as product. “I was saying, ‘Can’t pop culture embrace a wider spectrum of references?”’ he told MOJO magazine, explaining the idealism behind his approach.

Primal Scream Screamadelica

Former commercial printer and one-time milkman, Paul Cannell was never formally schooled in graphic design. Deeply inspired by Picasso, he sought refuge in painting and in his mid 20s became the in-house artist for both the Heavenly and Creation labels, setting up a studio in the latter’s Hackney offices. There, fuelled by the pre-Britpop bohemia that surrounded him, he created Primal Scream’s most iconic sleeve - the child-like, primary colours of his misshaped sun matching the impressionistic, post-rave psychedelic sensibilities of the music it housed.

Pink Floyd The Division Ball

It may not be as iconic as the prism artwork that accompanied 1973's The Dark Side of the Moon, but the sleeve creation for Pink Floyd’s 1994 album, The Division Bell, was far more extravagant in terms of production and execution. The gigantic metal heads depicted on Storm Thorgerson's CD artwork were drawn by Keith Breeden and sculpted by John Robertson, standing over nine feet tall and weighing more than a family car. These gargantuan objects were lifted to a field in Cambridgeshire where they were photographed over a two-week period. The dramatic outcome proved fitting for what would ultimately turn out to be Pink Floyd’s last studio outing - a 12-million-selling swan song at that.

Blur Parklife

Despite their Colchester roots, Blur were inspired by the very essence of London. Their third album, Parklife - allegedly part-influenced by Damon Albarn’s enthusiasm for Martin Amis’s 1989 novel, London Fields - was a sign of that, its geezerish charm accentuated by its laddish sleeve depicting a pair of greyhounds captured mid-race by photographer Bob Thomas. Designed by Chris Thomson (whose association with Blur harks back to their 1992 'Popscene' single, the sleeve for which he designed while on work placement at Rob O’Connor’s Stylorouge design hot-house), the cover itself is now regarded with mixed feelings by the band, with guitarist Graham Coxon exemplifying their ambivalence by stating, “It’s all intellect and no soul,” and adding, “but it’s also sensational, graphic and perfect”.

Coldplay A Rush of Blood to the Head

Seemingly unable to fulfil his dream of becoming a gainfully employed photographer in his native Norway, Solve Sundsbo came to England, graduated from the London College of Printing and spent four years assisting fashion photographer Nick Knight before developing his own hyper-real style. The shot he took that graces the cover of Coldplay’s second album was originally commissioned by Dazed and Confused magazine before being appropriated by the band. “Chris Martin saw the image and said, ‘I want that on my album cover.’ So they called me up and told me,” explains Sundsbo.

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HIPGNOSIS

1968. The year that Royal Mail introduced the first class stamp, comedy show Dad’s Army hit the small screen for the first time, Britain’s first heart transplant was carried out at a London hospital, and £80 would buy around 1600 pints of milk at a shilling each.

Eighty pounds would also buy you a sleeve designed by Hipgnosis, the company formed by Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell who, in that year, designed the sleeve for Pink Floyd’s A Saucerful of Secrets for that less-than-princely sum. The duo’s inaugural offering marked the start of a remarkable creative run that would last up until 1982 and which produced a unique body of work.

In many respects, the work undertaken by Hipgnosis confirmed the album sleeve as an artistic arena in its own right, the duo’s conceptual interpretation of the music setting new standards in design adventurism. Unlike most other graphic designers, Hipgnosis did not focus on the use of typography. Instead, it was the image that did most of the work. And the image itself had to be bold, striking, imaginative, sensual and mischievous, providing what Thorgerson calls “a daily departure from reality.”

According to Thorgerson, Floyd’s A Saucerful of Secrets was a multi-layered “attempt to represent the swirling, dreamlike visions of various altered states of consciousness, religious experience, or Pink Floyd music.” A suitably cosmic piece of design, its sea of interplanetary swirls framed a tiny, off-centred shot of the band taken in Richmond Park. Three years later, with such humble beginnings long in the past and now with several more sleeves for artists that included Quatermass, The Pretty Things and T Rex under his belt, Thorgerson was able to give rein to a far more grandiose vision as he and ‘Po’ prepared to create a sleeve for neo-classical prog rockers The Nice for their forthcoming Elegy album.

“We suggested to the record company the then-unheard of idea of them flying us to the Sahara so we could take a photo of the desert in which we placed a line of red footballs acquired in a kasbah in Marrakesh. We did it and it worked,” explains Storm.

For Hipgnosis in general - and for Thorgerson in particular - the execution of that particular concept spawned a modus operandi that appeared to bring the work of their heroes Rene Magritte and Salvador Dali to life. While the latter duo reflected on both the mundane and the surreal through painted art, Thorgerson and his Hipgnosis acolytes created scenes that were as real as they were fantastic. The sleeve for Led Zeppelin’s 1973 album, Houses of the Holy, is a fine example of this, the original idea of a more extravagant shoot on the Nazca Plains in Peru, having been scrapped in favour of a less glamorous trek to the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland with a bunch of blond-haired children in tow. The effect of Aubrey Powell’s hand-tinted photograph is both striking and mysterious, stretching as it does across the gatefold sleeve without any type to disturb the image’s eerie impact. The overall effect alludes to the worship of a higher power that is as potent as it is imprecise.

If the sleeve to Houses of the Holy is relatively grand in its creation and execution, that of Zeppelin’s 1976 album, Presence, focuses more on the mundane. This time, the listener is confronted with a normal fifties-styled two-child family sitting round a dinner table gazing admiringly at a black obelisk-shaped “cosmic battery”, “spiritual relic” or “alien artefact” which is placed in the centre. The objects cast no shadow, suggesting what Thorgerson describes as “an absence rather than a presence”. As such, the sleeve itself exudes a sense of mystery and a deeper quality, something which Thorgerson again believes is matched by “the band, their music and their reputation”.

In fact, if much of Thorgerson’s work - both with Hipgnosis and subsequently with his current set-up at Storm Studios - is inspired by the music itself, it stems back to his relationship with Pink Floyd.

Born in Potters Bar, Thorgerson grew up in Cambridge and attended the same school as Syd Barrett and Roger Waters. His association with the duo developed further when he attended the Royal College of Art in London at the same time as the pair began to develop their vision for Pink Floyd. Thorgerson was present during the turbulent time that followed the release of the band’s debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, which saw Barrett endure a breakdown and subsequently leave the band. While Thorgerson’s journey as one of the principal architects of Floyd’s iconography began in earnest once Syd had left the group, he, like the band members themselves, is haunted by Barrett’s collapse and was present when the band’s former singer visited his ex-colleagues at Abbey Road during the recording of Wish You Were Here in 1975. The album itself is of course Pink Floyd's own paean to their fallen leader, a point mirrored once again in the complex artwork that houses the LP, the original version of which came housed in a funereal black plastic wrap.

“All the pictures refer to absence in one form or another," says Thorgerson on the subject of the artwork. “The burning man (on the front cover) is absent metaphorically - too frightened to be present, lest he be burned.”

In truth, Wish You Were Here is just one of many Floyd sleeves where the band’s own concept is accentuated through the visuals that accompany it, the abstraction involved in the imagery echoing the group’s own cinematic music.

In Thorgerson’s view, it is the band’s own complex worldview that is being reflected through his own highly charged images. “The Floyd were interested in atmosphere, emotions, politics, war, drugs, girls... A simple picture of them on the cover every time wouldn’t have represented that,” he says.

Most iconic of all of Floyd’s images is the prism-led concept created by the Hipgnosis team for the 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon. In relative terms, however, this is one of the simpler sleeves that Thorgerson has been involved in. At least it is in comparison to that which he created for A Momentary Lapse of Reason in 1987, which saw him place 700 cast-iron hospital beds on Saunton Sands, Devon, in order to translate guitarist David Gilmour’s lyric (“visions of empty beds”) into reality. The shoot had to be done twice, rain interfering on the first day, and forcing the entire project to postponed for two weeks. Fittingly, Thorgerson now views the whole affair as “madness”. Nevertheless, it was not enough to stop him from creating a further monolithic piece of art for Floyd’s 1994 album, The Division Bell.

It is this sense of the epic, the adventurous and the absurd that has driven Thorgerson onwards and which appears to continue to excite him. His most recent work includes elaborations wrth artists-as diverse as Muse, Phish, Ween, Audioslave and The Mars Volta. Moreover, across four decades he has created some of rock’s most lasting images. And in most cases, these images say more about the music than the band ever can.

“What does a picture of a band on the sleeve tell you?” concludes Storm. “It tells you what they look like, but it doesn’t tell you what they sound like or what’s in them. That’s what I’ve wanted to do all along.”

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The iconic image of Nipper the dog gazing into a phonogram's horn in an attempt to discover the source of his master's voice, exemplifies the relationship between music and the artwork that accompanies it. Painted in Liverpool by artist Francis Barraud in 1899, the picture draws on the principal emotions associated with music: mystery, evocation and romance. It is these three sentiments that have in turn helped define the art of the album sleeve as the format has developed during the last seven decades.

The Birth of Cool

Sleeve artwork emerged in 1939 in a bid to elevate music about its status as a mere commodity, 78s being sold at the time in grocery stores. While the pioneer of the record cover was New Yorker Alex Steinweiss - who, aged 23, became art director of Columbia Records in the US - in the UK the notion of a picture sleeve for popular artists took a little longer to evolve. Nevertheless, as the 1950s dawned Decca, the company founded by former stockbroker Edward Lewis in 1929, saw the value in housing their EPs in sleeves that reflected their content.

A key release consisted of The Lonnie Donegan Skiffle Group, whose first four-track EP recorded in 1954 featured a line drawing of a chain-gang worker in a bid to evoke the reinterpreted folk-blues songs it contained.

Rock Island Line

Even though this recording is credited to The Lonnie Donegan Skiffle Group, making him a star on both sides of the Atlantic, Donegan actually played on it as a member of Chris Barber's Jazz Band, with Barber on bass and Beryl Bryden on washboard.

The Tommy Steele Story - No. 1

Taken from the 1957 film of the same name, which tells the true story of the meteoric rise to fame of Britain's first rock n' roll star. Steele was discovered by Decca Records in 1956, singing at the 2i’s coffee bar in London.

While in the US the likes of Jim Flora, Bob Jones and Reid Miles were credited for their work (most of which was created for jazz artists), most UK sleeves remained unattributed, being designed by seemingly homogenous in-house design departments. The advent of rock'n'roll ushered in a new audience who demanded something more direct: rather than the abstraction associated with jazz, they wanted to see their idols, hence the energy reflected on the cover of Elvis Presley's 1956 debut. A year later Tommy Steele, Britain's first rock star, matched the pose on the sleeve that accompanied The Tommy Steele Story - No. 1. Steele's stance may have been a little more polite, but it confirmed that pop marketing via the record sleeve had well and truly arrived...

From Pop to Pop Art

THE DAWN OF THE 60S SAW POST-WAR AUSTERITY DIMINISH IN FAVOUR OF A NEW SENSE OF FREEDOM - PERSONAL, SOCIAL, SEXUAL, AND MUSICAL, THE LATTER CONFIRMING THE UK AS A POP NEXUS. THIS BRAVE NEW AGE WAS CHARACTERISED BY THE OPENING OF THE FIRST SUPERMARKETS, THE LAUNCH OF THE AUDIO CASSETTE, THE ARRIVAL OF THE INTERCITY TRAIN, AND THE TELEVISUAL REVOLUTION. BRITAIN'S FEEL-GOOD FACTOR WAS FURTHER UNDERLINED BY THE GLORIOUS WORLD CUP WIN OF 1966.

A Girl Called Dusty

While the album consisted mainly of covers, its art was highly original. The casual denim-shirt look was shocking in an age when a pretty dress for young female singers was very much the norm. It's a look that has been much copied since, however.

"Painters weren't offered the opportunities to do album sleeves," says Sir Peter Blake, describing the period prior to his creation of the landmark 1967 artwork for The Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Over a decade after the release of Elvis Presley's debut, the Sgt Pepper's album is a high water mark in terms of both creativity and as a cultural signifier. The positioning of John Lennon, Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney and George Harrison in a firmament that includes everyone from Marilyn Monroe to Dr Livingstone via Karl Marx confirms pop music's import as the most significant artistic force of the post-war generation.

Furthermore, the sleeve to  Sgt Pepper's  is a far cry from the image projected four years earlier by The Beatles, who grinned down nonchalantly at the listener from the cover of their debut album Please Please Me , on the balcony staircase at EMI's Manchester Square HQ. It highlights just how pop music had begun to view itself, its immediacy translated into something far more tangential.

Disraeli Gears

An icon of 60s psychedelia, the album art is regarded as an LSD-influenced masterpiece by many. The title is said to have come from a Cream roadie’s mispronunciation of a bicycle's 'derailleur gears', inadvertently bringing Benjamin Disraeli to mind.

Sir Peter Blake The man who Peppered the 60s and beyond

Who were your key artistic influences?

In the early days it was David Stone Martin and his work for various jazz labels. Ben Shahn did a couple I liked and Andy Warhol later. It was that kind of broken line drawing of the 50s. In more traditional terms, it was people like Velasquez, Degas and Vermeer. Anything that's real. That's what I’m interested in: the illusion of reality. That's what I tried to do with what people called Pop Art, although that needs defining in itself.

The Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is obviously a good example of what became Pop Art. How do you view its impact?

I get about six copies of the album sent to me every week to sign! It's kind of an albatross, but it's become iconic. Album design is now more complicated. I think Sgt Pepper is simple and quite clumsy, but I'm proud to have done it. It has a handmade feel that gives it a lot of its quality.

Which other artists do you admire?

Storm Thorgerson is extraordinary. There's no use of Photoshop with him. If there are 100 beds on a beach on a sleeve then you know he's actually put 100 beds on a beach. I also like Peter Saville, and I love Barney Bubbles. He was a genius. His work with Ian Dury and the Blockheads is just brilliant.

Which of your ambitions have gone unfulfilled?

That's hard to say. Ten years ago I'd have said I wanted to do a cover for Brian Wilson, but I've done that with Getting In Over My Head. The Law Lords are moving into new courts and I've done the carpets for that, and I've been commissioned to do a painting of St Martin to hang in St Paul's, which is an honour. And I've also got about five books on the go, so I’m quite busy.

BBC Radio One DJs, September 1967 

Radio One's mission was to take music to the masses. It did so under the auspices of Young Turks including Tony Blackburn, Jimmy Young and Terry Wogan. John Peel is easy to pick out: but serious-looking Kenny Everett and future Blockbusters host Bob Holness are in there somewhere too.

While American designers such as Victor Moscoso and Stanley Mouse created a graphic vocabulary for psychedelia, in the UK pop art manifested itself through a number of different album sleeves. The Who's 1967 set Sell Out provided the listener with a snapshot of the consumerism of the time, art directors David King and Roger Law actually introducing product placement on the sleeve. So too Mick Swan's sleeve for the Small Faces' Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake, which featured echoes of consumerism while emphasising Britain's increasing fascination with its own past, replicating an old tobacco tin from 1899.

The Rolling Stones preferred something a little less sentimental - the original cover art for the 1968 album Beggars Banquet displayed photography of a graffiti-strewn lavatory. However the record company refused to distribute the LP with this sleeve design, so a plain white cover featuring the album and band name was released instead.

As the decade came to a close, in Britain the nascent Hipgnosis team of Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey 'Po' Powell, the oft-overlooked Marcus Keef and David Bowie's former bandmate George Underwood, all created sleeves that were both ambitious and grandiose which appeared to point the way towards a more opulent future.

The Who Sell Out 

The cover led to a welter of lawsuits from brands with infringement complaints. Roger Daltrey also ended up with pneumonia as a result of lying in a bath of frozen baked beans.

Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake 

Bass player Ronnie Lane came up with the idea to make this 1968 cover like a tobacco tin: and the makers of Ogdens’ Nut Brown Flake were happy for Mick Swan to reproduce their branding.

Ready Steady Go!

When it was launched in 1963 by ATV, pop-music shows were nothing new. What made Ready Steady Go! special was its arrival at the same time as artists like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Dusty Springfield. Never afraid to showcase new talent, RSG! also gave British TV debuts to artists including The Animals, The Kinks, Jimi Hendrix, Marvin Gaye, Sonny and Cher, and Martha Reeves and the Vandellas.

From Prog to Punk

Nursery Cryme

The third Genesis album was the first to feature Phil Collins, following his audition at Peter Gabriel's parents' house. Like Trespass before it and Foxtrot, which was to follow, the cover by Paul Whitehead depicts elements from songs on the album.

THE OPTIMISM OF THE 60s FADED AS THE 70s DAWNED, RESULTING IN A PERIOD CHARACTERISED BY GLOBAL RECESSION AND THE COLD WAR. IN BRITAIN THE POPULATION WAS HIT BY STRIKES AND THE THREE-DAY WEEK. THIS STATE OF FLUX ENCOURAGED AN OUTPOURING OF MUSICAL CREATIVITY WITH A STYLISTIC CHANGE FROM PROGRESSIVE ROCK TO PUNK AND HEAVY METAL, AND FROM SOUL TO DISCO AND REGGAE.

The decade began with the dissolution of The Beatles, following Paul McCartney's departure in April 1970. Though echoes of the 60s remained, the start of the 70s was characterised by music that became increasingly heavy and complex, but whose accompanying sleeves remained escapist.

Arguably the most opulent period in British graphic design, the progressive nature of the music was matched by the work of Roger Dean (whose fantastic landscapes graced the sleeves he designed for Yes, Budgie and Uriah Heep), Hipgnosis (the neo-surreal iconographers whose extravagant visions dressed albums by Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and, of course, Pink Floyd - including The Dark Side of the Moon ) and Paul Whitehead (the Charisma label's in-house artist responsible for sleeves by Genesis, Van Der Graaf Generator and Lindisfarne).

Most, if not all, of these designers were able to express themselves across not only the album sleeves, but also the extra packaging that accompanied the album, ranging from a gatefold offering to a poster-packed affair.

Roger Dean Cartographer of the supernatural 70s

Who were your key artistic influences? 

My answer is quite weird because I didn't study graphic design, I studied under David Pye at the Royal College of Art Furniture School, so I really didn't look to artists for inspiration. Then, by chance, I got a call to re-design the seating of Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club, which I did in about all of two weeks. That led to me designing my first record sleeve for a group called Gun and it went from there.

Your collaboration with bands such as Yes, Osibisa and Uriah Heep defined 70s album design. Which of your works are you most proud of?

If I had to narrow it down I would say Yes's Relayer (1974) and the sleeve for the first Asia album (1982) with the dragon on it. It went on to sell millions of copies, so it was quite a big deal for me. Oh, and I'm also very proud of the first two Osibisa albums.

When you create a sleeve do you listen to the music itself?

No, because a lot of the time the music isn't there to be heard. Instead, I talk to the band a lot. In the case of Yes, that became very useful because someone like (singer) Jon Anderson could always tell you about what inspired the music, so you could take it from there.

Which of your ambitions have gone unfulfilled? 

I have two ambitions. I set out to design buildings a while ago and I have three prototypes on the go, and I'd like to get those to a point where we could build them in serious quantities. The second is to actually walk on the landscapes that I have created throughout my career.

Tales from Topographic Oceans

Roger Dean encoded this cover with hidden patterns including historic stones from Avebury, Stonehenge and Land's End, and the band's star signs in the night sky above them.

The Dark Side of the Moon

George Hardie illustrated the refracting prism for this iconic sleeve which, sadly, can't be reproduced as a stamp due to its pure black background.

In the case of Pink Floyd’s 1975 concept album Wish You Were Here, the sleeve came wrapped in black plastic wrapping, an echo of its greater thematic expression of absence.

"I think we’d all learnt our lessons in the late 60s," comments Roger Dean. "And by the 70s we were able to express ourselves fully. Things got a little bigger in terms of the scale upon which we operated, but we also felt that we knew what was required and what would work."

But as Dean's partnership with Yes flourished and expanded, not everyone identified with the increasing indulgence of the musicians involved. And, while the mid 70s saw rock acts such as David Bowie, Roxy Music, Thin Lizzy and Mott the Hoople become superstars, as the decade unfolded a sense of disillusionment began to manifest itself among the younger generation. It was this restlessness and refusal that exploded through punk as the long, hot summer of 1976 effectively became Year Zero for the iconoclastic movement.

BY THE 70S THE MUSIC INDUSTRY HAD ARRIVED. ARTISTS AND BANDS HAD BIGGER AND BETTER BUDGETS AMD COULD EXPERIMENT. INNOVATION WAS EVERYWHERE, ALBUM SLEEVES BECAME ART DIRECTED.

"Overnight, punk destroyed the big budgets," explains Hipgnosis co-founder Aubrey ’Po’ Powell. "Record companies realised you could get yourself an album cover for two pounds."

One British designer who straddled the worlds of both progressive music and punk was Barney Bubbles who graduated from being Hawkwind's artist-in-residence (his work included stage sets as well as sleeves, the most typical being 1973's Space Ritual) to becoming the man whose electric style animated the work of the Stiff label. His ability to match design with music is typified by the frenetic outpouring on the sleeve for The Damned's Music For Pleasure, or the mundane nature of the wallpaper on Ian Dury and the Blockheads' Do It Yourself. Such was his impact that fellow designer Peter Saville later eulogised Bubbles, describing him as "the missing link between pop and culture".

Wish You Were Here

 'Absence' is the great theme of the album, so Hipgnosis designer Storm Thorgerson originally wanted to shrinkwrap it entirely in black plastic, thereby making it as 'absent' as possible from the shelves. The record company, predictably, had other ideas.

SPEAKING AS SOMEONE WHO'D SPENT HALF HIS LIFE AT ART COLLEGES, BARNEY (BUBBLES) WAS EASILY THE MOST INCREDIBLE DESIGNER I'D EVER COME ACROSS. HIS VISION WAS FANTASTIC

IAN DURY

While punk raged, however, the biggest band to emerge in Britain at the time was also the most flamboyant and excessive: Queen. Their defining image was shot by photographer Mick Rock and graced the sleeve of their second album, Queen II, in 1974, capturing the band in regal repose on a black background. It was an image that the band returned to a year later when they replicated it for the groundbreaking video for the epic single, 'Bohemian Rhapsody', released in October 1975.

If Queen were at odds with punk, their sense of the outre chimed perfectly with sensibilities emerging from New York's underground club scene and from which disco emerged. If punk's visual sense was cheap, disco's was larger than life and, like Queen themselves, attempted to reflect a certain sense of glamour. Largely US and European-based, the impact of dancefloor design would come to full fruition in the UK as the 80s dawned.

'Bohemian Rhapsody'

The first ever pop video was shot in just three hours for £3,500. which not only helped this classic song to top the charts for nine weeks in 1975, but also established the visual language for a whole new genre.

Do It Yourself

Multiple covers were rare in 1979 when Barney Bubbles designed Do It Yourself. Twelve different covers were available, each featuring a Crown wallpaper.

One Step Beyond

The 'nutty walk’ in many ways defined Madness, capturing the humour and the solidarity of the band. Chas Smash is missing from the picture, as he was not yet a full member of the band.

Rio

Creating the perfect image was as much a part of the New Romantic scene as making the music. So for the cover of Rio, artist Patrick Nagel stripped out all the superfluous elements from a photograph, leaving only an idealised representation of beauty.

IN THE 80s THE RISE OF CAPITALISM WAS MIRRORED IN| THE EMERGENCE OF PERSONAL COMPUTERS AND GAMING CONSOLES, WHILE THE IMPACT OF MTV SOLD A NEW AIRBRUSHED VERSION OF POP TO THE RISING CD GENERATION. PUNK'S INFLAMMATORY SPIRIT CONTINUED TO BURN AS MUSIC DEVELOPED AN ELECTRONIC EDGE AND SHOOK OFF THE SPECTRE OF TRADITIONALISM.

TWELVE INCHES TO FIVE

The most significant thing to happen to the album since it was established as the dominant affordable art form of the 60s and 70s was the advent of the compact disc in the 1980s. While the format had been trialled since 1976, the public had to wait until 1 October 1982 for its official launch courtesy of Sony. The format's first million-seller came three years later when, in May 1985, British group Dire Straits released their fifth album, Brothers In Arms (sleeve design by Andrew Prewett at Sutton Cooper). Soon after, David Bowie released his entire RCA catalogue on CD, thereby declaring that the new format had truly arrived. For sleeve designers, the rise of the CD meant that their canvas was reduced from twelve inches to a mere five, and therefore a reduction in the impact of their work, though not everyone agrees.

"I've never had a problem with CDs. Nobody had a problem designing for postage stamps, so size doesn't matter. If you want twelve-inch record sleeves, you're not a designer, you're a nostalgist. It's pathetic," sleeve guru Malcolm Garrett told MOJO magazine in 2007.

Garrett was one of the key British designers to emerge in the wake of punk along with fellow Manchester Polytechnic graduate Peter Saville (responsible for the iconography that defined the Factory label), Vaughan Oliver (4AD's artist-in-residence via his 23 Envelope company) and Neville Brody (art editor of The Face, but also responsible for sleeves by Cabaret Voltaire, Depeche Mode and Defunkt).

Significantly, the 80s ended with the release of The Stone Roses' eponymously titled debut album. To many it signalled the dawning of a new era, although tellingly it came housed in an iconic paint-splattered cover designed by the band's lead guitarist and talented artist John Squire, inspired by Jackson Pollock, which proved that the art of the album sleeve was still alive and well...

Micro-Phonies

Neville Brody designed this 1984 cover for Cabaret Voltaire. Like the band's music, Brody’s work is deliberately ambiguous, allowing viewers to reach their own conclusions.

The Stone Roses

Epitomising the relationship between music and art is this cover painting by band member John Squire, inspired by the Paris riots of May 1968.

Peter Saville The modernist soul of Manchester

Who were your key artistic influences?

The first work I was obsessed with was the early-to-mid 70s airbrush school - Dan Fern, Bush Hollyhead, George Hardie and Mick Brownfield - which offered a sense of photo realism. That appealed to me, along with design by Biba and Fiorucci.

It was adolescent Pop Art in reality. We didn't understand the realities of the communication design industry, but record covers offered a way in to the visual arts. They were like an extension of the playground.

Which sleeve are you proudest of and why?

New Order's Power, Corruption and Lies. I have a very personal relationship with it. The front is representative of the world I was brought up in - it's middle class and Victorian in a way. The back is more modern and reflects the brutalism that I saw around me. It's autobiographical. The fact that it doesn't have labelling on it and still resonates is also important to me.

Which other artists do you admire?

In the early years, I loved Andy Warhol's work. But the single biggest influence to me was Kraftwerk's sleeves. The UK Autobahn design had a direct influence on my Use Hearing Protection poster. On the UK edition of Ralf and Florian, the embossed circuit diagram transformed it from just being a cover to being a thing. They were giving you part of them. And that's what we tried to do at Factory.

Which of your ambitions have gone unfulfilled?

I would've liked to have done a sleeve for Kraftwerk, but I've retired from that world now. These days I'm the Creative Director of the City of Manchester, so I operate in the adult world and I have learnt a lot over the years. I hope I can put that to good use helping the people of my home town.

FROM THE CD TO THE MP3, THE WORLD APPEARED TO SHRINK THROUGHOUT THE 90s AS A LIBERTARIAN SPIRIT FLOURISHED AND THE INTERNET CAME INTO ITS OWN. MEANWHILE, BRITAIN'S PROSPERITY DURING THE EARLY PART OF THE DECADE FOUND ITSELF ENCAPSULATED IN THE SLOGAN 'COOL BRITANNIA'.

FROM BRITPOP TO BANKSY

If The Stones Roses' debut reflected a sense of modernity as well as a nod to the past, the evolution of album sleeve art in the last two decades has continued to incorporate this duality. Britpop's classicism is evident on the cover of Oasis’s debut album from 1994, Definitely Maybe. The sleeve - shot by Michael Spencer Jones in guitarist Paul 'Bonehead' Arthur's front room and designed by Brian Cannon - features knowing visual inclusions (Burt Bacharach, George Best, Rodney Marsh and The Good, The Bad and the Ugly).

In contrast, Mark Farrow - whose career in album sleeve design stems back to his long and fruitful relationship with the Pet Shop Boys - is the don of modernism, typified by his utilitarian packaging created for Spiritualized’s Ladies and Gentlemen We are Floating in Space in 1997.

In the last two decades street art and comic art have also influenced album artwork. This trend is personified by Gorillaz - a virtual group helmed by Blur's Damon Albarn and graphic artist Jamie Hewlett, the latter drawing the characters supposedly responsible for the music made by the group. With Blur, Albarn has also been involved with the reclamation of pop art, placing a piece of art by street artist Banksy on the cover of the band's 2002 album, Think Tank.

It's Great When You're Straight Yeah

The cover of Shaun Ryder’s post-Happy Mondays project with Black Grape, featuring a famous image of terrorist Carlos the Jackal in Pop Art colours, gives a nod to the 60s-referenring Britpop covers of the time, while simultaneously sending them up.

Once Upon a Time in the West

Called "the White Album for the digital culture" by Peter Saville, the cover of Hard-Fi's second album was designed to reflect the move towards digital sales. Released on CD and download only, the artwork provoked much debate in the music industry.

Think Tank

Street art and comic art have been massive influences on album design in recent years and never more so than in the case of Think Tank , which features cover and liner paintings by mysterious street artist Banksy. Five years later, the original cover artwork sold at Bonhams for £62,400.

STAMP PANES

Classic Album Covers stamps designed by Studio Dempsey. 

Acknowledgements: The Division Bell by Pink Floyd - licensed courtesy of Pink Floyd (1987) Ltd; A Rush of Blood to the Head by Coldplay - design by Solve Sundsbo; Parklife by Blur - design by Chris Thomson/Stylorouge, photography by Bob Thomas; Power, Corruption and Lies by New Order - Factory 1983, design by Peter Saville, A Basket of Roses by Henri Fantin-Latour, 1890; Let It Bleed by The Rolling Stones - courtesy of ABKCO Records, original cover and liner design by Robert Brownjohn, photo by Don McAllester, cake by Delia Smith; London Calling by The Clash - photograph © Pennie Smith; Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield - licensed courtesy of Mercury Records Limited; Led Zeppelin IV by Led Zeppelin © Superhype Tapes Ltd. Reproduced by permission of Led Zeppelin; Screamadelica by Primal Scream - Artist: Paul Cannell, Courtesy Primal Scream/Sony Music Entertainment UK Ltd; The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars by David Bowie - courtesy of Risky Folio Inc. on behalf of David Bowie.