In the digital era, album cover artwork sadly doesn’t quite have the same impact as it used to. However, in the days when the only option for owning music was to buy a physical copy of a record on vinyl, cassette, or CD, the cover was hugely influential, helping us to identify with the music and the artist more closely in an age when stars were less accessible.
A varied artform
It is no surprise then that a lot of thought, effort, and sometimes expense has gone into creating album covers over the years. Some of the best examples have become iconic artworks in their own right, and are framed to display on living room or café walls up and down the country.
The album cover is a highly varied artform, which is perhaps to be expected when you consider the diverse range of artists and music they represent. From the iconic Peter Blake collage of The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to the stylish photography of Herb Ritts for Madonna, there’s a fascinating range of styles to capture the imagination.
The fascinating story of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures album cover
There’s no magic formula for success: some of the memorable album covers feature very simple but striking graphic design, such as Peter Saville’s enigmatic wave form design for Joy Division’s 1979 Unknown Pleasures album.
It’s apparently based on a computer plot printout of radio waves from a rotating neutron star known as a pulsar. The image was created by a graduate student, Harold D. Craft Jr, who was working at the Arecibo Radio Observatory in Puerto Rico in the late 1960s.
As the star turns, it emits electromagnetic radiation, and this beam is picked up by radio telescopes—the individual lines on the image represent a single pulse, which are not uniform because of the distortion created by time and distance. The image was reproduced in the The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy in 1977.
Here, a twist of fate occurred when Joy Division member Bernard Sumner, who was also employed as a graphic designer at the time, happened to be browsing in the Manchester Central Library on his lunch break. He discovered the pulsar image, and the combination of scientific accurateness and otherworldliness resonated with him straight away.
From one star to another
When Factory Records were preparing to release the debut Joy Division album, the band discussed their ideas for the cover with the in-house designer Peter Saville.
In an interview, Saville recalled: “[They said] we’d like it to be white on the outside and black on the inside. I took these elements away and put it together to the best of my ability. No one said what size or where – I had to figure out how.”
“I contradicted the band’s instructions and made it black on the outside and white on the inside, which I felt had more presence. Saville added: “It was called Unknown Pleasures, so I thought the more this could be an enigmatic black thing, the more it might evoke the title.”
The image has since taken on a life of its own, and it reached far beyond the album cover of an then obscure indie rock band from Manchester.
Definitely Maybe: How the first Oasis album cover happened
From one legendary Manchester indie band to another, Oasis have hit the headlines again as they announce a 30th anniversary reunion tour. It’s also 30 years since the release of the album that propelled them to fame, 1994’s era defining Definitely Maybe.
Teenagers of the 1990s grew up in the haze of the Britpop scene that was spawned by the release of anthems such as Supersonic and Live Forever. The album cover of Definitely Maybe was also a hit in its own right, featuring a photograph of the band hanging out in the front room of an ordinary terraced house in West Didsbury, a south Manchester suburb.
The BBC reports that the image was inspired by a photograph of the Beatles chillaxing in a Tokyo hotel room in the 1960s. The art director responsible for the Definitely Maybe album cover was Brian Cannon, and he explained how the shot came about.
He said of his influences: “That’s kind of where the idea came from. Most groups on their first album do some kind of pose, but Oasis are sat watching [Clint Eastwood Western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly on] the telly which I thought was hilarious.”
“Another one to look at is the Arnolfini Portrait by [15th-Century artist] Jan Van Eyck. It’s in the [later] style of Flemish Renaissance art where the images are littered with visual metaphors.”
He adds of the various items placed around the living room: “The mirror on the wall was out of my flat, but all of those little bits including the inflatable globe came from recording engineer Mark Coyle and roadie Phil Smith’s house.”
“I went round there with the photographer and me and Bonehead’s wife were sat in different positions. It’s effectively still life that you’ve got complete control over. The photo used on the sleeve just clicks. It’s perfect. There’s not one person where you think we should have had them doing something else.
“Our shoots were always skeleton crews. I just don’t see the need to have people stood about and the last thing you need is anyone from the record company hanging about poking their nose in.”
Fortunately the band didn’t insist on creative control over the image: “Liam’s idea was a knife sticking out of a lump of butter. I don’t know what he was going on about or whether he was being serious. After that we never bothered having band meetings again.”
The story of Oasis could have turned out to be very different…maybe. Of course, these are just two examples of iconic album artwork, and everyone will have their own favourites that merit a trip to the framing shop.