It was weird, it was witty, it was Warhol. The famous minimalism of The Velvet Underground & Nico peel-away banana album cover became an influence on punk visual style many years later and remains one of the greatest album covers. This cover is Roger Dean at his most vivid. When you walked into a record store, you could see this album clear across the room. 20: Cream: Disraeli Gears (cover by Martin Sharp)

The original cover was changed soon after release and a white couple was put on the cover to get the record carried in the South. The perfect cover for a cool, sensual and futuristic concept album, this captures Janelle Monáe’s depth and mystery and is a beautiful piece of art in its own right. 26: Miles Davis: Bitches Brew (design by Mati Klarwein) If you're coming to Coles by car, why not take advantage of the 2 hours free parking at Sainsbury's Pioneer Square - just follow the signs for Pioneer Square as you drive into Bicester and park in the multi-storey car park above the supermarket. Come down the travelators, exit Sainsbury's, turn right and follow the pedestrianised walkway to Crown Walk and turn right - and Coles will be right in front of you. You don't need to shop in Sainsbury's to get the free parking! Where to Find Us There's not a lot to actually *read* in this 50-year survey of LP record-cover design, but the absence of text is more than compensated for by high-quality photo reproductions of a huge representative sample of what was a thriving art-form until the demise of vinyl records in the 1990s - and may yet become so again now the format has regained popularity. Record Covers’ (2002) by Michael Ochs – is essentially an interesting photo collection of album covers throughout the decades – but ultimately this amounts to nothing more than a vanity project for its author/curator Michael Ochs.One does notice that each decade has its own 'looks', which can date it there a bit. Some with similar themes or style are grouped together. There is good, bad and ugly (sexism, underage person(s)) covers, though that might sometimes depend on the reader's taste. It may be a more glamorous cover after her first two, but this photo of PJ Harvey – in which she could easily be mistaken for Shakespeare’s Ophelia – implied that a newer, softer image comes at a cost. All the Ohio Players covers were legendary, and the early Westbound ones were considerably more daring than the hit-era ones for Mercury. As the band often claimed, fewer people would have bought the albums if they’d put themselves on the covers. 30: The Louvin Brothers: Satan is Real (design by Ira Louvin) If The Beatles could do a double “ White Album,” the Bee Gees could do a fuzzy red one. The red velvet cover, with gold embossed lettering, served notice that Odessa was going to be unique and beautiful, which it was.

This is not that original of an idea for a book. Brad Benedict (the guy who produced all of the ultra lounge records that were popular in the mid 90s) put out a book in 1977 called PHONOGRAPHICS: CONTEMPORARY ALBUM COVER ART & DESIGN. From 1st July 2021, VAT will be applicable to those EU countries where VAT is applied to books - this additional charge will be collected by Fed Ex (or the Royal Mail) at the time of delivery. Shipments to the USA & Canada: Though Steely Dan was long associated with Los Angeles, the cover for Pretzel Logic (actually shot at Fifth Avenue and 79th Street) looks, feels, and tastes like New York. George Clinton’s gonzoid take on outer-space adventure found its perfect match in the effortlessly cool spaceship-party cover for Parliament’s Mothership Connection. The fact that it looked remarkably low budget only made it funkier.Anyone who went to plays or read the New York Times in the 70s will recognize the work of the line-drawing caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, who did his magic on Aerosmith’s members here. As always, his daughter Nina’s name was hidden a few times in this famous album cover. 64: Eric B. & Rakim: Paid in Full (design by Ron Contarsy) Okay, so it was a little graphic and provocative, but as the single most controversial thing The Beatles ever did (and the most expensive for an original), the cover of Yesterday and Today surely earns a place on a list of the greatest album covers. 66: Alice Cooper: School’s Out (design by Craig Braun)

Most of Pink Floyd’s covers would be in the running for a list of the greatest album covers, but we wanted to highlight something that wasn’t Dark Side of the Moon. This burst of Storm Thorgerson / Hipgnosis imagination features four versions of the same photo (except that the band rotates one position in each), matching their sense of surrealism. 58: Metallica: …And Justice For All (design by Stephen Gorman) Beggars Banquet is a rare case where an album’s two famous covers really complement each other. Put the notorious bathroom cover together with the engraved invitation on the US replacement, and you’ve got the yin and the yang of The Rolling Stones at the time.The image of a baby grasping at a dollar bill became one of grunge’s coolest and most enduring symbols, an album cover that captured the attitude of Nevermind and the era. The baby in question, Spencer Elden, even recreated the photo 25 years later. Smashing Pumpkins’ album covers were often softer and prettier than the music, but this cover (created by Billy Corgan’s then-girlfriend) is the perfect translation of the obsessively romantic theme of Adore. 31: Ohio Players: Climax (design by Joel Brodsky) This Reagan-era concept album makes its visual point by using a photo of Beatles records being burned that followed John Lennon’s “more popular than Jesus” remarks. But in this case, the photo is a Mobius strip, and the album they’re burning is the very one they’re standing in. 41: Taylor Swift: 1989 (design by Austin Hale and Amy Fucci) Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-alpha-20201231-10-g1236 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.8883 Ocr_module_version 0.0.13 Ocr_parameters -l deu+fra+eng Old_pallet IA-NS-2000370 Openlibrary_edition

This is a collection of album covers, well-known and less-known. They are roughly grouped by the decade (1960s, 1970s, and 1980s-early1990s: all getting a short introduction), some appearing in other decade than their own. Each cover is accompanied by artist name, title, record label, your (or rough guess - I do wish there had been some more insisted searching), then design/collage/art/photo by, if known (but put sometimes just as 'unknown'). Sometimes there's a further comment added (these and the introduction are also in German and French). Arguably the coolest 60s album cover of all, the art for Big Brother & the Holding Company’s sophomore record was also most people’s introduction to the style of underground comic art perfected by R. Crumb. This style of art would be associated with psychedelic music from here on out, though Crumb was a bit anti-hippie himself. 4: The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (design by Peter Blake)You don’t necessarily get a thing of rare beauty when you load a cover with as many fold-out panels and elaborate paintings as an 11-inch disc can hold, but Santana certainly did in this case, thanks to famed Japanese designer Tadanori Yokoo. Recorded live during Santana’s performances in Osaka, Japan, the full sleeve art is an amalgamation of Buddhist and Christian imagery, along with Yokoo’s signature pop art style. 18: 10cc: How Dare You! (design by Hipgnosis) One of the psych era’s great hallucinations, the famous album cover for Moby Grape’s 1968 double LP Wow showed an otherworldly landscape with the world’s largest bunch of grapes. Wow indeed. 77: Kayne West: Yeezus (design by Kanye West and Virgil Abloh)