Album covers aren't what they used to be. But then albums aren't what they used to be, either. John Kelly sifts through five decades of LPs and remembers a time when the cover art rivalled the music
For younger readers, any collection of album covers will be as curious as a collection of cigarette cards. "Daddy, what's an LP?" is a typical question these days, along with the supplementary "Daddy, what's a compact disc?" I despair. Young people nowadays. Never even heard of Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols, let alone regarded its cover as a forceful piece of art with its roots in Dada and agitprop.
But it's hardly their fault. We live, after all, in an era when music increasingly arrives via the internet - one track from here, another from there - with the very idea of albums, never mind album covers, almost a thing of the past. Downloaded music comes without packaging. It lands without sleeve notes and without charm - and seems, to antiquarians such as me, a much diminished experience. Call me old fashioned - and it seems I have suddenly become so - but if it's a toss-up between the worldwide web and a Rolling Stones LP, there's no contest.
The introduction of the compact disc was bad enough, but at least we still had something to gaze at - albeit with a magnifying glass. Ultimately, it's a fetishistic business, and without the thing itself it's a waste of time. A record, after all, is not music. It is a recording of music. It is a unit. It is part of a process that turns music into a commodity that can be sold as a package: tracks (in a considered order), art, design and, occasionally, a sleeve note full of scholarship and insight. As they say in American restaurants, it's a full fish presentation.
LPs were first produced by Columbia Records in the late 1940s. By the mid-1950s the idea of cover art had developed to the point that it was used to sell the product. The most significant pop records of the time came from Frank Sinatra, then enjoying his comeback on Capitol Records. The covers re-presented Sinatra - alone under a street light with a cigarette, alone at a bar staring at his drink. Sinatra was deeply involved, and the sleeves won a Grammy before the singing did.
These Sinatra covers - Songs for Young Lovers, No One Cares and Only the Lonely - are the appropriate starting point for The Greatest Album Covers of All Time, a book that is part history, part catalogue of 60 years of popular music. For those of us who predate downloading, it is a sort of extended family album, packed with loves remembered or best forgotten, lost schoolmates, good pals, bitter enemies, missed opportunities, turning points and bad haircuts. No matter where and when you might have been touched by pop's trajectory, you'll find your experience reflected in these covers - many of which are now rare, collectible and rightly valued as high points in commercial design.
The authors have, of course, made their own judgments about artistic or cultural worth. There are omissions - but then they may never have been exposed to Horslips and their concertina-shaped Happy to Meet Sorry to Part. To their endless credit, however, they have also chosen to ignore other sleeves from the early and mid-1970s - the ones "oozing delusions of grandeur but looking like the jacket for a silly sci-fi novel". Such album covers, they suggest, look exactly the same now as they did then. I think I know what they mean. Surely not Yes? They have, however, included Roxy Music's Country Life - notable for the near nudity of two women standing in front of a hedge. Better than the album cover, however, is the story that it might have so offended Canadians that their version featured only the hedge.
There is serious stuff to be gleaned from a book such as this. The designers of record sleeves have sometimes led, and often followed, the culture of the day. They have helped to define the times; in some cases they may have helped to kick-start something else. And, certainly, this is a book that might provoke many a debate. For example: the portrayal of women, the self-image of Afro-American males, the constant recycling of fashion, the stunning quality of some rock photography or the cultural ubiquity of Andy Warhol - represented here not only by the Velvet Underground's yellow banana but also by a beautiful drawing from a Kenny Burrell Blue Note album from 1957.
But, in the end, The Greatest Album Covers of All Time is best enjoyed as a delightful browse. And if, as the cliche goes, music has been the soundtrack to your life, you may well find that this book is the accompanying slide show. Even if, mainly, it just features the hedge.
The Greatest Album Covers of All Time, by Barry Miles, Grant Scott and Johnny Morgan, is published by Collins & Brown, £25. John Kelly presents Mystery Train on RTÉ Radio 1 and The View on RTÉ 1. His Sophisticated Boom Boom, a book about music, is published by Jonathan Cape