Art is, of course, subjective. But there are many instances over the years when great albums have been compromised by badly thought-out artwork.
In some cases, such as The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, the artwork has become so intrinsically linked to the album that it’s hard to imagine it with anything else on the cover. But in many others, the sleeves remain a baffling representation of the music within, here are some of music’s worst offenders.
Great albums with terrible covers
17. Billie Holiday, An Evening With (1953)
In the 1940s and ’50s, illustrator David Stone Martin’s work graced over 400 record sleeves, including some of the greatest jazz recordings of the era.
His instantly recognisable line drawings had an energy, personality and intuitive sense of cool that perfectly matched albums such as the Norman Granz Presents Jazz At The Philharmonic series and The Great Artistry Of Django Reinhart.
Martin’s run of covers for Billie Holiday are among his most adventurous work, with sleeves such as Billie Holiday Sings depicting the great singer’s struggles. But the artwork used for the cover of An Evening With is not only deeply unflattering, it looks like it was drawn from memory.
16. Leonard Cohen, Old Ideas (2012)
Poet, author and songwriter Leonard Cohen’s lyrics were honed with care and precision. Likewise, he was immaculately put together, with an effortless sense of elegance and style.
And yet, his album covers – particularly from 1992’s The Future on – have a sense of ‘will this do’ about them that seem utterly at odds with the man himself.
Old Ideas is perhaps the worse culprit, a badly framed and weirdly saturated photograph of Cohen sat on a bench, with the shadow of the photographer in the foreground and already-dated typeface. Ah well, nobody’s perfect.
15. Neil Young, Sleeps With Angels (1994)
Having spent much of the ’80s trying be anyone but Neil Young, the Canadian rocker returned to form with 1989’s storming Freedom, the following year’s Crazy Horse reunion Ragged Glory (not just a clever title) and the bucolic beauty of 1992’s Harvest Moon.
In 1994, he was back with Crazy Horse for the album that earned him the nickname ‘Godfather of Grunge’, Sleeps With Angels. It’s perhaps the best of his late-40s purple patch, an album that veers between moments of stark beauty (the epic ‘Change Your Mind’, ‘My Heart’) and visceral sludge-rock (‘Safeway Cart’, ‘Piece Of Crap’, ‘Sleeps With Angels’).
Unfortunately, the cover image – a shadowy figure in front of a furnace-like background with stray lyrics overlaid – looks like a GCSE art project.
There have been many more rum Neil Young album covers since (Are You Passionate?, Chrome Dreams II, Fork In The Road and Storytone especially), but nowhere was the gulf between the quality of the artwork and material as deep as on Sleeps With Angels.
14. Three Dog Night, Hard Labor (1974)
What came first, the album title or the utterly bizarre cover idea? Three Dog Night’s eighth album featured a chaotic operating room scene, with what appears to be a giant chicken with the head of a baby doll giving birth to a vinyl LP. The doctors look suitably incredulous; the new mother looks ecstatic.
Much like The Beatles’ ‘butcher cover’ for 1966’s US-only album Yesterday And Today, Hard Labor was considered too disturbing for the sensitive record-buying public and initial copies came with a manila file folder covering the offending scene, while further pressings had a peelable Band-Aid plaster covering the ‘birth’ or a plaster printed directly on to the cover.
13. George Harrison, Brainwashed (2002)
Just pipping the tipsy-uncle-at-a-BBQ vibes of 1987’s Cloud Nine, the cover of George Harrison’s final album, the posthumously released Brainwashed, doesn’t do the material justice at all.
Though Harrison died before he finished the album, he left meticulous notes for its completion for his son Dhani and producer Jeff Lynne.
As the title track is a classic Harrison rant – against education, the establishment, the stock markets, mobile phones, computers… you name it – it’s fair to assume that the cover was his idea too. But the final image, of crash test dummies proudly holding a television, as if posing for a family photo, is so on-the-nose it’s cringeworthy.
12. Lou Reed, Lou Reed (1972)
Some album covers are let downs because they seem to be at a complete odds with the artist’s image and work – such as the self-titled 1972 debut from former Velvet Underground lynch-pin Lou Reed.
Anyone who’d spent more than two minutes listening to the Velvets would’ve had an idea of the seedy, edgy world that Reed’s songs inhabited and – despite its slightly overblown production – his debut was no different.
But the cover art – by Tom Adams, an artist best known for his illustrations on the covers of Agatha Christie paperbacks – was a total mismatch, a twee illustration of a dejected-looking duckling and a cracked-open Fabergé egg, surrounded by hummingbirds, and with Reed’s name in flowers.
Don’t worry, Transformer was just months away.
11. David Bowie, Toy (2021)
Recorded in summer 2000, Toy saw David Bowie rework songs he’d originally recorded between 1964-’71, along with a couple of new tracks, with his touring band.
Bowie planned on a rush-release, in keeping with the spontaneous spirit of the project, but when his label postponed the album and suggested he record a new set of wholly new material, Toy was put to one side.
Over the years, some tracks ended up as B-sides while others were bootlegged, so when the album was finally announced for release in November 2021, the biggest surprise was its cover.
Created by Bowie himself by crudely photoshopping a recent photograph of his face on to an old baby picture, the cover of Toy aimed for Lynchian weirdness but fell flat. A shame, as the music within was quite good fun.
10. Guns N’ Roses, “The Spaghetti Incident?” (1993)
Everybody knows that drugs are neither big nor clever, but that didn’t stop Guns N’ Roses from placing copious substance-related in-jokes throughout their back catalogue. The 1993 covers set “The Spaghetti Incident?” was a case in point – legend has it that drummer Steven Adler would store his stash in his fridge beside takeaway containers from his local Italian restaurant.
Adler’s appetite for self-destruction was such that he was fired from the band in 1990 and later sued them. In court, Adler’s lawyer asked bassist Duff McKagan to ‘tell us about the spaghetti incident’, causing much mirth among the remaining members of the band. And when it came to the cover, they doubled-down with a strangely unappetising close-up of a saucy bowl of the pasta in question – rock’n’roll!
9. Bob Dylan, Tempest (2012)
Perhaps Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen were involved in a secret competition to outdo each other when it came to dodgy album covers?
How else to explain some of the great man’s later stinkers, such as “Love And Theft” (fairly nondescript black and white portrait used for one of his greatest albums); Together Through Life (a classic Bruce Davidson photo made to look like a jeans ad thanks to the cheesy, distressed typeface) and Tempest?
The cover of Dylan’s 35th album features a close-up of a statue created by Carl Kundmann for the fountain in front of the Parliament building in Vienna. The figure – one of four which adorn the fountain – represents the Vltava River. What can it all mean? Only Bob knows.
But the red-tinged photograph isn’t the problem – it’s the chintzy font used for the album title, scrawled over the statue’s face, and the downright odd lettering used for ‘Bob Dylan’. The whole thing looks like Dylan himself knocked it up after a 15-minute Photoshop introduction – which could, of course, be the case.
8. The Rolling Stones, Goat's Head Soup (1973)
The Stones’ 1973 album has never quite had the rarified status of its predecessors Exile On Main Street and Sticky Fingers, despite including classics such as ‘Angie’, ‘Winter’, ‘Coming Down Again’ and ‘Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)’.
Perhaps it has something to do with the decidedly creepy cover photograph, shot by David Bailey and featuring Mick Jagger shrouded in some sort of veil/a pair of tights. Jagger appears to be caught mid-song, or perhaps the idea is that he’s suffocating – who knows, but it certainly didn’t do the album any favours.
7. Deep Purple, Fireball (1971)
Following the huge success of 1970’s In Rock, the world was primed for the next album by heavy rock pioneers Deep Purple. And while Fireball continued their dizzying rise, it was in spite of a cover that Spinal Tap might’ve had misgivings about.
Obviously intended to be a representation of the titular astronomical phenomenon, the cover image instead looks so much like an illustration of a sperm cell from a sex education textbook (albeit with the faces of five hairy rockers at its head) that it’s hard to ignore.
Still, it sold over a million copies in the UK alone, despite any sniggering that might’ve greeted its arrival.
6. Prince, Emancipation (1996)
During Prince’s (ahem) purple patch in the ’80s, his album covers were as effortlessly cool and sexy as the music he was making, as Purple Rain, Parade, Sign O’ The Times all prove.
But things started going seriously awry in Paisley Park’s art department around the mid-’90s – Chaos And Disorder is a mess, Crystal Ball was a fine concept with an unspeakably naff cover and Emancipation was an overly literal interpretation of the cover, featuring two hands breaking free of chains (this was the last album of his contract with Warners) and Prince’s new name – the infamous logo he started using around this time – in the foreground.
5. Frank Zappa, Studio Tan (1978)
Released in September 1978, Studio Tan was a Zappa classic, not least thanks to the inclusion of ‘The Adventures Of Greggery Peccary’ – a 20-minute-plus anti-establishment mini-opera that the composer had been working on since the late ’60s. But when it arrived in shops, its cover hardly lived up to the music.
Studio Tan was one of four albums – along with Zappa In New York, Sleep Dirt and Orchestral Favourites – delivered to Zappa’s record label Warners in March 1977 to fulfil his contract.
While Zappa had provided artwork for …New York, Warners commissioned cartoonist Gary Panter to provide sleeves for the remaining three albums.
Zappa was used to having complete control over his releases and when the albums were released without promotion and with Panter’s illustrations on the sleeves, he fumed, "They’ve hired somebody to do artwork and probably charged my account with his services and put ugly covers on the thing."
4. Radiohead, Pablo Honey (1993)
While very few would claim Radiohead’s debut is their best work, tracks such as ‘Lurgee’, ‘Blow Out’ and (yep) ‘Creep’ are superior alt.rock that point to future glories.
But it’s all rather let down by the cover art by Lisa Bunny Jones – an of-its-time collage of a black and white photograph of a baby’s face surrounded by pick’n’mix sweets on a backdrop of an opening flower.
Following Pablo Honey, frontman Thom Yorke would get in touch with old art school pal Stanley Donwood and ask him to collaborate on their sleeves – the pair have overseen every Radiohead cover since.
3. Black Sabbath, Sabotage (1975)
While there’s no denying the righteous riffs of Black Sabbath’s sixth album, the cover is a mess.
The four members standing in front of a mirror, all dressed as if they’re in different bands – Ozzy Osbourne is in a kimono and platforms; Bill Ward is trouserless and wearing his wife’s red tights (along with Ozzy’s underwear because he apparently didn’t wear any to the shoot); Tony Iommi is sat cross-legged, looking as if he’s just stepped out of a mid-’70s menswear catalogue and Geezer Butler appears to have stepped out of a yacht-rock band.
Theories vary as to what happened – some say it was supposed to be a test shoot; others suggest that the band thought they were going to be photographed from the head up. But does that explain why Ward turned up without trousers or shoes on? No, it does not.
2. Joni Mitchell, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter (1977)
Joni Mitchell’s stellar 1977 double-album, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter includes the sublime ‘Paprika Plains’, along with Mitchell classics ‘Otis And Marlena’ and ‘Jericho’, but is another album that has suffered thanks to its cover.
Mitchell is dressed as a pimp in blackface on the cover (yes, that is her on the left), a character she dubbed Art Nouveau. ‘At that point, I realised I really enjoy character acting,’ she later said – but Mitchell was naïve to think that her role-playing wouldn’t cause offence. The 2024 reissue of the album featured a new sleeve – a photograph of Mitchell being savaged by a wild dog.
1. Rod Stewart, An Old Raincoat Won’t Ever Let You Down (1970)
The debut solo album by Faces singer Rod Stewart was originally titled The Rod Stewart Album and given a plain cover for its 1969 US release. So far, so unproblematic. But when the album was released in the UK the following year, it was titled An Old Raincoat Won’t Ever Let You Down and featured a photograph that was in appalling taste back then and has aged badly.
‘[The] choice of photograph for the front cover, in which an elderly man in a mac appears to be menacing a small child in a park, probably wouldn’t have got very far through the marketing meetings today,’ Stewart reflected in his 2012 book Rod: The Autobiography. ‘What can I say? I thought it was a beguiling image at the time.'
