6 album covers in our archive
Behind the Covers currently documents 6 The Beatles album covers from 1963 to 1970. Read together, the entries show how the artwork changed from release to release, with each story identifying the designers, photographers, source material, and design decisions behind the sleeve.
Cover evolution
John Kosh designed The Beatles' Let It Be sleeve around four separate Ethan A. Russell portraits, set into a stark black grid beneath a simple white title. The released 1970 cover replaced an earlier Get Back plan to recreate the band's Please Please Me stairwell photograph with Angus McBean.
Four men, one zebra crossing, traffic held by a hired policeman — and one of the most copied photographs in pop. The Abbey Road cover carries no title and no band name, a decision that triggered a furious midnight phone call from EMI's chairman.
In 1968 the world's biggest band handed record buyers a sleeve that looked like nothing at all: pure white, a whisper of embossed type, a serial number in the corner. Richard Hamilton's blank canvas was the deliberate anti-Sgt. Pepper, and it accidentally rechristened the album forever.
The concept was born from Paul McCartney's idea that the Beatles would become an entirely fictional band. The cover depicts the band in colorful satin military uniforms standing in front of a crowd of life-size cardboard cutouts of famous figures.
Klaus Voormann's revolutionary black-and-white collage combines pen-and-ink drawings with photographs, using the Beatles' flowing hair to create a psychedelic masterpiece that won the first Grammy Award for rock album artwork in 1967.
Angus McBean photographed the Beatles looking down from an EMI House stairwell for their 1963 debut. The quick, unpretentious portrait became a visual marker of the band's extraordinary rise.
