The cover of XTC's Go 2 looks like someone forgot to replace the designer's notes with actual artwork. That is precisely the joke. Hipgnosis, the studio famous for surreal photographic sleeves for Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, ended up making one of its most radical covers from nothing more than words.\n\nAubrey Powell later recalled Andy Partridge visiting the Hipgnosis studio to review ideas prepared for XTC. Partridge disliked them. While looking around the room, however, he noticed another concept by Powell's partner Storm Thorgerson: a typewritten sheet beginning with the idea that this was a record cover and proceeding to explain what record covers do.\n\nPartridge asked who it was for. According to Powell, Thorgerson told him it was simply an idea that could be sold to anybody. Partridge loved it and claimed it for XTC.\n\nThe finished front cover turns that studio artifact into a piece of anti-advertising. Instead of using an image to seduce the shopper, the text explains the machinery of seduction: the cover is there to attract attention, encourage interest in the music and ultimately persuade somebody to exchange money for the record. The band name and album title are buried inside the prose rather than elevated into a logo.\n\nThat makes Go 2 unusually self-aware. The sleeve tells the buyer that a sleeve is manipulating them while performing that manipulation successfully. Its refusal to show a conventional image becomes the thing that makes it stand out in a rack full of images.\n\nThe idea also fit XTC's temperament. In 1978 the band was emerging from the British new-wave moment with music that was nervous, witty and suspicious of convention. A cover that dismantled the language of record marketing while still functioning as record marketing was more appropriate than a polished promotional portrait could have been.\n\nHipgnosis had built its reputation by making viewers ask what an image meant. Go 2 performs the same trick without an image at all. It asks what an album cover is for—and then answers the question directly on the cover.