10 cover stories in our archive
Behind the Covers' archive includes 10 album covers documented under the "typographic" design theme, spanning the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 2000s. These covers sit within the soul, r&b, pop, punk, alternative, rock, country, blues, folk tradition and feature work by Amy Winehouse, Michael Jackson, The Clash, Fleetwood Mac and others. Each entry below includes the cover artwork, the designers and photographers behind it, and a short story about the visual choices that defined the release.
She sits alone on a wooden stool against a chalk-streaked black wall, hands clasped, gaze level and unflinching. The cover of Back to Black froze Amy Winehouse at the threshold of fame, in a Kensal Rise room the photographer called 'the black room'. Behind the calm pose sat an album built from real heartbreak.
The white suit on the most recognizable man in pop music wasn't his at all. It belonged to the photographer, who'd simply worn it to work that day. The story behind Michael Jackson's Thriller cover is a small accident that helped shape an image seen around the world.
On 21 September 1979, a frustrated Paul Simonon swung his Fender bass at the floor of New York's Palladium, and Pennie Smith caught it. She thought the shot too blurry to use. Joe Strummer pointed at the contact sheet and said: 'That one.'
On the cover of Rumours, Mick Fleetwood strikes a courtly pose with wooden balls dangling between his legs. The story behind those balls, a toilet, and a couple of glasses of English ale, is stranger than anything the music suggests.
Before the guitar-spaceships, an album cover team seriously pitched Boston lettuce, Boston cream pie, and a pot of baked beans. What won instead was a fleet of upside-down guitars escaping a dying Earth, an optical illusion millions never caught until Reddit lost its mind decades later.
A Columbia producer heard it and snapped, 'It's a piece of shit! It's not produced.' Recorded cheap in a Garland, Texas studio with barely more than guitar, piano, and drums, Willie Nelson's spare murder-ballad concept album turned a dismissed 'demo' into the record that made him a superstar.
Peter Corriston spent weeks combing New York for the perfect tenement, then cropped out an entire floor so the buildings would fit a square sleeve. The windows of 96-98 St. Mark's Place became die-cut peepholes that could spell out a name and reveal everyone from Buzz Aldrin to Lee Harvey Oswald.
On a cold, wet January night in 1972, a man stood alone under a furrier's sign in a London cul-de-sac, holding a borrowed guitar and pretending to be an alien. The black-and-white photograph that resulted was hand-painted into a sci-fi vision, and the shop owners were not amused.
When Milton Glaser built this 1969 cover, he wanted strangers to stop and ask 'What the hell is that?' The face staring back, half-lit and unblinking under a battered hat, belonged to an unknown songwriter whose name couldn't sell a single record. So Glaser sold the stare instead.
A young man caught mid-howl, mouth wide, eyes shut, hammering an acoustic guitar in pink and green block letters. For nearly fifty years the wrong photographer got the credit for one of rock's most copied covers. Here's who really shot it, and why The Clash stole it.