The confusion comes because a separate shoot for the inside cover was carried out at the famous East London track, which has since been converted into flats. The image used, shot by photographer Bob Thomas, was taken from a stock image library and was not, contrary to popular belief, shot in Walthamstow. (Other images Blur considered were a fruit and veg market stall, a betting shop window. Parklife, their third studio album, saw them at the height of their powers, from Girls and Boys, which poked fun at Club 18-30 holidays, to the title track, which guest-starred Quadrophenia actor Phil Daniels to brilliant comic effect.Īll this post-modern authenticity was topped off by a brilliant cover based on the unlikely topic of greyhound racing. but with subtle dashes of post-modern irony to keep things interesting.īest at managing this contradiction were Blur middle-class student types who nonetheless appealed to the masses with their mockney accents, Kinks-influenced tunes and clever appropriation of working class culture. This was quickly filled by a return to the old-fashioned pursuits of boozing and listening to rock bands. Parklife's album cover appropriated working-class culture perfectlyĪs the 1990s progressed, British youngsters started to tire of ecstasy-fuelled raves, and a vacuum opened up in youth culture. It was even recreated as an official postage stamp in 2010, as part of the Royal Mail's Classic Album covers collection. But this classic cover, along with his work for bands like Manic Street Preachers, The Telescopes, Flowered Up and Shonen Knife, will surely live for an eternity. Tragically Cannell took his own life in 2005. The band's singer Bobby Gillespie took a detail from one of Cannell’s paintings, altered the background colour to a hot red, and the classic 'sun' image was the result. Its cover was the work of Paul Cannell, a London artist known for combining a punk aesthetic with exuberant colours, using unusual media such as household undercoat paint and car body filler. A major landmark in the resulting crossover was Primal Scream's third album, which brought together rock, psychedelia, dub, house and gospel in one glorious concoction. and all of a sudden fans of moody rock music became much more open to the idea of repetitive beats. Throughout the 1980s, the divide between indie music and dance music couldn't have been more marked. Uniting dance with indie, Screamadelica came with upbeat, dayglo album art He's now 27 and working as an artist in LA, while Weddle has continued to be an advertising photographer specialising in underwater work. The child he shot was four-month-old Spencer Elden, the son of one of Weddle's friends. (The dollar and fish hook were added later.) So instead they commissioned photographer Kirk Weddle to shoot some bespoke images in a Pasadena swimming pool for just $1,000. Geffen's art director Robert Fisher dug out some stock images of underwater births, but they were too graphic to put on an album and would have cost $7,500 to licence.
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Singer Kurt Cobain had come up with the idea while watching a TV documentary on water births with drummer Dave Grohl.
And its unusual cover was attention-grabbing to say the least. Nirvana's second album brought grunge into the mainstream, following the success of their number one hit Smells Like Teen Spirit. Then came grunge, which brought everything back to its basics and acted like a big 'reset' button, just as punk had done two decades earlier. Nevermind by Nirvana has one of the most unusual and memorable covers of all timeĪt the beginning of the 1990s, it seemed like rock music was starting to go stale and repeat itself. As he left the courtroom, the group's singer, Johnny Rotten, joyfully exclaimed to a reporter: "Great! Bollocks is legal. In the resulting court case, Virgin was successfully defended from obscenity charges by John Mortimer, now best known as the author of Rumpole of the Bailey. The use of 'bollocks' (a term in British English that means both 'nonsense' and 'testicles') led to a police raid on a Virgin record store that stocked the record.
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The effect was heightened by the sleeve's lurid colour palette, which was based on a series of stickers distributed by the Situationalist political movement (the originals read: ‘This Store Welcomes Shoplifters’). The use of obscenity, cast in the kind of cut-out lettering commonly associated with criminal ransom notes, was shocking to audiences of the time. And the debut album of Britain’s loudest and angriest punk rockers Sex Pistols, designed by Jamie Reid, was a true statement of intent. While the psychedelic era saw album covers commonly feature intricate, surreal and lavish illustrations, punk stripped everything to its bare essentials. The cover that established in court, once and for all, that you could put a rude word on an album