Iconic album covers. What’s your favourite?

@AlanP recognised it and found it on the WAYLT thread.

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Agree ! Do you know the story behind this? This was back in the day before digital photography. To do this cover they put both these guys is flame-retardant suits. They put some sort of flammable liquid on the guy on the right…Got the cameras ready and right before they shot they LIT HIM ON FIRE

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I remember being fascinated by this album cover as a boy (and in particular the label and inner sleeve graphics with the inner workings of a phone leading to the inner workings of the ear. It was one of four LP covers* and inners that I found really interesting. Two of the others were Dark Side of The Moon and Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd. My eldest sister had all of these for me to pore over. Of course, I now realise that all three were the work of Hipgnosis.

*the fourth LP cover was the one I nominated earlier; Hunky Dory by David Bowie.

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All except Hunky Dory, designed by Hipgnosis of course. If you haven’t got the book, I strongly urge you to get it.

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The stuntman in question, Ronnie Rondell, is still with us (he’s 83). The other guy is fellow Hollywood stuntman, Danny Rogers. In interviews, Rondell frequently expresses his his bemusement that he’s more famous for one album cover than all the film work he’s done over the past 65 years.

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Thanks, Richard. Yes, me too as a teenager when I first got the LP. I used to imagine the stories behind the images and spot the band-members in the party image inside the gatefold. My best friend and I would hunt out Hipgnosis album covers in local secondhand record stores etc, getting an eye for their style. We’d often buy the LP simply from the cover art knowing that if Hipgnosis designed the artwork, it must be good even if we’d never heard of the band.

You may have it, but I recommend the ‘Hipgnosis Portraits’ book - lavishly illustrated and a great read.

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A couple more:

Kate Bush’s ‘The Red Shoes’

Air’s The Virgin Suicides:

Not sure if either are truly ‘iconic’ but they’re both pretty striking (IMO)

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Complete Hipgnosis catalogue. The book arrived today but I have squirrelled it away for Xmas. Firstly because it’s the kind of book I would like to thumb through Christmas morning and secondly I am not in the mood for treating myself at the moment. Ok thirdly I’m a crackpot :woozy_face:

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That’s a nice time to browse through the book - you’ll enjoy it.

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Hi Ian 2001,

I listed Love - Forever Changes on my post number 99 incidentally the Forever Changes came from Arthur Lee when one of his girlfriends said to him “ You said you would love me forever and he replied well “ Forever Changes “

Regards,

Martin

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I always had a strange fascination with the cover of AC/DC’s If You Want Blood live album as a youth… not sure what that says about me :joy:

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Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds - the original album from the late 1970s. One of my first LPs and one I loved not just for the story and music, but the booklet inside of artwork depicting scenes from the story. Captivating stuff for a 10-year-old in 1978.


images

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Tyrannosaurus Rex. My people were fair and had sky In their hair…but now they’re content to wear stars on their brows.
A lot of posts choose iconic album covers because they represented a significant chapter in their lives. This is no exception.
It is a cover that depicted our 60s dreams.

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Yes Yessongs (1975)

Another fab Roger Dean album cover. Influenced many an aspiring artist…

Dean was friends with album cover designer Storm Thorgerson of Hipgnosis and the two lived in the same building after leaving university.

So I guess a reference to this obscure cover should here too:

Thorgerson’s design for the cover of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, as he puts it, “offers fertile revisiting”. Here, he applies a process developed for an album cover for Powderfinger to the infamous artwork to stunning effect.

Storm explains, “This was first designed as a graphic, then turned into a ‘tray container’ in which liquids could be poured and allowed to leak with a little encouragement, thus contaminating neighbors with beautiful and unexpected patterns and swirls. Magic.”

0.0
:open_hands:

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Rubycon

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“Iconic” is a much-overused word. In this thread, it has come to mean “OK, I suppose.”

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Perhaps we could try ‘ironic’ covers as a thread…?

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yes, yes it does

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