Worst Album Covers - CD or Vinyl

Last week I posted those album covers which are btter enjoyed on a large format.  Today, I've chosen my top five which fit into the 'what were the design people doing when they came up with this?' box. Of course selecting terrible cover art is quite difficult.  There's so much choice, you have the puerile, the cheesy, the egotistical, the disturbing and Modern Talking.

I narrowed the field by choosing those albums which I adore but which I've always flet have been undermined by their artwork.  This is what I came up with.

"Today's Active Lifestyles" - Polvo



This is a nasty shade of yellow. It actually put me off listening to the album at first. Which is a pity because I don't know where I would be without "Lazy Comet". Nor is it that I have something against yellow per se. Peng is a great album cover. But this murky shade of too-much pumpkin in the diet yellow is off-putting.

"Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" - The Beatles



Whether you think this is the moment pop melded with art, or when pop disappeared up its own art-hole, you have to agree this is a terrible cover. There are the school-musical style uniforms, the amateurish flower display, the ad hoc collection of people (Aleister Crowley at the same level of Karl Marx?), the seemingly ironic but not so pretension of placing themselves among these luminaries and finally the total contrived nature of it all. The whole set up only existed for that rather tawdry photo. And what was Paul thinking when he wrote "Lovely Rita"?

"Mezcal Head" - Swervedriver



I get the connection. Mezcal is from Mexico and bullfighting took place there as it did in many Spanish colonies. But wouldn't a quiet sun-bleached Hacienda suffice? Bulls are not pretty up close.

"Knock Knock" - Smog



A stuffed cat and a bolt of lightning. What more can I say? thank god for the track "River Guard".

"Pink Moon" - Nick Drake



Drake took two days to record this sparse masterpiece.  One story mentioned on the documentary "Nick Drake: Under Review", was that after two days recording these songs, Drake left the master tape with his record company as though he was not interested in what happened to it. The cover was done by his sister's partner. I've always considered it utterly inappropriate - an arch and busy piece, someone's misguided idea of psychedelia, it was everything Drake wasn't.