Album Covers That Changed My Life

I love album covers, especially on vinyl LPs.  Narrowing my list down to eleven wasn’t easy.  To do so I had to omit thousands of my favourites, among them the homoerotic Teutonic imagery of Accept and Rammstein, the loincloth-clad would-be warriors Manowar, the nonchalant symbolism of Scorpions, the eerie imagery of Venom, Mercyful Fate, King Diamond and Blue Öyster Cult, the razor blades and metallic robot creatures of Judas Priest, the masking-tape-nippled, cameltoe-pantied, oiled-up, chainsaw-wielding anarchisexuality of Wendy O. Williams, the two-steps-from-transexuality preening poseurishness of LA glam metallists, the otherworldly wonder of Magnum’s Rodney Matthews artworks…you get the idea.  These eleven are not necessarily my favourite album covers, but they are the ones that, for reasons which will be explained, had the biggest impact on me.

1. AC/DC – If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It)

My equal-favourite album of all time (the other being Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction’s Tattooed Beat Messiah).  Its cover affected the 10-year-old me in a visceral way when I saw it for the first time (on a snowy winter’s day in an East Kilbride record shop called Impulse).  I picked up the vinyl LP and – after a few minutes of staring at both sides of the cover – walked to the counter shaking with excitement and bought this chunk of high-voltage riffage.  Walking the mile and a half home through the snow, I gazed at the cover in amazement: on the front Angus is impaled by his own guitar while Bon looks over his shoulder like a demon; on the back Angus is face down and dead, a Gibson SG headstock jutting from a bloody exit wound, and Bon nowhere to be seen (prophetic, as Bon was to check out of this world soon afterwards).  And the sound? Immaculate!  From the roar of Glasgow Apollo’s crowd (the greatest gig venue I’ve ever set foot in) to Bon’s banshee screams on High Voltage to the never-bettered guitar tone of Angus and Malcolm Young, the energy levels on this album are higher than any ever captured on record before or since.

2. Motörhead – Ace of Spades

This one shouldn’t need explanation.  The band image – equal parts biker, bandito and shoot-you-in-the-back bastard – was perfect.  This cover didn’t just convince me to buy the album: it inspired me to buy a bullet belt, too.  Little Filthy Phil Taylor was the scuzziest-looking thing I’d ever seen, so naturally I loved him!

3. Black Sabbath – Black Sabbath

This cover scared the bejeesus out of me as a child.  I was afraid of only one thing back then: witches.  I’d fight any boy, man or beast.  I’d boot a vampire in the balls if he crossed my path.  I’d set a werewolf on fire if he bared his teeth at me.  Witches, though, were a different story.  They terrified me.  The spectral female figure on the front of this album looked like a definite witch – the scariest I’d ever seen: a pant-shittingly frightening wyrd woman who would haunt my dreams and rip out my soul if I so much as dared to play the album.  So I played it over and over, staring at the cover for hours, certain that facing my fears was the only way to banish them.  The building on the cover is Mapledurham Watermill.  I’m happy to report that it hasn’t changed much.  With a bit of Crowleyesque jiggery-pokery, some Satanic slap and tickle, and a shamanic forest dance (or, if you prefer, a short walk from the car park), you can look upon the watermill from the same angle as the cover photographer did back in 1970. And if you’re lucky, a pale figure in black might appear on the water’s edge…

4. Rush – Permanent Waves

Symbolism run amok.  In the background a man waves, unaware of the approaching tidal wave that’s about to wash him away.  In the foreground a woman with a demi-wave hairstyle smiles as her skirt flutters in waves, offering the viewer a cheeky glimpse of panties.  Genius.

5. Candlemass – Nightfall

The most numinous of these eleven, Nightfall‘s cover features the Thomas Cole painting Old Age.  If you fancy a look at the original, pop over to the Smithsonian Institute and have your mind blown by this spectacular piece of art.  For me, it provokes memories of early childhood with its Sunday School, biblical parables, and pondering the existential mysteries of the Universe.

6. Deep Purple – Deep Purple in Rock

The cover features the giant heid of Ian Gillan…carved into rock!  Ritchie Blackmore’s there too, as are the other three legends from the Mark II lineup of Deep Purple (Roger Glover, Ian Paice, Jon Lord).  Based on the larger-than-life sculptures on Mount Rushmore (where the heads of American presidents Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt are hewn into the rock), this cover goes one better by having five heids.  And even an idiot knows that five heids are better than four.  As a child, I found this vinyl LP in a Menorcan record shop during a summer holiday.  Nearly pissed myself with excitement.  Bought it on the spot.  Iconic.

7. Diamond Head – Living on…Borrowed Time

Like AC/DC’s If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It), this cover uses back and front to deliver its message.  For the full effect, take the gatefold vinyl album, open it and enjoy the wide landscape art (by Rodney Matthews, who also created legendary covers for rock legends Nazareth and Magnum, among others).  Of all Rodney’s work, this is the piece I find most captivating.

8. Iron Maiden – Iron Maiden

When artist Derek Riggs created Eddie ‘the Head’ (Iron Maiden’s now-famous mascot, who has graced all the band’s covers – albums and singles – evolving through many incarnations along the way) he couldn’t have foreseen the enormity of the impact his monster would have on heavy-metal culture and identity. Derek’s body of work is now legendary, his character Eddie the universally recognised figurehead of the Iron Maiden juggernaut.  Each Maiden cover has breathtaking attention to detail, little flashes of self-referencing humour, and a unique mood.  I find the cover of this, their debut album, hypnotic.  The scene communicates an eerie and palpable sense of nocturnal danger.  As for Eddie, is he a punk or a metalhead?  Is he alive or is he dead?  Is he friend or foe, or sexual pest?  Or all of the above, like some Schrödinger’s zombie?  These are the things I’ve wondered as I’ve gazed into his eclipse-in-the-abyss eyes.  An utterly inspired cover with unparalleled atmosphere.  I can’t get enough of it.

9. Testament – Souls of Black

Pick up a copy of this on vinyl and look at the cover.  See it.  There are over 20 tortured faces in the clouds and sea.  The more you look, the more you’ll see.  I’m still finding new ones and I’ve had the album since its release in 1990.  Beautifully symmetrical logo in blood-red font.  Hooded dark wraiths.  Stolen heart wrapped in black thorns.  A beautiful inversion of Christian iconography.

10. Jean Michel Jarre – Oxygène

It’s difficult to look at this cover without contemplating the destruction mankind has wreaked on Mother Earth.  Job done, Monsieur.

11. Pink Floyd – The Division Bell

One of my favourite albums and a cover to match, courtesy of longtime Floyd collaborator Storm Thorgerson (RIP, you transcendent genius).  Division and union in one scene: an eternal paradox.  A metaphor for the Universe.  The building in the background is Ely Cathedral.  If you fancy seeing the giant heads, go to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, Ohio.  They’re above the entrance to the museum’s third floor.

Metal’s Least Metallic Song Titles

Before I poke fun at any song titles, I should stress that I have vast respect for the artists below.  They, and thousands of others like them, have enriched my existence immeasurably and continue to do so.  Often they surprise me in ways which, with hindsight, I could have anticipated.  But sometimes they dish up surprises so bizarre that I’d never have been able to intuit their arrival.  The following song titles are examples of this – metal songs with names so unmetallic that they beggar belief.  Like Spinal Tap’s amps, the list goes up to 11…

1. Saxon – Standing in a Queue

No one likes standing in a queue.  There are always more productive things one could be doing.  My guess is that Biff Byford, he of the vocal chords that must surely be polished silver, was stuck in a non-moving queue one day.  With a long wait looming and a cup of tea out of reach for the foreseeable future, Biff snapped.  Raging, he penned a song about the experience.

I’m standing in a queue.

I don’t know what to do.

I haven’t got a clue

Why I’m standing in a queue.

2. The Darkness – English Country Garden

A metal variation of a traditional folk song I learned in primary one (and soon bastardised in the playground).  Here’s the first verse of the original song.

How many kinds of sweet flowers grow

In an English country garden?

We’ll tell you now of some that we know.

Those that we miss you’ll surely pardon.

Daffodils, heart’s ease and phlox,

Meadowsweet and lady smocks,

Gentian, lupin and tall hollyhocks,

Roses, foxgloves, snowdrops, forget-me-nots

In an English country garden.

In the school playground, my friends and I were soon singing an adapted version with rather different lyrics.

What do ye do when ye cannae find the loo in an English country garden?

Pull doon yer pants and fertilise the plants in an English country garden.

Then ye take a leaf and wipe it underneath in an English country garden.

Keeching is fun underneath a blazing sun in an English country garden.

We added many other rhyming lines to that song: some crude, some awful, some inspired.

Now to The Darkness’s adaptation.  The title has no metal credibility whatsoever.  The Darkness don’t care about that, though.  They’re ever playful, always just on the edge of parody.  Their lyrics in this track are – at points – classic.  Check out this for an example.

When I saw her pushing that wheelbarrow,

She said, “Have you got a match?”

And I said, “Yes – my cock and Farmer Giles’s prize marrow!”

Fun and frolics.  To be a credible metal song, though, it’d need a title like Carpathian Ruin at Dusk.

3. AC/DC – House of Jazz

Jazz has no place in metal (with the possible exception of Spinal Tap’s Jazz Odyssey, but that’s another story).  AC/DC would have been better to call a spade a spade: House of Whores.  Or maybe even House of Holes.  But not jazz.

4. Rainbow – The Shed

I like my sheds.  Both of them.  The larger one contains an ever-present supply of Polyfilla and other invaluable substances, all of which are guarded by a large ginger cat who sprawls on the roof during daylight hours.  Although I might consider writing a track called Guardian of the Polyfilla or Orange Hairy Gargoyle about this situation, I wouldn’t pen a metal song called The Shed.  No matter how impressive Ritchie Blackmore’s shed was circa 1980, he must have been having one of his wired-to-the-Moon days (does he have any other type?) when he named a song after it.  And if his shed really was that special, why isn’t it mentioned in the song?  Doubly puzzling.  But – as with all things Blackmore – earthly logic needn’t apply.

5. Hardcore Superstar – Why Don’t You Love Me like Before

Do I need to explain?  Really?  It isn’t the missing question mark that offends me most (although I’m not happy about it).  Why Don’t You Love Me like Before is a synonym for I’m a Self-Pitying Whiner Who’s Feeling Sorry for Himself – an unacceptable attitude for a metallist.  If she doesn’t love you like before, instead of moaning about it in a ballad, find a hotter, filthier woman, get stuck into her, then write a song about the experience.  That’s the metal thing to do.

6. Motörhead – Joy of Labour

The song’s lyrics are dark and devilish, its title ironic.  Nonetheless, the title makes me think of Mother Mary giving birth to the baby Jesus in a manger, smile on her face, halo glowing around her head, while a baffled Joseph looks on wondering, ‘How did he get in there?’

7. Eternal Tears of Sorrow – Tar of Chaos

Conjures up images of demons (dressed in high-visibility yellow jackets and hardhats) drinking tea from flasks by a roadside while a steamroller flattens glutinous black goo next to a sign that reads Chaos 1 Mile.  Not a bad vision, just not a metal one.

8. Bigelf – Counting Sheep

Shagging Sheep would be a metal title.  So would Throwing Sheep at Satan.  But not Counting Sheep.

9. Halford – The Mower

The Metal God has created some enduring characters: The Metallion; The Painkiller; The Ripper; The Sentinel; The Hellion.  Those visceral beasts are mythic and magical.  The Mower, on the other hand, makes me think of an orange Flymo trimming my wee ma’s lawn on a summer’s day.  A quaint image but not a metal one.

10. Ozzy Osbourne – Civilize the Universe

As if the world needed any more evidence that Oz has become Americanised, he removes all doubt by using the ‘z’ spelling (civilize) rather than the English ‘s’ one (civilise).  That’s his prerogative, but stop a moment to reflect on the song title and its intention.  Keep in mind that this is the same Ozzy who bit the head off live doves (a stunt for which I’d have snapped him in two, had I been present at the scene); he was supposed to set the doves free from their cage after signing a solo record deal with Jet Records: a symbolic celebration of his freedom from Black Sabbath.  This is the dude who bit the head off a bat thrown onstage by a fan (although, admittedly, Oz thought that one was a rubber toy).  It’s also the same individual whose drunken, drug-fuelled debauchery has become legend.  I have immense admiration for Oz as a musical artist, even though he can be a compassionless mentaloid where animals are involved.  Were I to list the least civilised folk who spring to mind, he’d be near the top.  There’s unintentional irony in the lyrics of Civilize the Universe, which plead for peace (an admirable sentiment) but also lambast hypocrisy and implore us to be civilised (this from the man who, in his recent autobiography, claimed that he enjoyed his job at a slaughterhouse).  So an individual who gained pleasure from killing beautiful sentient beings then wrote a song begging folk to be more civilised.  That’s like a porn actress writing an anti-fucking anthem.  And another thing – heavy metal was never meant to be civilised.  Desecrate the Universe would be a good metal title.  Defecate a Universe would be an even better one.  But so-called civilised (or civilized) things have no place in metal.  It’s raw, primal and authentic.  Diary of a Madman – now that was a perfect metal title from Oz.

11. UFO – Dance Your Life Away

Strange left-field subject matter for a UFO song: a man and woman who take part in foxtrot competitions.  I put the whole thing down to the gargantuan amounts of drugs Moggy and co were doing at the time.  The idea probably felt like an epiphany.  I’d love to have witnessed the conversation that led to this track’s creation.  It must have been more Spinal Tap than Spinal Tap.

That’s it for now.  Watch this space for my next all-the-way-to-eleven list: Album Covers That Changed My Life (complete with lovely full-colour pictures).

Don’t say I’m not good to you.

Until then, keep your head in the clouds and your feet on the ground.