12 brilliant albums with terrible covers

Don’t judge a record by its cover – some great music has been smuggled within awful designs. Here are the 12 ugliest offenders

Charli XCX’s Mercury-nominated album Brat is as well known for its cover art as it is for its boldly irreverent music. A slime green square with the album title spelt out in blurry lowercase font, the sleeve has been co-opted by US presidential hopeful Kamala Harris, has defined a cultural movement (“Brat summer” – an empowered, sloppy, happy, hedonistic way of living), and has become as inextricably linked to the Cambridge-born singer as the colour pink is to Barbie. 
Despite looking as though it was cobbled together with no regard for aesthetics, the sleeve of Brat actually took five months to finalise. It was designed by a high-end New York design studio called Special Offer, Inc. who went through 500 colours in their search for a suitably brash shade. Some observers are touting Brat as a design classic. Its look will be repeated this week when Charli XCX releases her highly-anticipated remix album, Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat.
Brat, then, is a hugely successful album with a sleeve that is deliberately made to look terrible. It’s terrible with a very knowing wink. 
But what about hugely successful albums whose sleeves are just plain bad? Here, we pick a dozen classic albums that are let down by disappointing sleeves, with no winks in sight.
The Who’s fifth studio album is an absolute belter, featuring Baba O’Riley, Won’t Get Fooled Again and Behind Blue Eyes. Who’s Next was originally conceived by Pete Townshend as Lifehouse, a rock opera follow-up to 1969’s Tommy. But the ambitious project was shelved and it became a traditional album instead. Less traditional was its cover depicting all four members of the band urinating on a concrete obelisk in a slag heap somewhere between Sheffield and Leicester. Bleak. The Beatles had only broken up the year before, but the era of peace and love was well and truly over.
The Beach Boys’ enduring classic regularly tops “the greatest album of all time” polls. Pet Sounds is an artistically adventurous, psychedelic masterpiece that was a huge influence on the Fab Four’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released the following year. But the cover of Pet Sounds features a winsomely literal take on the title that is startlingly at odds with the album’s ambitious contents: the band feed goats at a petting zoo. It’s terrible. Recalling the banal cover in 2013, band member Brian Johnston conceded that some people see Pet Sounds as “the best album with the worst cover” in the history of the music business. 
Its ludicrously pretentious title aside, this greatest-hits-plus-some-new-stuff album by Michael Jackson features one of the most narcissistic covers of all time. The singer was rendered as a 10-foot-high grey sculpture (by artist Diana Walczak) striking a defiant pose and wearing what looked like bullet belts. The vibe was no doubt intended to be “futuristic and powerful pop cultural icon”, but the sculpture came across more like the sort of thing you’d see on a Pyongyang roundabout. Jacko doubled down by displaying 30-foot replicas of the statue in locations around the world, including on a barge on the Thames. Still, Billie Jean and Thriller.
Simon & Garfunkel’s final studio album, Bridge Over Troubled Water, was the world’s best-selling LP in 1970. It’s a stone-cold classic. But the cover is underwhelming, to say the least. 
Apparently taken on the hoof at an airport, the blurry picture shows Paul Simon looking off into the distance and part-blocking Art Garfunkel’s face. For his part, Garfunkel stares impassively ahead as Simon’s hair creates the illusion of a giant handlebar moustache. The best that could be said of the sleeve was that it reflected the pair’s tricky relationship with each other. 
One word: easyJet. I can’t be certain but I’m pretty sure that when Frank Ocean was crafting his sublime 2012 progressive R&B album he wasn’t thinking about whether to upgrade to speedy boarding for the 6am flight from Luton to Gran Canaria. But that’s the unfortunate impression given by the recognisable hue of Channel Orange’s sleeve. 
Listening to the album again, though, was there a subliminal travel theme all along? Song titles include Pyramids and Sierra Leone, while the track Lost – with over a billion streams and counting – namechecks Miami, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Spain, Los Angeles and India. Perhaps Ocean (I mean, come on!) was in cahoots with Stelios Haji-Ioannou all along. 
One of the finest “greatest hits” compilations out there, 20 Golden Greats contains early rock ‘n’ roll classics such as That’ll Be The Day, Peggy Sue, Everyday and Oh, Boy!. It was released in 1978 and topped the UK album chart for three weeks, knocking ABBA off the number one slot. But the sleeve is an oh-so-cheap bit of graffiti saying “Buddy Holly Lives” on a wall of peeling paint. The image is hardly in keeping with the smartly bespectacled, besuited and bequiffed image we have of Holly. And it’s also – as we all sadly know – factually incorrect. Holly was killed in a plane crash 19 years before the compilation was released.
Paul McCartney’s second post-Beatles album included his first number one single in America since his former band broke up (the whimsical Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey). The album’s cover shows McCartney grappling with a ram by its horns, an apparent reference to his adoption of a simpler way of life post-Beatles. 
In a nod to his then-fractious relationships with his former bandmates, the back of Ram featured a picture of two beetles humping each other. John Lennon was clearly amused. When he released Imagine four months later, his album included a postcard of him handling a pig by the ears in a clear satire of Macca’s cover. Japes.
Bon Jovi’s poodle-haired opus introduced heavy metal to the pop mainstream via singles Livin’ on a Prayer and You Give Love a Bad Name. It sold by the million, belying its bargain basement sleeve. 
The original plan was for the cover to feature the band dressed as cowboys. This was jettisoned in favour of a shot of a busty woman in a wet yellow T-shirt with “Slippery When Wet” written on it. But Bon Jovi’s label feared that retailers would refuse to stock the sexist cover. With time running out before the LP’s release, singer Jon Bon Jovi sprayed a black bin bag with water and scrawled the title on it. “So simple, and not very impressive,” was the verdict of guitarist Richie Sambora.
“I’m your man… if you like your men to look moody in suits and chomp bananas in warehouses” might have been a more accurate title for Leonard Cohen’s fantastic late-Eighties synth-based album.
It’s such an odd cover, down to its weird proportions. Cohen initially thought the photo of him wearing shades by publicist Sharon Weisz made him look “cool”. But he then admitted: “At the times we think we’re the coolest, what everyone else sees is a guy with his mouth full of banana.” 
With songs including First We Take Manhattan and Take This Waltz, the album remains one of Cohen’s best. Curiously, the track Take This Banana Skin While You’re At It didn’t make the final cut.  
Released on the Mo’ Wax label by California’s DJ Shadow in 1996, Endtroducing revolutionised instrumental hip-hop through its dizzying use of samples and breakbeats. But the sleeve – a blurry pic of an aisle of a record store ­– initially looks like a mistake. The reason is revealed in the gatefold version: there’s a cat in the foreground. The photographer Brian Cross has explained that in a rush to include the cat in his widescreen shot, he wrongly measured the focus in feet rather than metres, hence the out-of-focus foreground. But it sort of works, reflecting the album’s discombobulating sonics.
Beyoncé’s self-titled fifth studio album was a surprise “drop” in late 2013. Featuring the goosebumpy track XO, the album sold 2.3 million copies in just 19 days post-release. Bey’s eponymous LP was a so-called visual album, meaning that every track was accompanied by a short film. 
All of which makes the plain cover a bit baffling. It’s just her name against a black background. The megastar’s team wanted to avoid a “beauty shot” on the front, as that’s what would have been expected. Her creative director Todd Tourso was apparently inspired by Metallica’s eponymous fifth studio album, AKA The Black Album. So that’s what they went with. It just feels a bit… lacking.
For anyone over the age of 45, the cover of Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms is seared into their memory. But look at it. It’s a flying guitar (Mark Knopfler’s 1937 National Style “O” Resonator) with a border around it. It’s pretty but hardly iconic – unlike the album itself, which contains bangers like Money for Nothing and Walk of Life. 
The reason for the simple cover may be down to technology. Brothers in Arms was at the vanguard of the CD revolution and was the first album to sell a million copies in the new format. CDs are, of course, 5-inches squared compared to vinyl’s 12-inches squared. And a smaller cover means less detail is needed. But it’s so far away from doing the music justice.
 
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