Let’s be honest, most album covers are bad, whatever decade they are from. There are however album covers that are released every year that really make you look twice. This list is dedicated to the first year of the 80s and is part of a series I’ll be doing about album covers. The ones below were purely chosen on how well designed they are, and not due to the popularity of the musicians or how high it charted at the time. They are also not listed in any specific order. Some of these covers will be discussed in great detail in future posts. Think of this post as an introduction, or an overview, if you will, of the album covers released in 1980.
(Note: Did I miss an amazing cover of some obscure group? Let me know in the comments.)
1. Joy Division – Closer
Joy Division was an English rock band that formed in the late 1976 in Sanford. They released two albums, Unknown Pleasures and Closer. Closer was released after the suicide of the lead vocalist, Ian Curtis. The remaining member would later form the group New Order, which gained much international success.
The album cover was designed by Martyn Atkins and Peter Saville, and sported a photo of the Appiani family tomb in the Monumental Cemetery of Staglieno in Genoa in Italy. Peter Saville is a noted graphic designer in England. He is especially known for his album cover designs which he did for Factory Records (which he co-founded in 1978 with Alan Erasmus and Tony Wilson). In addition to creating covers for Joy Division and New Order, Peter Saville also created numerous covers for OMD, Ultravox, Peter Gabriel, Pulp, King Crimson, and Roxy Music, to name a few. During the 90s he produced many commissions for Christian Dior, Calvin Klein, Stella McCartney, and others. He also designed England’s 2010 football home team shirt.
The cover design spawned numerous imitations, from Bauhaus’s In the Flat Field to Ultravox’s Vienna, to name a few. None of them were as good as this album’s design. Peter Saville describes the cover art as a work of antiquity containing a vinyl record, in other words, a postmodern juxtaposition of the old and the new.
2. Iron Maiden – Iron Maiden
Iron Maiden probably doesn’t need any introduction. The band also hails from England and is known as one of the great pioneers of heavy metal. Even more pioneering are the covers that adorned their albums since 1980. They have released 16 studio albums since 1980 to 2015, and their zombie mascot, Eddie, has been raging, fighting, killing, and scaring people on every cover.
The most notable of these covers are the ones from 1980 to 1992. Their cover for The Number of the Beast was especially controversial and had numerous Christian and other socialist conservative groups up in arms (I’m talking to you Tipper Gore and the PMRC).
This cover is where it all started though and was painted by Derek Riggs (who also painted their covers from 1980 to 1992). Riggs is a self-taught painter and is mostly known for his Eddie paintings. He has though done other covers for rock and metal bands, like Stratovarius and Bruce Dickenson. The Iron Maiden album covers seemed to capture the imagination of thousands of people during the 80s and might be partially responsible for Iron Maiden’s success.
3. Kate Bush – Never for Ever
Kate Bush rose to success after releasing her single, Wuthering Heights, in 1978. It is very difficult to attribute her style of music to a genre. I would place it somewhere between experimental rock and art pop, if that makes sense.
Never For Ever is her third album and also her first number 1 album. It should also be noted how important this album is historically, since it is the first album by a British female solo artist to go all the way to the top of the album charts in the UK.
The album cover was illustrated by Nick Price, and shows various monsters and animals flying out from under her skirt. Something about the album cover is reminiscent of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. Some find the cover unsettling, but I find it beautiful and it suits the sound of the album very well.
Nick Price is mostly known for his Dr. Snuggles animated series and series of children’s books. Before this though, he worked for Ogilvy, Benson and Mather, one of the best-known advertising studios in the world.
4. Rush – Permanent Waves
The Canadian progressive rock band, Rush, had released 6 other studio albums before the release of Permanent Waves. Their albums were laced with sci-fi and fantasy inspired lyrics, which detracted some from the obvious musical genius the group displayed at the time. The band always created music on their own terms and because of this garnered a cult following over the years.
The album cover for Permanent Waves was produced by Hugh Syme, who also created these famous album covers: Aerosmith’s Get a Grip, Megadeth’s Youthanasia and Countdown to Extinction, Iron Maiden’s X-Factor, and Warrant’s Cherry Pie. The man is rock royalty…even though he did two album covers for Celine Dion (check out some of his other credits here).
The cover did illicit some controversy upon its release in 1980. In the bottom left corner one can see a newspaper fluttering in the wind. The headline reads “Dewey Defeats Truman”, which was an actual headline printed in error on the front page of the Chicago Daily Tribune on 3 November, 1948. Harry S. Truman had won the presidential election that year, over Thomas E. Dewey. Later releases of the album had the headline removed. The original Coca-Cola signs in the background were also removed and replaced by the names of the band members in a similar style. The woman in the front is Canadian model Paula Turnbull, who also appears on the cover of Rush’s live album Exit…Stage Left. The apocalyptic background was specially photographed by Fin Costello, with Hugh Syme himself waving in the background, and Paula superimposed over it.
Fin Costello, an Irish photographer, is another fixture of music royalty and is best known for the photos he took of The Rolling Stones, Duran Duran, Kiss, and Jimi Hendrix.
5. The Cure – Seventeen Seconds
The Cure is another British group on our list, and Seventeen Seconds is the album that put The Cure on the map. The three band members actually appear on the cover, albeit in blurred form. The cover design for this album was personally overseen by Robert Smith (the vocalist), with Bill Smith contributing to the cover art. Bill Smith has designed more than 3000 album covers since 1976 and was also responsible for the cover design for Three Imaginary Boys, The Cure’s sophomore album. Some of his most notable cover designs include Queen’s The Works, Marillion’s Brave, Led Zeppelin’s Remasters, and Killing Joke’s America (see more of his work here).
The cover evokes a certain air of mystery. Robert Smith stated in an interview with Rolling Stone that he told ‘the bloke’ taking the pictures to take a few very out of focus images of the band, since he didn’t like the idea of the band on the cover (the band members were very “anti-image”). The cover art, and the music contained on the album, work very well together. I find the black and red lines on the cover to resemble a gothic forest, which is ironically also the single from the album, The Forest, with The Cure often described as a goth rock group.
Check out part 2 here.