'Nothing You Can See That Isn't Shown': The Album Covers of the Beatles

Ian Inglis
Popular Music, Vol. 20, No. 1. (Jan., 2001), pp. 83-97.
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Popcilar Music (2001) Volume 20/1. Copyright O 2001 Cambridge University Press, pp. 83-97.

Printed in the United Kingdom

'Nothing You Can See That Isn't

~hown'*rthe
album covers of the
Beatles analysis on the visual component of the Beatles
I A N INGLIS

fame as cultural icons, particular reasoning behind

the aesthetics of the album cover (what it
represents and connotes, how it relates to its
content)

Introduction
From their release in the 1960s, the LPs of the Beatles have dominated the various
selections and lists which routinely purport to identify the most popular/most
influential/best albums of the popular music era. Throughout each subsequent
decade, the verdicts expressed in audience polls, in critics' choices and in the comments of other musicians have served to effectively maintain and enhance the
group's reputation.
There is, however, an additional way - often alluded to, but rarely investigated - in which the albums of the Beatles are celebrated. Almost without exception,
the album covers themselves have been seen as groundbreaking in their visual and
aesthetic properties, have been congratulated for their innovative and imaginative
designs, have been credited with providing an early impetus for the expansion of
the graphic design industry into the imagery of popular music, and have been seen
as largely responsible for allowing the connections between art and pop to be made
explicit.
Now may be a particularly opportune moment to pursue in a little more depth
these, and other related, issues. The nature of the relationship between popular
music and its traditional visual conventions is ambiguous. On the one hand, the
performance of much live music relies on the accompaniment of startling (and
expensive) visual accessories. Performers such as the Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson, U2 and Madonna employ increasingly complex and ostentatious sets, costumes
and special effects to enhance (some would say, to disguise) their music. On the
other hand, the all but complete commercial replacement of the LP by the much
smaller CD has led many to lament the decline, even the disappearance of album
art: 'Just like the 78 rpm record, the record album became a relic of the past. The
room for cover art was reduced from 12 to 5 inches while the price of albums almost
doubled.' (Ochs 1996, p. 495)
By concentrating on the aesthetics of the Beatles' album covers, I hope to be
able to offer some observations which may be applicable to an investigation of the
dynamics of album art in general. At the same time, I believe that such an examination might allow an overdue reassessment of the revolutionary qualities they have
long been reputed to possess. First, however, it is necessary to remind ourselves of
what it is that album covers actually do.
The first and basic role of album covers has been to ensure the protection of
the recording they contain. In the early years of the twentieth century, records were

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Ian Inglis

distributed and sold with no packaging or with a paper sleeve. Cardboard began
to replace paper in the 1930s, but the combination of a paper inner within a card
sleeve was not achieved until Columbia's introduction of the long-playing record
in 1948. With occasional variations - the gatefold sleeve, the boxed set - this has
remained the standard form of packaging.
Secondly, album covers are an advertisenlent for the recordings they contain.
In this, they reflect the conventions of other media forms, notably the news headline
and/or lead, which act as an enticement to the reader to continue reading; and the
magazine advertisement or television commercial, which similarly seek to attract
and retain the consumer's attention.
Thirdly, album covers function as an acconlpanitnent to the music. This may
range from the inclusion of a simple photograph of the performer to which the
listener may refer when playing the LP, to the reproduction of the album's lyrics
which can be followed, studied and sung. In this way, the sleeve is not a superfluous thing to be discarded during the act of listening, but an integral component of
the listening which assists and expands the musical experience.
Fourthly, there is an important sense in which an album sleeve can be seen as
a cornnlodity in its own right. Like other forms of commercial art - the poster, the
print - the sleeve itself may be the object of purchase: 'For a fanatical few, the cover
can be everything. "I may buy something purely on the cover," writes designer
Neville Brody "and throw the record away".' (Sorger 1988, p. 56) Alternatively,
sleeves may be coveted as trophies in a collection: Roger Dean, Stanley Mouse and
Derek Riggs are among those designers whose work is increasingly sought out in
this way by collectors.

The album covers of the Beatles

As the commercial success of the group extended from Britain around the world,
the titles, contents and packaging of their album releases were adapted for the
variety of markets in which they were promoted. In the UK the group released
thirteen albums (on Parlophone artd Apple) during their recording career from 1962
to 1970; by contrast, twenty-three albums were released in the US (on Vee Jay,
Capitol, United Artists and Apple) over the same period. When that number is
multiplied globally, increased by three decades of re-releases, compilations of old
material and anthologies of 'new' material, distorted by an abundance of unofficial
or bootleg recordings, and complicated by the occasional banned or withdrawn
cover,' it quickly becomes apparent that there are, in fact, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Beatles album covers in existence.
I shall confine my discussion to the twelve original and official albums'
released in the UK:
(1) Please Please M e (Parlophone), March 1963
(2) With The Beatles (Parlophone), November 1963

(3) A Hard Day's Night (Parlophone), July 1964

(4) Beatles For Sale (Parlophone), December 1964
(5) Help! (Parlophone), August 1965
(6) Rubber Soul (Parlophone), December 1965

The album covers of the Beatles

85

(7) Revolver (Parlophone), August 1966

(8) Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Parlophone), June 1967
(9) The Beatles (Apple), November 1968
(10) Yellow Siiblnarine (Apple), January 1969
(11) Abbey Road (Apple), September 1969
(12) Let It Be (Apple), May 1970

While other performers have released many more album titles (the Grateful Dead,
the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Elton John), and in spite of the fact that
there are a large number of other albums whose individual sales overshadow those
achieved by any of the Beatles' LPs (Saturday Night Fever, Fleetwood Mac's Rumours,
Carole King's Tapestry, Michael Jackson's Thriller and the Eagles' Greatest Hits), none
have received the consistent and positive acclaim for their artwork enjoyed by the
Beatles:
Record sleeves . . . functioned as the visual signposts of the 'dynamic decade'. Periods and
events between 1963 and 1970 can be recalled by reference to particular Beatles album covers,
as clear a beacon as that of their actual music. The Beatles' album art - like their music was highly innovative, setting the standards that others followed during the 60s and since.
(Evans 1 9 8 4 ~p.
, 24).

Evaluations of this kind invite an examination of the group's album covers

from three positions. The first is the assumption that the covers provided a physical
link between the group's visual image and its recordings, which in some way
reflected the Beatles' current musical and professional identity. The second is the
claim that these covers became highly influential within the popular music community, and that ideas and styles derived from them were to be rapidly disseminated and imitated. The third is the proposition that the album covers themselves
can be subjected to a textual analysis yielding rich insights into the ways in which
they invite or allow the consumer to decipher them.

Image and identity

Angus McBean's photograph of the Beatles looking down the stairway at EM1
House in Manchester Square, London, which was used as the cover for Please Please
Me, locates the group precisely and predictably within the conventions of the British
popular music industry in the early 1960s. It exemplifies what Thorgerson has called
'the personality cover' (Thorgerson 1989, p. 10). Identically dressed in suits and ties
and smiling happily into the camera, they personify the contemporary pop star bright, breezy, young and handsome. Following the traditions of the era, their two
hit singles are named followed by the promise of 'twelve other songs'. In early
1963, of course, EM1 was unaware that the Beatles were anything more than an
attractive pop group with a Number One single - they were still unknown outside
the UK, Beatlemania was yet to emerge, and their two significant television appearances of 1963 - on Sunday Night A t The London Palladium in October and The Royal
Conlnland Perfornlance in November - were months in the future.
But by the release of With The Beatles, these events, and others, had taken
place, and distinct and recognisable images of the group had begun to coalesce
around the identity of the Fab Four, Merseyside's moptops. Its cover, and those of
the subsequent four albums, were photographed by Robert Freeman and served to

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Ian Inglis

consolidate that identity. While the Beatles spearheaded the British Invasion of the
USA in 1964-5, taking the British popular music industry from its peripheral imitation of American styles to a creative dominance of global markets, the musical and
visual appeal of the group's casual, accessible and playful image was unequivocally
emphasised and maintained through the covers of With The Beatles, A Hard Day's
Night (which reflected EM1 and Brian Epstein's agreement with the traditional pop
star trajectory from records to movies), Beatles For Sale and Help! (the group's second
movie). The four covers provide a striking example of the correspondence between
music and visual packaging which can be achieved by 'the sleeve as the semblance
of sound' (Kemper 1996, p. 14).
The first disruption to the effervescence of the Fab Four, which suggested that
both the group and its music might be prepared to explore alternatives to the Top
Ten and the conventions of the three-minute pop song, came with Rubber Soul. It is
the first of the group's covers from which the word 'Beatles' is absent. The four
Beatles are still there, as recognisable as ever, but three of the group choose to
ignore the photographer, looking away from him and the audience, their thoughts
elsewhere. In doing so, they assert a newly discovered independence. Only Lennon
returns the camera's gaze. As on the covers of With The Beatles and Beatles For Sale,
there are no smiling faces, but here the challenge - both to the audience and to the
conventions of the album cover portrait - is increased by the deliberately stretched
and distorted faces of the Beatles. Evans has claimed a connection between the
album cover, its songs and the group's growing immersion in drugs: 'the image
distortion of the picture hinted at chemical visions both sinister and sublime' (Evans
1984~,
p. 28). The photographer himself assigns more general causes to the disintegration of the Beatles' familiar image:
The distorted effect in the photo was a reflection of the changing shape of their lives. They
had begun their careers as musicians, but the wide range of people and ideas that they had
encountered, their financial success, and the new privacy of their homes encouraged them
to take up more varied and personal interests. As a group they were still the Beatles, but as
individuals they were experiencing a subtle chemistry of change. The direction in which they
were moving was inwards. (Freeman 1996, p. 15)

The cover of Rubber Soul may have been an early clue to the new directions
open to the Beatles, whose unmatched commercial success had by now guaranteed
them a degree of unprecedented professional autonomy. However, John Lennon's
comments in Mareh 1966 in which he appeared to claim that the Beatles enjoyed a
greater current popularity than Jesus Christ, and the group's decision in August
1966 to stop touring in order to concentrate on studio work, were merely the first
of many events which signalled their abrupt departure from the world of the pop
star and a willingness to explore directions and debates that went far beyond conventional assumptions about the activities of young musicians (see Inglis 1995) and
which were to define the remaining years of their career.
One of the more striking and evident changes was in the nature of the subjects
the Beatles chose to explore in their subsequent albums. Of the eighty-three tracks
on the six albums released from 1963 to 1965 (Please Please Me to Rubber Soul),
seventy-six, or ninety-one per cent, are love songs. Of the ninety-two tracks on the
six albums released from 1966 to 1970 (Revolver to Let It Be), only sixteen, or fifteen
per cent, can be conventionally described as love songs. The group's shift from
the traditional and predictable theme of popular music to the construction and
performance of songs whose lyrics consider such topics as the payment of taxes

The albunz covers of the Beatles

87

and life in a submarine, has led several critics to comment on the significant distance
of Revolver from '. . . the conventions of commercialised pop music. Halfway
between ritual and art, it's both verbally and musically an extraordinary breakthrough.' (Mellers 1973, p. 69) No less innovative is the album cover itself, which
for the first time in the group's career, eschewed the conventions of the personality
photograph(s) in favour of a montage of small photographs of the four Beatles
variously peeping through larger line drawings of their heads. It was designed and
drawn by artist and musician Klaus Voorman, whom the Beatles had first met
during their performances in Hamburg in the early 1960s. The similarity of Hertsgaard's observation that the 'songs on Revolver were performed in ways that had
never before been realised in pop music . . . the lyrical sophistication of their songs
also reached new heights' (Hertsgaard 1995, p. 176) and Evans' assertion that its
cover 'was far removed from anything the Beatles - or any other recording artists had attempted before' (Evans 1984~,p. 28) does support the view that with this,
their seventh album, the Beatles had achieved a remarkable visual-musical correspondence. The discongruities and idiosyncrasies of the cover in which the
(unnamed) Beatles reject any notions of uniformity (of location, pose or activity)
were a preparation for the varieties and innovations of the music inside it.
Please Please M e had been recorded in early 1963 in one day at a cost of 400.
By contrast, Sgt Pepper took more than seven hundred hours to record before its
release in 1967 and cost 25,000. The cover design alone cost more than 1500.
Almost everything about the project indicated the ease with which the Beatles felt
able to develop the initiatives of Revolver in both musical and design terms. It was
the first record not to be banded into individual tracks. It was the first album whose
inner sleeve was not just a white paper envelope but part of the overall package
design. It was the first record to have the song lyrics printed in full on the rear of
the album cover. It was the first album to contain an additional cardboard sheet of
cut-out memorabilia. It also, incidentally, contained the first Beatles song to be
banned by the BBC - 'A Day In The Life'.
Reactions to its release showed that the Beatles had promoted the cultural
significance of popular music to a level unimaginable at the start of the decade.
Kenneth Tynan claimed that the record represented 'a decisive moment in the history of Western civilisation' (Dowlding 1989, p. 161). Timothy Leary believed that
it compressed 'the evolutionary development of musicology and much of the history of Eastern and Western sound in a new tympanic complexity' (Dowlding 1989,
p. 162). Mellers has judged that it marked 'the climacteric point in the Beatles'
career, their definite break with the pop music industry . . . henceforth the world
they've created is sui generis, bringing in its own criteria' (Mellers 1973, p. 101).And
MacDonald has suggested that 'the psychic shiver which Sgt Pepper sent through
the world was nothing less than a cinematic dissolve from one Zeitgeist to another'
(MacDonald 1995, p. 198). The majority of these, and many similar, comments are
responses to the music of Sgt Pepper. Countless interviews, numerous articles and
several books3 have devoted themselves to examinations of the bewildering variety
of styles, themes and vocabularies that characterise what is arguably the most celebrated album in the history of post-war popular music (a word which recurs in
many of these accounts is 'kaleidoscopic').
No less significant has been the attention paid to its cover, whose extravagance
and complexity amply and consciously reflect its music. 'The Beatles and their
entourage took exceptional pains to create for the Sgt Pepper jacket a collage as

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Inn Inglis

colorful, imaginative and intriguing as the record itself' (Schaffner 1977, p. 81). As
the Beatles reinvent and introduce themselves on the album's opening track not as
the Beatles now, but as the members of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, so
too the cover confirms the new identities. Surrounded by an audience of around
sixty of the group's friends, heroes and mentors (including the early Beatles
themselves), wearing the satin military style uniforms of a Northern brass band,
holding brass and wind instruments in place of guitars, and posed behind a bass
drum on which the new band's name is proudly displayed, the Beatles are encouraging us to re-evaluate our assumptions about who they are. But in fact there is a
surfeit of visual clues - the references to competitor-colleagues Bob Dylan and the
Rolling Stones, a portable television, flowers that spell the word 'Beatles' on what
appears to be a fresh grave, a row of marijuana plants, the threefold presence of
child star Shirley Temple, a figure of an Indian goddess - whose impulse is amplified when the graphic design of the cover is assessed in conjunction with the musical design of the record, '. . . among the most varied collections of songs anyone
had ever pieced together, a crazy quilt of rock 'n' roll, sound effects, electronic
noodling, and Indian, folk, baroque, classical, and music-hall influences' (Schaffner
1977, p. 77). The cover was designed by Peter Blake and Jann Haworth, and photographed by Michael Cooper. Their involvement left little doubt that 'Beatles album
sleeves, in the mind of the group itself, as much as in the opinion of . . . fans and
critics, had assumed the status of Works of Art.' (Evans 19848, p. 96) Producer
George Martin believes that it accomplished its task precisely and efficiently: 'their
artwork on the sleeve complements the music inside it perfectly; both are types of
collage' (Martin 1994, p. 116).
By the appearance of the group's next album some sixteen months later, three
events had impacted upon the trajectory of the Beatles' career. The first was the
death, in August 1967, of their manager Brian Epstein; the second was their introduction to and increasing immersion in the doctrine of Transcendental Meditation
practised by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, which culminated in their visit to Rishikesh, India, in the Spring of 1968; the third was the inauguration, in January 1968,
of their own management and recording company, named Apple Corps Ltd.
Released in November 1968, the group's only double album, The gentles, has continued to meet with critical confusion. Some have hailed it as another masterpiece,
pointing to its 'remarkable richness of invention and variety of mood' (Mellers 1973,
p. 125), while others see it as disappointing and mediocre, believing that 'half the
tracks on it are poor by earlier standards . . . many of its lyrics are little more than
the lazy navel-gazing of pampered recluses' (MacDonald 1995, p. 261). Many of the
tracks were written during the group's stay in Rishikesh, and betray all too clearly
the varying degrees of (dis)satisfaction the four Beatles experienced at the time, as
first Ringo Starr, then Paul McCartney, finally John Lennon and George Harrison,
returned to Britain to engage in a number of individual projects in the early and
middle months of 1968. It is not surprising then, that 'there is little in this collection
of songs to suggest either literary or musical unity . . . the album fails to demonstrate any particular theme or conceptual reference point' (O'Grady 1983, p. 150).
In fact Lennon himself has confirmed that the initial signs of the Beatles' eventual
break-up were in their preoccupation with individual musical ambitions at the time
of this album. 'We made the double album, the set . . . it was just me and a backing
group, Paul and a backing group, and I enjoyed it. We broke up then.' (Miles 1980,
p. 69)

The album covers of the Beatles

89

If the design of any album cover should reflect the music it contains and evoke
the intention of the performers, the strategy employed to illuminate and accompany
two LPs, by four de facfo soloists, whose musical contents encompassed rock 'n' roll,
doo-wop, blues, folk, rock, country, pop, psychedelia, avant-garde and music-hall,
was deceptively simple. Richard Hamilton, one of the earliest exponents of Pop Art,
was recruited as designer for the double album. He proposed a blank white cover,
subtly embossed with the words 'The Beatles', indicating both performers and title,
which could be embellished by the inclusion of photographs and prints inside, and
a unique 'limited edition' number on the outside; eventually the first two million
copies to be pressed bore their own serial number. It did, however, also possess a
powerful commercial rationale: 'It was a very radical way to package the album.
Richard Hamilton saw it, not as an art statement, but as a way of competing with
the lavish design treatments of most post-Sgt Pepper sleeves.' (Miles 1997, p. 502)
And by curtailing the conventions of the album sleeve to the most extreme of minimalist concepts, the design - in contrast to Sgt Pepper - provides no clues to the
nature of the complex and unpredictable correspondences (if any) between performers and music, between the Beatles and The Beatles. For the only time in their
career, there is no place for the group (in whatever form) on the album front. In
saying nothing, the cover says everything.
Although the group's third film, the full-length cartoon Yellow Submarine, was
released in July 1968, the soundtrack album, containing only four new songs, did
not appear until January 1969. The delay was mainly to allow Apple to concentrate
on the promotion of The Beatles - uniquely, the rear of the Yellow Submarine cover
said nothing about its own record, choosing instead to reproduce Tony Palmer's
review of The Beatles that had appeared in The Observer. But it also reflected the
overall lack of involvement and attention given by the Beatles to the project. The
movie had been demanded by United Artists (the producers of A Hard Day's Night
and Help!) whose contractual arrangements with the group had stipulated three
films: 'Both the Beatles and Brian [Epsteinl treated it as a throwaway, a means of
fulfilling their obligation to provide United Artists with a third film.' (McCabe and
Schonfield 1972, p. 105) The Beatles' voices were dubbed by actors, and for the first
time in its career the group had little or no control over the imagery and identities
constructed for them: 'the contribution of "the Beatles" was limited to the four
contractually enforced original songs, a few minor script ideas, and a brief appearance at the film's closure' (Neaverson 1997, p. 83). The album was completed by
the inclusion of a couple of previously released songs - including 'Yellow Submarine' - and the original film score, composed and orchestrated by George Martin.
Disowned by the Beatles themselves and generally regarded as the weakest of their
albums (Dowlding 1989, p. 210), its music fails to match the psychedelia and
extravagance of the post-Sgf Pepper cartoon caricatures the movie depicts. Instead,
the colourful graphics and characterisations, designed by Heinz Edelmann, which
adorn the cover are in sharp contrast to the hastily assembled music of the record
itself.
The lack of title and the absence of the group's name on the cover of Abbey
Road (which was the last album the group recorded, although its release came
before Let If Be) can be seen to serve a specific purpose. The photograph, by Iain
MacMillan, of the group confidently striding across the zebra crossing was an
'uncomplicated acknowledgement of the scene of their greatest artistic achieve, 100). Led, appropriments, the Abbey Road EM1 recording studio' (Evans 1 9 8 4 ~p.

90

Ian Inglis

ately, by John Lennon whose Quarrymen skiffle group, formed in March 1957, had
eventually evolved into the Beatles, the presence of the group provides a visual
signature which permanently and officially links its music with the location in
which it was produced. Unlike many of their contemporaries in the 1960s, such as
the Rolling Stones, who used a variety of studios in the UK and US in their attempts
to create particular sounds,' the Beatles had seen little need to go beyond the familiarity of Abbey Road and George Martin. Abbey Road's combination of the traditional
conventions of pop (the love songs, ballads and rock 'n' roll of Side One, in which
all four Beatles are present as composers and vocalists) with the innovative and
unexpected aesthetics of rock (the fifteen-minute suite of songs on Side Two) is
ideally complemented by the cover's image of four independent young men who
must remain inevitably connected to the end: 'the Abbey Road album seems to sum
up all the reasons why the Beatles became the most popular and accomplished
musical force of their time' (Hertsgaard 1995, p. 304).
Let It Be was intended to be the soundtrack album to accompany a film documentary about the Beatles at work in the recording studio. Although filming was
concluded in January 1969, the movie and the album did not appear until May of
the following year, as a result of the group's disillusionment with the project.
Recorded in (and on the roof of) the newly built Apple Studios in Savile Row,
rather than Abbey Road, the music (and the movie) reveal the lack of unity or
optimism within the group. As the tapes were passed from George Martin to Glyn
Johns to Phil Spector in an attempt to improve their quality, the Beatles 'were horrified at how ragged and thin it sounded. They were also sick of it.' (Miles 1997, pp.
549-50) Lennon gave guarded approval of Spector's contribution to the eventual
release: 'he was given the shittiest load of badly recorded shit with a lousy feeling
to it ever, and he made something out of it' (Wenner 1971, p. 120). But this opinion
was not shared by McCartney who complained bitterly about Spector's embellishments, which included '. . . harps, horns, an orchestra and women's choir added.
No one had asked me what I thought. I couldn't believe it. I would never have
female voices on a Beatles record.' (Miles 1997, p. 575)
Given the acrimony that the album created within the group, it is, perhaps,
entirely appropriate that the four Beatles, again unnamed, appear separately on its
cover. Four separate portraits (photographed by Ethan Russell), bordered in black,
present the Beatles unequivocally as four separate individuals, with separate opinions, ambitions and trajectories. Made somewhat more attractive by the inclusion
of a glossy book of photographs in the boxed set, which was designed by John
Kosh, nevertheless 'many record reviewers saw his black sombre design as a fitting
choice for the last Beatles' album' (Stannard 1982, p. 91).

Impacts and influences

George Martin's assertion that 'the art of the vinyl album sleeve . . . did not have
much of a life before the Beatles' (Martin 1994, p. 121) has been echoed by many
commentators who are keen to credit the group with initiating the explosion of
innovative album design which characterised the mid and late 1960s. Evans (1984~)
has suggested that, with the exception of the cover of Please Please Me, which followed the conventional 'personality' pose of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the
album covers fall into three distinct groups, whose designs reflect the intentions of
promotion (With The Beatles to Rubber Soul), art (Revolver to The Beatles) and music

The album covers of the Beatles

91

(Abbey Road to Let It Be); he excludes Yellow Submarine from his analysis, although
chronologically and stylistically it would seem to belong in the second categorisation.
Described as 'one of the most familiar - if not the most familiar - images in
Beatles iconography' (Evans 19848, p. 411, Robert Freeman's photograph for With
The Beatles quickly persuaded a number of young British groups caught up in the
turbulence of Beatlemania to mimic the unsmiling half-lit pose adopted by the
group. Albums such as Them's Angry Young Them, The Kink's Kinks, and the Rolling
Stones' The Rolling Stones were early imitators of a style continued through to the
1980s and 1990s by, for example, Phil Collins' No Jacket Required and Lou Reed &
John Cale's Songs For Drella.
Despite EMI's preference for a colour portrait for With The Beatles, the photographer won the support of Brian Epstein, George Martin and the Beatles themselves: 'Black-and-white photographs had been used for jazz album covers, whose
standards of design were consistently high, but it was the first time, to my knowledge, that a black-and-white photograph had been used on an LP cover for popular
musicians.' (Freeman 1996, p. 9)
The use of side-lit photography was continued in the selection of twenty blackand-white 'film strip' snaps of the four Beatles for the cover of A Hard Day's Night.
By visually signalling the relationship between movie and album in this way, the
traditional necessity to use the sleeve as an advertisement for the movie rather than
for the record was overcome. It was, however, not an entirely new device; the
album cover for Elvis Presley's Blue Hawaii, for example, had made use of a similar
film-strip approach on both front and rear, albeit in a less dramatic way. Like With
The Beatles, the design of A Hard Day's Night has continued to attract imitations and
parodies in the decades since it appeared. John Cale's The Academy In Peril, the
Rolling Stones' Some Girls, the Bangles' Different Light and the Super Furry Animals'
Fuzzy Logic are all albums whose lineage stems directly from the cover of A Hard
Day's Night.
The portrait of the group on the cover of Beatles For Sale was the first colour
photograph Robert Freeman had taken of the Beatles, and evokes the image of With
The Beatles in its directness. It provides an exemplification of Sontag's observation
that 'in its simplest form, we have in a photograph surrogate possession of a cherished person or thing' (Sontag 1978, p. 120).It is that possession or ownership which
this sequence of album covers accomplishes. When we purchase the record in its
cover, we simultaneously purchase the Beatles themselves; when we play the record
and/or examine the cover, we consume our purchase; when we file the record away
in our record collections, we confim that the product is now uniquely ours. In this
respect the title and design of Beatles For Sale represent a remarkably astute insight
into the nature of the relationship between the group and its fans.
The standard close-up portrait of head-and-shoulders utilised on the covers
of the group's first four albums was sacrificed for the design of Help! On this
occasion, the four group members were presented as full-length figures, set back a
considerable way from the camera, whose dark snow-gear was starkly contrasted
against an all-white background. It freely recalled the multiple portraits of the fulllength, gold lame-suited Elvis Presley from the cover of Elvis' Gold Records Volume
2. The organisation of the group's image was simple enough, as Freeman has
explained: 'For the design of the album cover I had the Beatles signalling in semaphore the word HELP!' (Freeman 1996, p. 15). Evans describes how 'the semaphore

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Help . . . became another trademark, another symbol that made them instantly identifiable . . . even at a distance' (Evans 1984~,p. 27). In fact, the semaphore positions
adopted by the Beatles spell out the letters NUJV. Linguistically meaningless, but
visually attractive, the distortion of reality and manipulation of imagery presented
by the Beatles on the cover of Help! was a demonstration of the argument that 'the
function of advertising is to create images that sell products . . . and there is therefore no need for it to adhere to truth' (Gordon and Kittross 1999, p. 240).
The design for Rubber Soul has been described as the cover that 'effected quite
a revolution in album artwork, which had heretofore been as cheap and unimaginatively garish as that on noodle boxes' (Schaffner 1977, p. 49). Most striking was
the pre-psychedelic typography which 'heralded a style that was to become the de
rigeur of the poster art of the flower power subculture which blossomed on America's West Coast in 1966' (Evans 19848, p. 60) and which directly influenced the
output of graphic designers like Wes Wilson, Alton Kelley and Victor Moscoso. An
equally tangible impact was to be seen in the number of covers which seemed to
draw directly from Rubber Soul's photography, both in terms of the dominant colours, background and stance of the performer (for example, Bob Dylan's Blonde On
Blonde and Count Five's Psychotic Reaction), and also in their use of the fisheye lens
which mimicked the image distortion of the Beatles (such as Captain Beefheart's
Safe As Milk and the Rolling Stones' Big Hits, High Tide And Green Grass).
Klaus Voorman's design and artwork for Revolver won the Grammy award
for the best album cover of 1966. While it reflected the revival of interest in the
whose elegant, black-and-white line drawVictorian illustrator Aubrey Beard~ley,~
ings were enthusiastically imitated by cartoonists, advertisers and designers, it
boldly transferred their whimsical, exotic qualities to the more vibrant environment
of mid-1960s rock: 'Its cover, amid its rivals' Carnaby colours, was plain black and
white. Who else in the world would announce themselves in graphics reflecting the
smartest magazines? Who else but the Beatles would have confidence colossal
enough to be so chastely downbeat?' (Norman 1981, pp. 262-3)
The cover for Sgt Pepper, which won the Grammy award for the best album
cover of 1967, is undoubtedly the most celebrated that popular music has yet produced. Weaving together images from psychedelia, nostalgia, the fairy-tale, the fairground and popular culture, it was the first cover to specifically offer itself as an
object for overt investigation and analysis; identifying the figures (who included
Aubrey Beardsley, as well as contemporary American artists Simon Rodia, Richard
Merkin, Wallace Borman, Richard Lindner and Larry Bell) featured in the tableau
became a popular game and an intellectual exercise. And in 1999, the BBC placed
the album cover in its Arena Top Twenty list of British twentieth century masterpieces of art and design - ahead of such national icons as Mary Quant's mini skirt,
Sir Gilbert Scott's red telephone box, and Sir Alec Issigonis's Mini car.
Like many Beatles albums, the cover continues to attract parody and pastiche,
most famously from the Mothers Of Invention's We're Only In It For The Money. It
also fostered a series of weak imitations, notably the Rolling Stones' Their Satanic
Majesties Request (also photographed, like Sgt Pepper, by Michael Cooper). In fact,
the group's regular and unacknowledged plagiarism of the Beatles' output over the
years frustrated John Lennon: 'I would just like to list what we did and what the
Stones did two months after, on every fucking album and every fucking thing we
did . . . you know Satanic Majesties is Pepper . . . I resent the implication that the
Stones are like revolutionaries and that the Beatles weren't . . . they are not in the

The album covers of the Beatles

93

same class, music-wise or power-wise.' (Wenner 1971, pp. 90-1) In addition, the
planned but unfulfilled involvement of Dutch design team The Fool in the Sgt
Pepper project (they were to have designed the centrefold spread) led to their actual
involvement in the creation of a number of other album sleeves (such as The Incredible String Band's 5000 Spirits). And their adventurous and elaborate Indianinfluenced designs were, in turn, to exert an influence on the covers of many more
LPs of the late 1960s, including Cream's Disraeli Gears and The Jimi Hendrix Experience's Axis: Bold A s Love.
In the same manner that Sgt Pepper had introduced unsuspected complexities
into the aesthetics of album cover design, The Beatles reacted against the trend its
predecessor had instigated by reverting to a uniquely minimalist design; to this
day, the album is conventionally referred to as the White Album. The flamboyance,
diversity, and visual excess typified by Sgt Pepper continued to be the chief signatures of album art through the late 1960s and early 1970s: 'album cover design
plundered whatever was necessary in order to approximate to an experience that
the music was trying to embody' (Thorgerson 1989, p. 95). In contrast, the design
of The Beatles remained an exceptional, if startling, alternative to the lustrous and
decorative colours of psychedelia.
The most lasting impact of Yellow Submarine, whose cartoon depictions of the
Beatles in Pepperland act as a compendium of visual styles of the late 1960s - op
art, pop art, art nouveau, psychedelia, surrealism - lies not in any direct influences
it may have had over album art generally, but in its significance for the merchandising and memorabilia sectors of the popular music industry. Toys, games, jigsaw
puzzles, souvenir books, watches, costumes, bedclothes, greetings cards, lampshades, lunch boxes and crockery were among the dozens of associated products
marketed to coincide with the release of the album and the movie. This second
wave of Beatle-related merchandising, four years after the wave that accompanied
their initial US success, was the final substantial marketing of the group as a product; it 'updated the moptop image of the 1964 versions with a dash of the trendy
psychedelia as exemplified by the film itself' (Schaffner 1977, p. 100).Together they
created a template which has been periodically employed to maximise commercial
returns within the entertainment industry; the most notable beneficiaries may well
be the Spice Girls of 1996-8.
This said, it is also undeniable that in the period immediately after the release
of Yellow Submarine, there was a distinct growth in the number of albums which
featured cartoon covers. Cat Stevens' Teaser A n d The Firecat, the Flamin' Groovies'
Supersnazz and the Move's Shazam may well have been encouraged in their use of
what was previously a relatively neglected area of album art by the example of the
Beatles. In fact, throughout the practices of the entertainment media, a new subculture of 'animatophilia' was ushered in by the success of Yellow Submarine; as Neaverson (1997, p. 122) has noted, the consequences of its rediscovery of the art and
possibilities of animation have continued into the 1990s.
Abbey Road is perhaps unique among Beatles album covers in its presentation
of an unremarkable, even banal image, which has nonetheless become as potent a
symbol of the group as any of its other images. Compared with the painstaking
research and preparation required for Sgt Pepper, the cover's creation, by Iain MacMillan, could not have been easier: 'MacMillan set up his camera in the middle of
Abbey Road, right outside the studios, and while the police stopped traffic the
Beatles walked across the road three or four times.' (Fawcett 1976, p. 84) Pre-

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lan Inglis

dictably, the shot of the four Beatles on the zebra crossing has produced its parodies, such as the Red Hot Chilli Peppers' The Abbey Road EP and New York City's
Soulful Road. Far less predictable, however, was the version by Booker T and the
MGs of the entire Abbey Road album - music and sleeve: McLemore Avenue was
named after the Memphis street in which it was recorded, and its cover shows the
group walking across the avenue which gave their LP its title.
The Abbey Road cover also served to fuel the rumour current in 1969 that Paul
McCartney was no longer alive, by allegedly providing clues to his death (Patterson
1996); in fact McCartney himself was to provide a pastiche of the cover for his own
album Paul Is Live. And, of course, the album can also be credited for introducing
the practice of naming an LP after a significant address: Eric Clapton's 461 Ocean
Boulevard, Paul Weller's Stanley Road, and John Lennon's Menlove Avenue are familiar examples.
After the impressive and influential innovations of their previous album
covers, the cover for Let It Be returned, rather despondently, to the conventions
of the 'personality' pose of their very earliest LPs. Evans' observation that
'design-wise, the cover had little to offer' (Evans 19848, p. 102) is a charitable
assessment of a cover which would not have been out of place in record racks
a decade earlier.

Readerly and writerly texts

In his discussion of the insights offered by Barthes (1975) into the interpretation of
texts, Fiske has pointed to the essential differences between the 'readerly text
[which] invites an essentially passive, receptive, disciplined reader who tends to
accept its meanings as already made. . . [and] . . . the writerly text, which challenges
the reader constantly to rewrite it, to make sense out of it' (Fiske 1989, p. 103).
The former can be characterised as a closed text, where meaning is intrinsic, easily
accessible and which contains little or no room for dispute. The latter is a (more
difficult) open text which requires the reader's involvement in the negotiation of
meanin&).
However, the construction and assignment of meaning may take time, and
is contingent on any number of emotional, material, experiential and intellectual
conditions. The belief that any text possesses a single absolute meaning is difficult
to sustain, since such a claim rests on the assumptions that the text contains a
deliberate message, which is decoded by the reader in the way it was encoded by
the producer, and which is accepted uncritically. Nonetheless, the attempt to suggest
if not to specify meaning is very necessary to the practice of informative advertising,
which aims to eliminate confusion and provide exact information. Within the highly
competitive world of popular music, in which (certainly in the 1960s) success is
largely equated with record sales, there is thus a commercial imperative to diminish
the potential consumer's scope for uncertainty at the point of transaction by emphasising as clearly as possible the nature of the commodity on sale. For the sale of
albums, the easiest ways to accomplish this are to frankly present the name of the
performers, their likeness (usually a photograph), and the title of the LP. This is the
strategy adopted by the Beatles.
The name of the group appears on eight of their twelve albums; when it is
absent (Rubber Soul, Revolver, Abbey Road and Let It Be) their photographs are there
to confirm their identity. Their photographs (in one case, a cartoon depiction) are

The album covers of the Beatles

95

on eleven of the twelve covers; when they are missing (The Beatles) the album's title
and the group's name simultaneously appear to offer reassurance. The title is also
to be found on eleven covers; on the one occasion when it is absent (Abbey Road)
there is a photograph of the Beatles in Abbey Road itself. In this sense, the album
covers of the Beatles allow little possibility for alternative readings. They ask
nothing of the reader. Each cover is absolutely and uniquely what it appears - the
cover of a new, named album by the Beatles. Even Sgt Pepper rigorously adheres to
these rules; in fact, by presenting two versions of the Beatles (one in military costume, one in suits) plus its prominent display of the group's name and the album's
title, the cover emphatically signals what is on offer. Similarly, the all-white cover
of The Beatles does not invite interpretation but restricts it, since the only visible
words are, explicitly, 'the Beatles'.
The album covers of the Beatles thus exemplify the readerly text. Through
their direct identification of the performers, consistent reproduction of their likeness
and clear display of the LP's title, the covers achieve closure; there is nothing else
that these texts can possibly be other than the covers of specific albums, created at
specific times, by the Beatles. That they are colourful, inventive, unusual or provocative does not detract from this basic characteristic. As texts, they are in sharp
contrast to those produced by, for example, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, groups
who have released several albums whose sleeves have dispensed with name, likeness and title. Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon, Atom Heart Mother, Meddle, Wish
You Were Here and Led Zeppelin's Houses Of The Holy, Untitled/Four Symbols and
Presence typify the writerly text; they contain no reference to the group or to the
album title, and the images have no musical relevance. They generate multiple
meanings and, in so doing, free the reader from the tyranny of imposed definition.
All interpretations are left open; these texts could be anything - including album
covers, but excluding nothing.
Although it has been argued that 'words, comparisons, signs need to create a
context for a printed photograph . . . they must mark and leave open diverse
approaches' (Berger 1980, p. 631, the words and signs on the album covers of the
Beatles achieve the opposite effect. Partly because of the universal familiarity of the
images of the four Beatles (there can be no speculation about their identity) and
partly because of the straightforward announcement of their contents (repetition of
name and title) the group's album covers served the function of 'transparent wrappers'. That they should remain so during a period in which 'enigmatic images
replaced the informative and documentary nature of the usual photographic album
cover' (Sorger 1988, p. 18) is quite remarkable. It may be ironic that the group
praised more than any other for its daring should, in this particular facet of its
career at least, demonstrate its affinity with the routine and the popular, rather than
the avant garde with which it has so often been linked.

Conclusion
Commerce and technology have played significant roles in the history of album
cover art. Its birth was assisted by the postwar reorganisation of record retailing
(coinciding with the emergence of rock 'n' roll) which introduced self-service record
racks through which the consumer could browse; they 'brought the cover face to
face with the customer . . . slowly the importance of the cover as a 'silent salesman'
was noticed by the record companies and their marketing personnel' (Sorger 1988,

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Ian Inglis

p. 11).Its death was provoked, some four decades later by Philips' introduction of
the CD, after which the creative significance and budgetary allocation given to cover
design was severely curtailed.
The album cover might therefore be approached as a historical relic whose
chronology can be precisely located, in much the same way as other ancient artefacts, such as the chronometer, the Davy Lamp, or the flintlock musket. But whereas
the creation of those objects stemmed from the recognition of certain needs and the
attempts to resolve those needs, the commercial world inhabited by the designers
of album covers stresses not needs, but desires - the desire of the producer to
sell, the desire of the purchaser to consume. And 'what characterises the so-called
advanced societies is that they today consume images and no longer, like those of
the past, beliefs' (Barthes 1981, pp. 118-19). The issues raised by an examination of
the particular imagery of album covers have, therefore, much wider relevance than
the specific position they occupy within popular music.
By concentrating on the album covers of the Beatles, whose images will be
familiar to almost all, I have attempted to illustrate the success they achieved in
linking the visual image of the group with its current musical output. In addition,
I have indicated some of the enduring ways in which their innovative design and
imagery were to impact on the popular music community. And I have also suggested that, notwithstanding these considerable achievements, they remain fundamentally conservative texts which reflect a set of commercially driven and relatively
inflexible assumptions and practices. In view of the group's ability to confront and
dismantle many of the restrictive structures and cultures of the popular music
industry throughout its career, it is perhaps surprising that, in this case, the Beatles
should demur from the opportunity for challenge, and consent instead to a policy
of innovation within predictability.

Endnotes
1. Notably the notorious 'Butcher' cover, originally intended as the album sleeve for Yesterday Aizd Today, released in the US in June 1966.
2. Excluding the compilation, A Collection Of
Beatles Oldies But Goldies, released in the UK in
December 1966.
3. See, for example, Harry (1989), Martin (1994)
and Moore (1997).
4. The eight albums released by the Rolling
Stones in the 1960s - from The Rolling

Stoizes (April 1964) to Let It Bleed (December 1969) - utilised various producers
(Andrew Loog Oldham, Glyn Johns, Jimmy
Miller) and different studios (Regent Sound
in London, RCA Studios in Hollywood,
Chess Studios in Chicago, Olympic Studios
in London).
5. An exhibition of Beardsley's work at London's
Victoria & Albert Museum had drawn huge
crowds in the Summer of 1966.

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Berger, J. 1980. About Looking (London)
Dowlding, W.J. 1989. Beatlesongs (New York)
Evans, M. 1 9 8 4 ~ .'The art of the Beatles', Exhibition Catalogue, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
(Liverpool)
1984~.The Art of the Beatles (New York)
Fawcett, A. 1976. John Lennon: One Day at a Time (New York)
Popular Culture (London)
Fiske, J. 1989. Understar~dir~g
Freeman, R. 1996. Yesterday (London)

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97

Gordon, A.D., and Kittross, J.M. 1999. Controversies in Media Ethics (New York)

Harry, B. 1989. Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (London)

Hertsgaard, M . 1995. A Day in the Life (New York)

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