Famous names album covers

Commonly regarded as the grandfather of pop album covers, Peter Blake created not only one of the most memorable covers of all time - The Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - but also covers for the Band Aid single Do They Know It's Christmas? (1984), Paul Weller's Stanley Road (1995) and the Ian Dury tribute album Brand New Boots and Panties (2001).

Most recently he designed the cover for Oasis's greatest hits album Stop the Clocks.

Kings of the album cover

Blake was also responsible for The Who's Face Dances (1981), for which he commissioned British painters like David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin and Patrick Caulfield to paint portraits of band members.

Fellow pop artist And Warhol has also created some iconic album covers. The Velvet Underground's 1967 debut, The Velvet Underground and Nico, featured a banana which could be peeled back, scratched and sniffed.

And The Rolling Stones' 1971 album Sticky Fingers, which featured a male pelvis clad in jeans, the zip of which could be suggestively pulled down.

Sadly the original interactive features of these album covers had limited availability.

Also in this brew of album cover creators was graphic designer Storm Thorgerson. He was a key member of the British graphic art group Hipgnosis and most famous for his Pink Floyd album covers - in particular Dark Side of the Moon.

Thorgerson, with Hipgnosis and solo, has also made covers for Led Zeppelin, Peter Gabriel, The Cranberries and Muse - amongst many, many others.

End of an era

But as the era of pop art faded, and photography became the predominant medium used for album covers, featuring the work of celebrated artists and designers on album covers has become less commonplace.

Aside from Thorgerson, Pink Floyd have had a fair few celebrated artists create artwork for them, including illustrator Gerald Scarfe who designed the cover for The Wall.

And the creative force behind the Alien films, HR Giger, is responsible for the cover of Emerson Lake & Palmer's 1973 prog rock album Brain Salad Surgery.

Also, the cover of Big Audio Dynamite's 1998 Tighten Up, Vol. 88 is a painting by Clash bassist turned artist Paul Simonon (seen smashing his guitar on the front cover of the Clash's masterpiece London Calling). The band was headed by Simonon's former bandmate Mick Jones.

Signalling a resurgence of contemporary art on album artwork, however, was the cover of the Best of Blur album designed by Julian Opie.

The album's release propelled Opie into the limelight of popular culture and the originals now hang in the National Portrait Gallery.

Blur had already frolicked with the Brit art movement when they got Damien Hirst to direct their video for Country House - featuring Keith Allen - in 1995.

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