The worst heavy metal album cover ever printed is Born Again, and it is also one of the most loved. Released by Vertigo in 1983, the only Black Sabbath album sung by Ian Gillan went into the shops wearing a newborn baby with horns, fangs and claws, coloured in the lurid tones of a bad trip, a picture so crude that its own singer turned on it the moment he saw it. "I looked at the cover and puked," Gillan said.
The designer who made it in a single night, from black and white photocopies of a baby on the cover of a 1968 educational magazine called Mind Alive, was Steve Joule, known to the trade as Krusher. He has said he submitted the most ridiculous rough he could think of on purpose, expecting to be turned down and keep his work on Ozzy Osbourne's sleeves, and the band approved it. Geezer Butler's verdict, by Joule's telling, was that it was terrible and great at the same time, and by the same telling Max Cavalera and Glen Benton have both named it their favourite sleeve.
That is the peculiar arithmetic of the worst heavy metal album covers, and Hans Christian Andersen set it down in 1837. Two swindlers sell an emperor a suit of cloth invisible to anyone unfit for office, every chamberlain praises a fabric none of them can see, and the monarch marches through his capital under a canopy in nothing at all, as spectacle for the whole city, until a child in the crowd says so and the laughter of the street smashes the procession to pieces behind the halberds. The procession was never the problem. The procession is what makes the moment unforgettable.
The sleeves that stood their ground, from the watermill on the first Sabbath album to the razor on British Steel, are set out in the section that covers it. The ones that went down fall into three families: the money ran out, the taste ran out, or the band ran out of reasons to care.
What sinks the worst heavy metal album covers
Money is the commonest cause. A young band on a small label in 1984 had no budget for a painter with a portfolio, so the sleeve went to a friend, a friend of the singer or whoever the label had in the building that week, and the result was printed because the pressing plant was waiting. Taste is the second, and it ages worst, because what read as a dare in 1980 reads as something else entirely forty years on. Indifference is the third. By the nineties some of the biggest names were signing off sleeves they had plainly never looked at twice.
The procession was never the problem. The procession is what makes the moment unforgettable.
When the money ran out
The guitarist whose sketch of a skull should have been the first thing anyone saw of his new band was Dave Mustaine. He had given Combat Records a drawing of Vic Rattlehead for the debut, Killing Is My Business... and Business Is Good!, in 1985, and the label lost it, then improvised a replacement around a plastic skull and tinfoil that left the whole band mortified. The 2002 reissue finally carried a sleeve redrawn by Michael Mueller from Mustaine's original sketches. Seventeen years is a long time for a debut to go about in somebody else's face. The label's tinfoil did more lasting damage to that record than any review.
A year earlier Anthrax had made its debut on Megaforce with Fistful of Metal, released in January 1984, and the painter handed the job was Kent Joshpe, working from an idea brought in by Neil Turbin, who was singing for the band at the time. A hand grabs a man by the hair while a fist in chainmail smashes into his mouth, teeth and blood spraying out past the knuckles, and on close inspection both hands are left hands. Scott Ian has called the cover horrible.
The sleeve lands the way the custard pie lands in a two-reel silent comedy. It is thrown with a full wind-up at a man in a top hat, it bursts from brim to collar, the pianist in the pit hammers out a chord, and what was built as a blow becomes the moment the audience has paid to laugh at. The wind-up was real. The splatter is what anyone remembers.
Behind that sleeve sat "Metal Thrashing Mad", a song the band has dug back out of the vault every so often since, long after it disowned the picture on the front. The worst painting in the rack could still hold a band worth hearing. The band grew into its music within two years. It never grew fond of the fist.
Taste, and the photographs that aged
The designer who set a woman kneeling at the hip of a man seen from behind, cropped at the shoulders with a can in his hand, and a Doberman at her ear, was Storm Thorgerson of Hipgnosis, and the photograph went onto Animal Magnetism, released by Scorpions on 31 March 1980. "We just knew there was something rude somewhere," he said of it later. The record held "Make It Real" and "The Zoo". The sleeve holds up far worse than either.
Taste also failed at the top of the trade, and in the most expensive way. The collaboration between Lou Reed and Metallica, released in 2011, went out as Lulu under Stan Musilek's photograph of a wax shop mannequin from the early twentieth century, borrowed from the Werkbundarchiv, Museum der Dinge in Berlin, its arms long gone and its glass eyes staring out from a blank ground.
"The View", the single from it, came with an official video, and between the sleeve and the song the record became one of the most argued-over releases either party ever put out. The mannequin, at least, was an art object with a museum behind it. On the sleeve nobody could tell.
The late cartoons
The painter who drew Sabbath's grim reaper for Forbidden in 1995, a cartoon skeleton in a blue cloak with a scythe raised under a full moon, ghouls scattered through the graveyard grass around him in the style of a humour magazine, was Paul Sample. Produced by Ernie C of Body Count and carrying a spoken passage from Ice-T, the album is by common consent the lowest point of the band's recorded life, and the sleeve announced as much before the needle dropped. The reaper was no crime, since the band had kept company with death since its first album. The crime was the grin, and a graveyard's worth of goblins drawn for laughs by a band whose whole name had once been a threat.
It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
| Year | Record | Made by | What went wrong |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1980 | Scorpions, Animal Magnetism | Hipgnosis | Taste, and forty years of hindsight |
| 1983 | Black Sabbath, Born Again | Steve Joule | Made in a night to be refused, then approved |
| 1984 | Anthrax, Fistful of Metal | Kent Joshpe | A singer's idea, and two left hands |
| 1985 | Megadeth, Killing Is My Business | Combat Records | The band's own sketch lost by the label |
| 1995 | Black Sabbath, Forbidden | Paul Sample | A cartoon where menace was wanted |
| 2011 | Lou Reed and Metallica, Lulu | Stan Musilek | An art object that read as a shop dummy |
What outlives every one of these failures is the vocabulary they were trying to speak. Horns, skulls, fists, reapers and chains turn up on the good sleeves and the terrible ones alike, and the difference is never the symbol, it is the hand that drew it and the money behind the hand. Where those marks came from and why a crowd reads them at a glance belongs to the heavy metal symbols.
The pantheon of bad sleeves keeps its members for the same reason the great ones do. Nobody forgets them. A mediocre cover disappears into the rack in a year, while Born Again has been argued over for four decades and is printed on shirts that sell to people who have never heard Gillan sing a note. On that measure alone the worst of them did their job, and that much is beyond dispute.
