Present fears are less than horrible imaginings.William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act I, Scene 3
Before a needle touched the groove, the sleeve had already done the frightening. The Vertigo photographer who signed his work Keef was Keith Macmillan, and at Mapledurham Watermill on the Thames, sometime between the album's November 1969 sessions and its release the following February, he got his model up before dawn on a freezing morning and shot her in a black cloak on Kodak infrared film, which drained the greens and left the whole scene an unnatural, poisoned colour. It went on sale on 13 February 1970 on the front of Black Sabbath.
That sleeve tore the smiling group portrait off the front of the rock album and nailed a stranger to the spot where it had hung. Heavy metal album covers have worked ever since like the carved figurehead bolted under the bowsprit of a man of war, a gilded beast or a painted woman lashed by every sea on the crossing, going first into the harbour so that the town sees teeth before it sees a single gun run out. The music arrives second. It always has.
Everything else in this culture grew out of that first decision to let a picture speak before the band did: the logo scrawled on a school desk, the jacket, the shirt, the tattoo, the film. The records themselves, and the order in which they arrived, are laid out in heavy metal, chapter by chapter. Around the records grew everything a fan could hold, wear or pin to a wall.
Heavy metal album covers before the monsters moved in
The seventies kept the monsters mostly offstage. Founded in 1968 by Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell, the London design studio that sold rock bands a deadpan surrealism was Hipgnosis, and it turned the same cold eye on Black Sabbath late in the decade: two robots coupling on an escalator for Technical Ecstasy in 1976, two masked airmen for Never Say Die! in 1978. Clever sleeves. Nobody was frightened.
The fantasy arrived by the other door. The English painter of floating islands and organic lettering was Roger Dean, and in 1972 he wrapped Uriah Heep's Demons and Wizards and The Magician's Birthday in the same dreaming worlds he was painting for Yes, which told a teenager in a record shop that this band dealt in spells before a single chord had been played. The lineage runs straight from those two gatefolds to every wizard later airbrushed onto a heavy metal sleeve.
The painting that brought the demons indoors went out on 30 November 1973. Commissioned for the fifth Sabbath album, the young illustrator who would later paint the posters for Star Wars and the Indiana Jones films was Drew Struzan. On Sabbath Bloody Sabbath he pinned a naked man to a bed under a swarm of clawing demons, set the number 666 into the headboard and then, on the back of the sleeve, painted the same man dying a gentler death, surrounded by grieving loved ones and sleeping lions.
A diptych, then. Damnation on one side, absolution on the other, and a sixteen year old turning the sleeve over and over in his hands before he ever reached the till. That is what a twelve inch cardboard square could do, and the decade that followed took the lesson and ran with it.
That sleeve tore the smiling group portrait off the front of the rock album and nailed a stranger to the spot where it had hung.
Snaggletooth, Eddie and the mascot that outlived the singer
Somebody had to give the fear a face. Commissioned by Lemmy Kilmister in 1977 for the first album of the trio he had formed two years earlier, the American illustrator who drew a war pig's skull with boar's tusks, a spiked helmet and hanging chains was Joe Petagno, and the beast he called Snaggletooth went onto Motörhead, released by Chiswick that August, where it bared its teeth in black and white at anyone who picked the record up.
Two years later the skull came back in colour. For Overkill, released on Bronze in March 1979, Petagno split the war pig open like a shell hit by a round, set its eyes blazing and threw a halo of green and violet light behind it, and from then on every Motörhead record carried the beast somewhere on the sleeve. The band was a trio. The mascot was the fourth member, and the only one who never quit.
The young English illustrator whose painted corpse Iron Maiden had already put on its debut in April 1980 was Derek Riggs, and the band kept calling him back. On Killers, released by EMI on 2 February 1981, Eddie stands on a lamplit East London street with a bloodied hatchet in his fist while a victim's hands claw at his shirt from below the frame, and a shop sign reading Ruskin hangs behind him, a nod to the Ruskin Arms, the East Ham pub where the band had played.
Where a sleeve used to carry a photograph of four or five musicians, it now carried one monster, and the monster could be updated, dressed as a pharaoh or a cyborg or a lobotomy patient, while the men in the band grew older, fell out and were replaced. Singers came and went. Eddie did not. The mascot turned a run of albums into a serial, and a serial is a thing that people collect.
Others followed the formula through the eighties. The demon hauling a priest on a chain across the front of Dio's Holy Diver in 1983 was christened Murray by the singer's camp, painted by Randy Berrett after an earlier version by a different artist was dropped, and a skeleton in a helmet stitched onto a shirt did more recruiting for a band in a small town than any review. The faithful learned to recognise a record across a shop floor before they could read its title.
British Steel and the razor in the fist
Not every great sleeve needed a monster. Working in the art department of CBS in London at the end of the seventies, the Polish designer who handed Judas Priest the plainest and most dangerous cover of its career was Rosław Szaybo, and for British Steel, released in April 1980, he had the photographer Bob Elsdale shoot his own hand gripping an oversized razor blade, the band's jagged name stamped into the steel where a maker's mark would be.
The picture holds a threat without spilling a drop. It is a blade held exactly where it should cut and does not, which is the whole sound of the record in one image: short, bright songs held under discipline, the danger always a quarter of an inch from the skin. Heavy metal album covers rarely got simpler than that, and very few got better.
The look behind the sleeve was being fixed at the same moment. Rob Halford had put the band into black leather, studs and chains from 1978, and the razor completed the costume: the hand on the cover might have belonged to anyone in the front row. That was the point of it.
| Year | Record | Artist | On the front |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1970 | Black Sabbath, Black Sabbath | Keith Macmillan (Keef) | A cloaked figure outside a watermill |
| 1972 | Uriah Heep, Demons and Wizards | Roger Dean | Painted fantasy scenery |
| 1973 | Black Sabbath, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath | Drew Struzan | A deathbed besieged by demons |
| 1976 | Rainbow, Rising | Ken Kelly | A fist rising from the sea to seize a rainbow |
| 1977 | Motörhead, Motörhead | Joe Petagno | Snaggletooth's first appearance |
| 1980 | Judas Priest, British Steel | Rosław Szaybo | A razor blade in a gripping hand |
| 1981 | Iron Maiden, Killers | Derek Riggs | Eddie with a hatchet on a night street |
| 1983 | Dio, Holy Diver | Randy Berrett | A demon with a priest on a chain |
| 1984 | Cirith Ungol, King of the Dead | Michael Whelan | A skeleton king facing a warrior |
Logos nobody could read, and letters everybody knew
The umlaut was the first joke that stuck. Blue Öyster Cult had set two dots over the O on its debut in 1972, next to a hooked cross that the artist Bill Gawlik had drawn as the alchemical symbol of Kronos, and Lemmy pinched the umlaut for his own band's name, saying years afterwards, "I only put it in there to look mean." The dots mean nothing in English. They were never supposed to.
A logo in this music is a signature that has to survive a biro. Assembled at a London studio in 1977 by Dennis Wilcock, the band's singer at the time, working with the art director Ray Hollingsworth, and traced by fans for four decades onto pencil cases and school desks, the angular Iron Maiden lettering took its sharp corners from an existing typeface that had already appeared on the poster for the 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth. It can be copied by a twelve year old with a ruler. That is why it spread.
Blackletter did the rest. The gothic scripts of German printing, the ones a monk would have recognised, gave Motörhead and a hundred bands after it an instant catechism of menace, and by the early nineties the youngest factions had pushed the letters so far into thorns, roots and dripping branches that the name vanished inside the drawing. Belgian designer Christophe Szpajdel drew the logo for Emperor in that manner and went on to draw thousands more. Illegible became a badge. Only the initiated could read the badge.
Denim, leather and the jacket that became a manifesto
The uniform was cut out of work clothes. Across the British club circuit of 1979 and 1980, teenagers took the kitchen scissors to their denim jackets, sheared off both sleeves at the shoulder seam and wore the result over a leather jacket, and Saxon named its 1981 album Denim and Leather after the kit it saw from the stage every night. A band had never so plainly written its audience onto a record sleeve.
Then came the patches. Every sleeveless jacket turned into a noticeboard, a woven square for each band sewn on by hand, a big printed back patch across the shoulders for the one band that mattered most, pin badges down the lapels and studs punched through the seams with a pair of pliers. In German the thing is called a Kutte, and fans there and everywhere else began calling it a battle jacket.
A battle jacket is a coat of chainmail knitted out of other people's record sleeves, each link a band, each band a vow, heavy enough by its fortieth patch to stop a sneer at twenty paces and carried like armour into any room that did not want it. The real ones are never bought finished. They are built over years, patch by patch, and by long tradition never washed.
A battle jacket is a coat of chainmail knitted out of other people's record sleeves, each link a band, each band a vow.
Spandex, bullet belts and leopard print came later and from different directions, the belts from Lemmy's cartridge bandolier and the Newcastle excess of Venom, the spandex from the Los Angeles clubs. By the mid eighties an outsider could no longer tell a thrash fan from a glam fan from a hard rock fan by clothes alone, and the confusion has outlived the decade: grunge in flannel, the chain store band shirt worn by people who have never heard the band, and a long list of music that is filed next to metal without belonging there, set out in what heavy metal is not.
Tour shirts and the ink that does not come off
The black shirt is the jacket's paperback edition. Printed with the album sleeve on the front and the tour dates down the back, every city and every night in a column like a war memorial, the concert shirt was the one piece of the culture a fan could buy at the venue for a few pounds and wear to school the next morning. The printed list of dates was proof. The wearer had been there, or knew someone who had.
Bootleggers worked the car parks outside every arena, selling cheaper shirts with the colours slightly wrong, and the official ones grew into a business that touring bands now count on for more income than the records themselves. The artwork went onto the shirt because the artwork was the brand. A razor, a war pig, a grinning corpse. The sleeve had become a flag that could go through a washing machine.
The tattoo took the final step and made the sleeve permanent. The needle does to the forearm what the cutting lathe does to the lacquer master, gouging a groove that will play the same way for the rest of its life, and a sleeve painted by Riggs or Petagno in 1980 now travels on the arms and backs of fans who were not born when it was pressed. There is no refund. That is what makes it an oath.
Parking lots, Stonehenge and the camera
The cinema found the culture late and mostly laughed at it. Directed by Rob Reiner and released in March 1984, the mock documentary about a British band in decline was This Is Spinal Tap, and its jokes about the black sleeve, the tiny Stonehenge lowered onto the stage and the amplifier that goes one louder were funny precisely because every musician who watched it recognised the tour. Ozzy Osbourne, Steven Tyler and U2's the Edge have all said they did not laugh, because they recognised too much of their own touring life on the screen.
The truer film was seventeen minutes long. On 31 May 1986, before a Judas Priest concert at the Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland, Jeff Krulik and John Heyn walked a borrowed video camera through the car park and simply let the fans talk, and the seventeen minutes of tape they shot as Heavy Metal Parking Lot caught the denim, the mullets, the beer and the joy more honestly than any studio feature.
Penelope Spheeris turned her camera on the Sunset Strip for The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years in 1988, and its portrait of ambition and excess on the Strip is still argued over. The camera never lost its fascination with the clothes. The clothes, after all, were designed to be looked at.
Painted by hand, then shrunk to a thumbnail
The underground kept the painted sleeve alive when the majors turned to photographs. The Californian band named after the spider's pass in Tolkien's Mordor answered to Cirith Ungol, and for King of the Dead in 1984 it took a Michael Whelan painting made seven years earlier for a paperback of Michael Moorcock's Elric novel The Bane of the Black Sword.
On King of the Dead a crowned skeleton in a violet shroud raises a halberd over a red cloaked warrior among scattered gold coins, and the painting promises exactly what the record delivers: slow, strange, heroic metal with no interest whatever in the radio. Frank Frazetta's barbarians had already been borrowed in the same way: Dust licensed an existing Frazetta painting, Snow Giants, for Hard Attack in 1972, the first hard rock sleeve to carry his work, and his nephew by marriage Ken Kelly painted the faces of Kiss on Destroyer in 1976 before going on to paint for Rainbow and Manowar.
By common consent that shelf of painted fantasy is the heart of the whole tradition: muscle, steel, skulls and castles, airbrushed or brushed in oils, the sleeve as a window into a world where the music would make sense. It was mocked for decades. It never went away.
The format nearly killed the art. The compact disc cut a square foot of painting down to a booklet twelve centimetres across during the late eighties and nineties, and streaming later shrank it again to a thumbnail on a telephone screen, where a Riggs street scene and a plain black square look much the same. Detail was the first casualty. Mood survived.
The vinyl revival reversed the trade. Heavy metal album covers are now bought again at twelve inches, on gatefolds and picture discs and coloured pressings, and a band starting out today still commissions a painter before it has saved for a producer, because it knows the sleeve will be judged first.
Nothing else in popular music asked a picture to carry so much, or trusted a fan to hold it for so long. The desk carvings, the patches, the ink and the shirts all come back to one square of cardboard. It is still the first thing anyone sees.
