U2’s singer Bono may nowadays be known for having dinner with Popes and Presidents. The cover of U2's War took an unusual but inspired approach to illustrating the concept of conflict Nagel’s depiction of the lead song’s title character is beautifully minimalist, with an inventive colour palette that was instantly eye-catching and trend-defining. It was designed by Malcolm Garrett (opens in new tab) and illustrated by Patrick Nagel (opens in new tab), who was known for celebrating the female form in a style that combined the Art Deco tradition with contemporary fashion designs. The cover design for their second studio album, Rio, pulls off the same trick. Duran Duran, a band from Birmingham, England, were among the leading lights of the New Romantic movement, which cleverly combined an art-school sensibility with the kind of pop-funk stylings a mainstream audience could actually dance to.
but that didn’t mean they wanted old-fashioned and cheesy. The cover art for Duran Duran's Rio combined Art Deco with contemporary fashion designĪfter all the bleak, moody aggression of seventies punk, many in the eighties were ready for the return of fun and glamour. As he left the courtroom, the group's singer, Johnny Rotten, joyfully exclaimed to a reporter: "Great! Bollocks is legal. In the resulting court case, Virgin was successfully defended from obscenity charges by John Mortimer, now best known as the author of Rumpole of the Bailey. The use of 'bollocks' (a term in British English that means both 'nonsense' and 'testicles') led to a police raid on a Virgin record store that stocked the record.
#PURE HEARTS COVERS SERIES#
The effect was heightened by the sleeve's lurid colour palette, which was based on a series of stickers distributed by the Situationalist political movement (the originals read: ‘This Store Welcomes Shoplifters’). The use of obscenity, cast in the kind of cut-out lettering commonly associated with criminal ransom notes, was shocking to audiences of the time.
And the debut album of Britain’s loudest and angriest punk rockers Sex Pistols, designed by Jamie Reid (opens in new tab), was a true statement of intent. While the psychedelic era saw album covers commonly feature intricate, surreal and lavish illustrations, punk stripped everything to its bare essentials. The cover that established in court, once and for all, that you could put a rude word on an album
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