There have been several versions of the tongue over the years, all of which can be seen here. The Forty Licks album is the only one to incorporate text into the logo. The numerals 4 & 0 have been added to the tongue. The Forty Licks logo itself has been coloured and is often referred to as a “rainbow” although it’s really just a gradient of yellow, orange, red and blue. I can’t find who designed this new logo so I’ll assume for now it was someone working within the Virgin art department. If you know leave me a comment. John Pasche however continued to be heavily involved in cover art for bands and has produced work for Jimi Hendrix, Art of Noise, The Stranglers, The Vapors and loads of others.

Whilst I really appreciate the subtlety of the 4 & 0 on the tongue, and the use of the bright colours, one aspect of the cover annoys me. The layout is simple, but I find the cropping of the logo awkward and although it is recognisable enough without being featured fully I think it could have benefited from a different placement on the cover.

David’s first choice incorporated an iconic piece of design but his second choice is an iconic piece of design in itself. The Dark Side of the Moon was released in March 1973. The album originally contained two posters and a set of stickers; my copy has both intact (yay me). It was designed by Hipgnosis and George Hardie. Hipgnosis was a design group consisting of Storm Thorgerson, Aubrey Powell and Peter Christopherson. Storm Thorgerson’s career will be subject to a blog post all of it’s own soon enough but to say he has produced some of the most memorable and impressive album covers of all time is to understate his achievements. This was the album cover that really brought Hipgnosis to international eminence.

The cover features Hardie’s prism design on the front. A beam of light entering from the left is refracted in the prism creating a stylised rainbow. In white text on the black background is the name of the band and album within a white circle. The label’s logo is also shown on the lower right corner of the sleeve. On the inside of the gatefold the rainbow continues in a straight line but the green colour is shown as a pulsing soundwave. The albums lyrics are also shown in white on the black background. The rainbow continues onto the back cover of the album where the rainbow is seen refracted from a larger prism. To keep the outside of the album clean; showing only the two prisms, white light and rainbow the album information is positioned on the inside with the lyrics. This is what David means by keeping the cover distintinctive and not overly complicated.

I can find nothing wrong with the album cover; not that I was looking fomr something “wrong” with the Rolling Stones album. I like The Darkside of the Moon for the same reasons David does and the album completely deserves it’s place in musical history both for it’s visuals and the music it contains.

As you can see from the title of this post Grace chose Hendrix’s second studio album Axis: Bold As Love.

“I remember being really young and plopping down in front of my Dad’s album collection at the bottom of a big armoire. Mostly I remember seeing a lot of Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor and thinking “sooo not cool” but then I flipped to this album and officially had my mind blown. I’d never heard anything like it and the cover was so crazy and trippy- it remained a favorite of mine for years, and was the first album I took into my guitar teacher when I was 13 and asked him to teach me the songs. I still remember him laughing and saying “you realize this is a beginner’s class and you’ve brought me a HENDRIX record, right?”

Here you can see the artwork in all its gate-fold glory. The artwork itself was not much liked by Hendrix, he stated he’d preferred it to have reflected his American “Indian” (Native American) heritage. However the album followed a trend at the time for incorporating Indian elements into artwork. The album artwork is the blending of two images, a Hindu devotional painting known as Viraat Purushan-Vishnuroopam that was available as a mass produced poster and a painting of the band by Roger Law (co-creator of Spitting Image fact fans).

Although not the exact version of the poster used it none the less shows how the original was incorporated into the artwork.

It doesn’t quite compare to the Hendrix album does it?