When I was young, I was entranced by the mysterious figures who appeared on the sleeves of vinyl albums. Where did Roxy Music find its inexhaustible supply of glamorous women? Who was the weather-beaten fisher on the front of the Cure’s Standing on a Beach and how did he know the Cure? Like many children, I assumed that the nine celebrities on the sleeve of Band on the Run by Paul McCartney and Wings – including Michael Parkinson, comedian Kenny Lynch and Liberal MP Clement Freud – represented the actual line-up of Wings, which would have made for a challenging studio environment.
In the Google era, one can answer these questions in seconds. Roxy Music knew a lot of models, and Bryan Ferry dated half of them. The fisher (retired) was called John Button. (“The man featured on the album cover was not a member of the Cure,” Wikipedia helpfully notes.) Parkinson did not play with Wings. Some mysteries, however, have proved harder to solve.
Led Zeppelin’s untitled fourth album has always exerted particular fascination. Commonly known as Led Zeppelin IV, it has also been dubbed “Zoso”, after the occult runes on the cover. The old man in the centre, bent double by his cargo of bound branches, resembles a sinister apparition from an MR James ghost story.
Now the historian Brian Edwards, having chanced upon the original photograph while researching another topic, has seemingly identified the man as Lot Long, a Victorian thatcher from Wiltshire, and the photographer as Ernest Farmer. Individual fans can decide whether this discovery enriches the artwork or spoils the enigma.
When physical music sales collapsed 20 years ago, it was widely predicted that both the album and its sleeve were doomed and music would be consumed from now on as just an ugly string of file names. This has not come to pass for various reasons, from the surprising tenacity of vinyl to the growing importance of merchandise to an artist’s bottom line. The Spotify app might not offer the same visual spectacle as a 12-inch sleeve but it still demands images that can pack a visual punch as tiny digital squares. Faces, whether the artist’s or someone else’s, are ideal.
Some artists are lucky enough to know the right faces. The bleary-eyed cigarette smoker on the Arctic Monkeys’ debut album is the band’s Sheffield acquaintance Chris McClure, while the doe-eyed child on U2’s albums Boy and War is Peter Rowan, the younger brother of Bono’s friend Guggi.
Others seek to forge an aesthetic kinship with the distant or the dead. Morrissey’s eye for an evocative image from the 1960s played an invaluable role in positioning the Smiths in a community of stars that existed in some romantic dream space beyond the reality of the 1980s – an invitation to sign up to not just songs but to a worldview. Alain Delon and Billie Whitelaw said yes; Albert Finney and George Best declined.
Often legal permission is required only from the photographer or rights holder, not the subject, which can cause unease. To play a role in music history without your knowledge is to experience a strange kind of celebrity in which your face becomes synonymous with someone else’s vision. US marine Michael Wynn, photographed in Vietnam in 1967, belatedly protested in 2019 that he “wasn’t real happy” with having the slogan on his helmet changed from “Make War Not Love” to the title of the Smiths’ 1985 album: “Meat Is Murder”.
Some US states have “right of publicity” laws, which open up the appropriation of an individual’s likeness without their consent to civil liability. Former model Ann Kirsten Kennis sued Vampire Weekend and their record label for $2m after the band used a 1983 Polaroid of her on the cover of their 2010 album Contra, claiming that the photographer who licensed it had not in fact taken the photograph. “It felt like someone was exploiting me,” she told Vanity Fair. “Who do these people think they are that they can just take my picture from God only knows where and plaster it everywhere?” (The suit was settled for an undisclosed sum.)
Grunge band Tad chanced upon a striking photograph of a half-naked hippie couple in a thrift-store photo album and used it on 1991’s 8-Way Santa, only to find that the woman was now a fiercely unimpressed born-again Christian.
The likenesses of celebrities, whose faces are valuable commodities, have additional legal protections. The Beatles sought permission from every living person featured in the collage on Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band but the Rolling Stones’ more cavalier approach to image rights on 1978’s Some Girls managed to outrage Lucille Ball, Raquel Welch and Judy Garland’s daughter Liza Minnelli. A modified sleeve was produced.
Younger cover stars, meanwhile, can develop retrospective reservations which cast an ethical cloud over famous images. David Fox, the face-pulling 12-year-old on Placebo’s debut album, later claimed the image triggered such intense bullying that he had to leave his school. Spencer Elden, who appears as a naked baby on the cover of Nirvana’s Nevermind, recently sued for alleged child sexual exploitation. The suit has twice been dismissed; Elden is appealing. Peter Rowan, U2’s “boy”, has no legal complaints but he denounced U2 for their pro-choice stance during Ireland’s 2018 referendum on abortion rights, which was awkward.
Artists tend to have a double-edged view of copyright: they appreciate protection of their own work but crave the freedom to grab the perfect image, like a musical sample, without having to secure watertight permission or consider the feelings of the individuals concerned.
In that respect Led Zeppelin’s mystical obsession with England’s past served them well. Lot Long died in 1893, so whether he would have appreciated his association with Stairway to Heaven, cryptic runes and rock’n’roll bacchanalia we will never know.
