Nomad Blog: Album Artwork that Inspired Me as a Kid

In celebration of the launch of my ARTgrab store where you can license my artwork for your album (or anything else), I'd like to write a little bit about the albums from my childhood that inspired me to become an artist. This isn't necessarily a list of my favorite album artwork, but art that had a profound effect on me while I was growing up.

To try and keep things somewhat clear, I'll set some ground rules:

1. My selections are not necessarily glitch art - those of you more familiar with me will know that a large part of my work is glitchy in nature. But my choices for this article predate a time when I was interested in glitch art. I may write an article in future that focusses specifically on glitchy-looking albums, but today we’ll be rewinding back to a more innocent time.

2. That means that since we’re focussing on artwork that had an effect on me during childhood, there may be some albums that were already around when I was a kid, but weren’t on my radar until I was into adulthood.

I wanted to write about this topic because music, and by extension the artwork packaged with it, was such a huge part of my childhood. I spent a lot of time as a teenager locked in my room with my headphones on lost in the album artwork and being transported into another world. It was an important source of escapism for me. Good album artwork can help turn a collection of great songs into something bigger; a piece of culture attached to a particular time or place forever imprinted on your memory. And if you’re lucky, something that has shaped your identity and become a part of who you are. Bad album artwork doesn’t do that. Think all those generic Greatest Hits albums with lazily slapped together artwork made by some suit who would rather be spending their time sipping champagne and picking out new door knobs for their yacht.

So, here are a collection of album covers from my childhood that have inspired me in some way on my artistic journey:

Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures

Probably one of the most iconic album covers of all time by one of my favourite bands of all time. Although I must admit that I didn't get into the music until I was an adult, the album art is something that was ubiquitous as a child growing up in Greater Manchester. 

The beauty of Joy Division is that their music has never really sounded like it belonged to a particular time or place, like it exists in a parallel universe. And the album artwork is no different.

Peter Saville, another Manchester icon, was the artistic director for Factory Records, the iconic Manchester record label to which Joy Division belonged, and it was he who was tasked with coming up with the album artwork for a new Manchester band.

At first glance, the art seems like a stark series of white lines set against a black backdrop. They look like remote, isolated mountains surrounded by darkness. The unconquerable, unknowable, complex structures contrasted by the void around it. 

There's a lot of commentary around the lyrics and music of Joy Division. I suppose that's what happens when the driving force of your band decides to end their life so young. Unfortunately, a lot of it tends to be reductive. Spend any time reading comments online and the vast majority of them default to "this song is about suicide" or "this song is about Ian's epilepsy". I've always felt that does a massive disservice to the breadth and depth of the topics he wrote about. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows, and I'm glad that people are able to find meaning and solace in the music if it's able to help them. But I've always felt those songs dealt with much larger themes; a failing marriage, the fragility and beauty of humanity railing against the cruelness of the world. I suppose it's not surprising that someone battling with such weighty thoughts decided to end things the way they did. But it brought us an amazing body of work with timeless themes that people can still relate to today.

So back to the artwork. The story goes that guitarist, Bernard Sumner, found the original image in a scientific journal while on his lunch break at the Manchester Central Library. It's a visualization of the radio waves caused by a pulsar (CP 1919). During the design process, the band shared a bunch of images they liked (including the image of CP 1919) with Saville, who then came up with the album design. He simply took the image from one context and made it into art by putting it into another context. But this radio transmission travelling through the void of space was a perfect metaphor for a band showing a broken desperate humanity in the context of a cruel harsh world.

It complements the album perfectly and raises an already wonderful album into something legendary. And there are not many albums out there whose covers managed to achieve legendary status by just sticking a graph on the front.

Pink Floyd - The Dark Side of the Moon

I'm going to start this one off with a massive hot take; I don't like Pink Floyd. I should like Pink Floyd. I like the idea of Pink Floyd; I like rock music from the 1960s. The artwork is cool. The concepts of their albums are interesting. But the music is just a bit wanky. With the risk of sounding all Alan Partridge, King Crimson are the band Pink Floyd could have been (at least in my own head). But their album artwork is often pretty cool, and that’s what this article is about.

I think one of the reasons that I’ve come not to like Pink Floyd is that I had built this image of what they sounded like based on their album covers. My dad had (and still does have) a lot of vinyl records, and I was always attracted to the front covers of the Pink Floyd records. From the psychedelic imagery of Pulse with its blinking LED on the side (which was very cool to a ten year old), to the subtle whimsy backdropped against the oppressive Battersea Power Station on Animals, Pink Floyd had a long and fruitful relationship with the British design studio Hipgnosis who designed a lot of their artwork. In my head, these albums contained music that somehow had all the answers to the secrets of the universe. It was bit like in 2008 when I first heard James Cameron talk about the movie Avatar for the first time. About how it was going to be something completely unique and push the boundaries of cinematic visuals and storytelling. And it was all that, just not in the way the way I had built it up in my mind. I was expecting surreal imagery like Fantastic Planet or Waking Life telling me the meaning of life while beaming the image directly into my brain. Instead, we got blue aliens prancing around relatively pretty landscapes with gimmicky 3D effects. Maybe he oversold or underdelivered. Maybe I just let my imagination get carried away. Like with young tokyo_nomad_ looking at those old vinyl covers of Pink Floyd albums, it did not do what it said on the tin.

The Dark Side of the Moon was the enigmatic album. Triangles evoke a lot of mystery, from the tombs of Egypt hiding treasures to spectrum of light hiding within a prism. What kind of alchemy did this album contain? It alludes to taking something ordinary and making it into something beautiful. As though listening to this album will transform the listener from ordinary to the extraordinary, like reaching nirvana.

Like Unknown Pleasures, it’s a very simple concept made up of simple shapes, lines and colours which makes it easily identifiable. Despite being over 50 years old, it’s an image that endures today and can be found on t-shirts and posters around the world. I’m reminded of the album every time I see a rainbow (and for some inexplicable reason, it’s often followed up with thoughts of blue aliens).

Pulp - Different Class 

So those familiar with my work with immediately notice that the artwork for Pulp’s commentary on social class in the UK is a very different art style from my own. This is all retro 1970s whereas I tend to be much more modern looking (we’re talking at least 1980s).

The standard cover shows a photograph of a wedding with black and white cardboard cutouts of the band. The wedding in question was a couple who were friends with the photography, Donald Milne. The thick black and white borders also have a very artsy 1970s feel to them (although somehow they remind me of old UK beer mats too). There were a dozen photographs within the sleeve, which was designed so that you could fold it over and design your own cover.

So how did the album and the artwork end up influencing my own work? For me, this era of Pulp goes to show how important it can be to have a consistent voice in all of your media as an artist. Pulp created this 70s sound and aesthetic throughout their music, lyrics, album artwork and videos. While I wasn’t around in the 1970s, I can still feel the wood paneled walls, shag carpets and orange and brown wallpaper. It created this world for the audience to believe in that is distinct from our own, and everything works together to enhance the sound of the music. I’d say even more so, these are the kinds of albums that have started whole cultural shifts, in music, fashion, art.

For me personally, there have only been a few other albums that I’ve enjoyed that have also built such fascinating worlds through the mixture of their media output. Rob-Sheridan era Nine Inch Nails was a big one for a number of years when they were collaborating together. Currently, Drab Majesty have been doing interesting things in the post-punk, shoegaze world that marries an interesting aesthetic with an artistic intent that reflects the music that they play (and I highly recommend checking them out if you haven’t heard them before).

Mansun - Six

This is the only album on this list that I would consider to be perfect (I mean all songs being 9 or 10 out of 10) and it’s an album I try to listen to at least once a year.

This entry might not be as well-known as some of the others on this list, so I’ll just go ahead and say that this album is absolutely insane. While Mansun were mostly known for indie rock with some surreal, proggy leanings, this album goes from incorporating Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy into a song, to starting a track off with the UK national anthem. Oh, and there’s an interlude in the middle of the album where Tom Baker narrates the supposed final thoughts of Brian Jones from the Rolling Stones as he lay drowning in a swimming pool, all set to a baroque harpsichord with two opera singers backing the track. The songs on the album shouldn’t make any sense. But it all works, and it works brilliantly. It may well be my favourite album of all time.

For 13 year old me, it seemed like some intellectual world, with song lyrics about Confucianism, the philosophy of Winnie the Pooh, and the hypocrisy of religion. I was kind of disappointed when I got older and realised that it was a big piss-take of overly pretentious concepts albums. As though that took away from the purity and genius of the songs. But really, it just means you can enjoy it on two different levels.

The album artwork is so great because it does so many things well. The artwork itself is striking and has a unique style influenced by the 1960s UK TV show, The Prisoner. According to Paul Draper, singer, guitarist and principle songwriter of Mansun, the artwork has a lot of allegory to both The Prisoner, but also contains lots of little easter eggs to the songs themselves. There are so many little details hidden within the artwork that you can spend ages to squinting at all the small details.

Like with Pulp’s Different Class, this is another example of album artwork helping to build a world for the listener to get lost in.

The Prodigy - Music for the Jilted Generation

The Prodigy's Music for the Jilted Generation is one of my favourite albums from my younger teenage years. Admittedly I was too young to really understand the ins and outs of its message as a big FU to the UK governments crackdown on rave culture, but it's general message of standing up to authority was not lost on little tokyo_nomad_. Admittedly, they probably weren’t hiding their message in a ton of subtext with lyrics such as "fuck them and their law", but I challenge anyone to listen to the live version of Their Law from the Phoenix festival in ‘96 and not get swept up in their desire to stick one to the conservative government at the time.

The front of the album was designed by Stewart Haygarth and features a screaming man petrified into steel, reminiscent of Han Solo frozen in carbonite, or what Disney did to Walt. It gave me vibes of the oppressed members of the titular jilted generation trying to break out of their prisons with every ounce of strength they have left (again, much like Walt). It was a great representation of the anti-establishment, cyberpunk, industrial leanings of the music itself (especially their live performances which were always a lot heavier and guitar-based than the albums).

The album is also famous for the art inside the sleeve, which was created by renown illustrator Les Edwards. It shows a raver cutting the support ropes on a bridge while defiantly gesturing to a bunch of riot police. It’s not the most subtle work, but as a kid I thought it was really cool, and that I’d get into trouble for looking at it.

I always felt that the inside artwork felt a little more optimistic than the front cover, and I always wondered how the two artworks were related. In my head cannon, I’ve always assumed that screaming mask on the front was someone who hadn’t escaped with the ravers, or maybe it was one of the police officers after the state finally turned on its own. The front cover taking place decades after the ravers left, demonstrating what kind of dystopian hell can happen if nobody stands up to unchecked authority.

Marilyn Manson - Mechanical Animals 

I feel I should start this one off by saying that as of writing, Marilyn Manson has been accused of heinous things by previous partners, allegations which he has denied. If those things are true, fuck you Marilyn Manson, you're an awful human being. And those things should define you more so than any musical legacy or any good will than your teenage fans from the early 2000s had for you.

So I will say that in 2023, I've barely listened to a Marilyn Manson song for over 20 years. Most of them don't resonate with a person in their 30s with a happy family life. And even I didn't have that, I'm not sure they'd resonate with an adult with adult problems either.

However, as a 15 year old kid that didn't fit in with most of the people in a rural high school, the early 2000s was an amazing time for alternative and metal music. It was a way to be rebellious against the music and culture that the normal people, who made your life hell (either for real or imagined) listened to. To stick one to your parents (who, having been raised on Bowie, were probably not as unsettled as we had hoped.)

The cover to Mechanical Animals was very cool to a teenager trying their best to separate themselves from mainstream culture. Featuring an androgynous Marilyn Manson, ‘naked’ with prosthetic breasts and ambiguous genitalia, it felt subversive. The artwork was also an interesting contrast to his previous albums, which were much more horror inspired works. This was more sleek, sexy, and futuristic, and almost certainly a huge homage to David Bowie (and musically and thematically to Gary Numan as well).

I’ve always tried to be somewhat subversive with my art, especially when it comes to transforming a subject into something else. Glitch art is very much transformational after all. Some of my very first works consist of wholesome, innocent subjects which I corrupted into something else, whether that’s something horrifying or transgressive. I guess, in part, I probably have Mechanical Animals to thank for that.

Nine Inch Nails - Further Down the Spiral 

Nine Inch Nails were a hugely important band for me as a teenager and they're still one of my favourite bands to this day. As a glitch artist, it's probably no big shock that Rob Sheridan's work with Nine Inch Nails has been a big influence on me as an artist. So considering that fact, it might be a surprising choice that I went with a non Rob Sheridan work. Most of Rob Sheridan s collaborations with NIN happened while I was already an adult (which gives me an excuse to write about these covers in a future blog).

Instead, I went with the artwork for Further Down the Spiral, which is a companion remix album to The Downward Spiral, with artwork created by Russel Mills. Mills created the artwork for both the main album, but also a ton of stuff that was used for the singles and other stuff related to the Downward Spiral.

After coming up with a list of words that he wanted to evoke such as ‘wound’ and ‘decay’ (source: Revolver), he set about creating these wood panels layered with plaster, oil, dead insects and bandages. The Downward Spiral was a concept album that dealt with the (self) destruction of a man as he spiraled into madness and ultimately, suicide. Incorporating bits of decaying nature into the artwork perfectly encapsulated the themes of the album.

The cover of Further Down the Spiral features a weathered, decaying coiled length of rope. It’s a simple cover but it’s packed full of meaning, which is one of the reasons I love it so much. The battered rope representing his fragile mental state, and its positioning as a coil perfectly illustrating the downward spiral of the album’s concept. I’m sure it was no coincidence that rope can often be associated with a noose, considering the fate of The Downward Spiral’s protagonist.

But it’s not just the clever themes that makes me love this artwork. There’s just something about the colours and the decay that really appeals to me. One of my favourite songs on the album is the collaboration with Aphex Twin, At the Heart of It All. This is a song that conjured up a rusty ship pulling into an abandoned, decaying port, trudging through a dirty, narrow canal with towering, rusted corrugated iron boards on either side creating this sense of dreadful claustrophobia. I feel the artwork helps sell that imagery for me. It’s like the artwork, music, and imagery from my mind’s eye all exist in the same universe.

So that’s it for my first long form article. It was a lot of fun revisiting these old albums after such a long time, and it made me appreciate how integral the artwork can be in enhancing the experience for listeners. Album art is often an overlooked and undervalued artform, so I wanted to use this article to shine a light on these unsung heroes.

If you’re interested in checking album artwork I’ve made, check out my ARTgrab store below.

Also, if you liked my article, then consider subscribing. I’ll be publishing my next newsletter on January 11 and I’ll be giving away some art freebies for subscribers.