All through his post-Beatles life, Paul McCartney’s album covers have mirrored his ardour for the visible arts. Lots of his album covers work as standalone artworks (McCartney, NEW, Egypt Station), whereas others show his humorousness (Paul Is Stay, Driving Rain). He has loved long-term partnerships all through his profession – his spouse, Linda, took a lot of the pictures featured (McCartney, RAM, Tug of Battle, Pipes of Peace) whereas he used the London-based design company Hipgnosis for a lot of extra (Band on the Run, Venus & Mars, Off the Floor, Again to the Egg). And but the one factor all of his file covers have in frequent is that every one is totally unique, and nothing just like the others.
Right here is the story behind a number of the finest Paul McCartney album covers.
Paul McCartney – McCartney
(1970, pictures by Linda McCartney)
It was a daring solution to launch a solo profession. Not solely did Paul McCartney’s 1970 debut album, McCartney, carry with it a press launch successfully asserting the top of the Beatles, however the album featured neither his picture nor his identify on the entrance cowl. In actual fact, many followers thought (and nonetheless suppose) that the again cowl – which bears the identify McCartney alongside a Linda McCartney portrait of her husband and their daughter, Mary, on the household’s Scottish farm – should be the album cowl.
However no. Folks merely had it all of the improper means round. The duvet is one other of Linda’s pictures, this time of cherries laid out on a wall subsequent to a bowl of cherry-red water. The image is titled “Feeding the birds in Antigua, 1969,” and it’s a hanging picture stuffed with distinction. The cherries, laid out on prime of a wall, create a burst of colour towards the bleached wall, with the bottom beneath lowered to a stable black.
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Paul & Linda McCartney – RAM
(1971, pictures by Linda McCartney; paintings by Paul)
If Paul McCartney’s eponymous debut of the earlier yr had a selfmade high quality to it, then RAM, the 1971 album by Paul & Linda McCartney, definitely had a selfmade look. Nonetheless, the contents have been much more polished, and featured session musicians in addition to the McCartneys on what has come to be considered as certainly one of his finest post-Beatles albums.
RAM contains a Linda McCartney portrait of Paul with a ram on their Scottish farm, whereas Paul has doodled a multi-colored, childlike body with felt-tipped pens. In amongst the rainbow zig-zags, he’s added a message to his spouse – the letters L.I.L.Y. apparently standing for Linda, I Love You.
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Paul McCartney & Wings – Crimson Rose Speedway
(1973, cowl {photograph} by Linda McCartney; paintings by Eduardo Paolozzi)
The duvet artwork for Wings’ first album of 1973, Crimson Rose Speedway, was Paul McCartney’s most extravagant bundle since Beatles albums like Sgt. Pepper and The White Album. It additionally noticed a connection from the early Beatles days come full circle. Whereas the fledgling Beatles honed their craft within the golf equipment of Hamburg, unique bass participant and artist Stuart Sutcliffe left the band to stay in Germany and research artwork beneath the instruction of Scottish artist and sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi. This created a emptiness on bass, which Paul dutifully took up.
Now, over a decade later, Paul turned to Paolozzi, a pioneer of the pop artwork motion, to assist with the paintings for his new album. The duvet {photograph} itself was taken by Linda McCartney, whereas the lavish gatefold-plus-12-page-booklet bundle included Paolozzi’s paintings alongside photographs of the band on stage and on their travels. The entire bundle was completed off with a Braille message to Stevie Marvel on the rear, which mentioned, “We love you, baby!”
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Paul McCartney & Wings – Band on the Run
(1973, pictures by Clive Arrowsmith)
Shot by Clive Arrowsmith at Osterley Park, in West London, the quilt artwork for Paul McCartney & Wings’ 1973 Band on the Run album recalled Sgt. Pepper. A band is pictured in entrance of a barrage of well-known faces. Solely this time, as a substitute of cut-outs, actual celebrities have been available. “We thought, it’s a band on the run, let’s have a group of people caught in a spotlight, as if they’re trying to escape from jail,” Paul defined. “So, it’s just a group of personalities who all look like they’re prisoners escaping, but when you look a little closer you find James Coburn’s in there, and John Conteh, a boxer from Liverpool…” Christopher Lee, Michael Parkinson, Clement Freud, and Kenny Lynch make up the band, together with Paul, spouse Linda, and bandmate Denny Laine.
Arrowsmith recalled that not every little thing went to plan, nevertheless: “I really didn’t know what I was doing and used the wrong film, so the pictures all came out yellow. On top of that, only about three of the shots weren’t blurry from everyone moving about, so when it came to showing Paul I was freaking out too much to say anything – I just held my breath.”
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Wings – Wings Over America
(1976, design by Hipgnosis/MPL)
To commemorate Wings’ triumphant world tour, a triple album – Wings Over America – was launched in 1976. Maybe unusually for a stay album, the packaging contained no photographs from the tour (a portray of a live performance adorns the within gatefold). As a substitute, Paul turned to Hipgnosis, a London-based design company that specialised in paintings for extra progressive rock acts like Pink Floyd and Genesis. The outcome was attractive, leading to a Grammy Award nomination for finest album bundle. Painted by Richard Manning, the quilt reveals an plane door opening, a flash of blinding gentle bursting out from behind the door, suggesting one thing thrilling had simply landed.
The photo-real paintings was a painstaking creation – actually. “Just over two thousand rivets were drawn in perspective,” Manning recalled. “[Hipgnosis founder] Storm paid for me to have acupuncture to alleviate an aching neck and shoulder after all that.” One good contact was how the blinding-light paintings was replicated on the three internal sleeves, with the sunshine getting brighter from aspect one to aspect six to establish the taking part in order of the discs.
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Wings – Wings Best
(1978, {photograph} by Angus Forbes)
Launched in 1978, the Wings Best compilation featured deceptively costly cowl paintings. When The Beatles had spent nearly £3,000 on the quilt of Sgt. Pepper, it was apparent the place the cash had gone, however with Wings Best, what number of of those that purchased it realized the lengths they’d gone to with a view to get the quilt excellent?
Designed by Paul and Linda with assist from Hipgnosis, the London design studio, the quilt featured {a photograph} of a statuette of a lady, robed arms stretched as wings, within the snow, with a mountainous backdrop. Created by Artwork Deco sculptor Demetre Chiparus, the statuette in query was reasonably small (as witnessed when it reappears on a mantelpiece on the quilt of Wings’ 1979 Again to the Egg LP). To date, so easy. However the shot was achieved by flying the whole McCartney household to Switzerland, the place the statuette was rigorously organized on a mountaintop within the Swiss Alps, earlier than being photographed from a helicopter in flight.
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Paul McCartney – McCartney II
(1980, pictures by Linda McCartney)
The duvet paintings for what was solely Paul McCartney’s second solo album contains a stark portrait by his spouse Linda, by which Paul seems very a lot the metaphorical rabbit within the headlights. Utilizing lighting from multiple angle, Linda achieves a number of shadows, giving the impact of a mugshot. The promotional paintings for McCartney II featured the {photograph} beneath the daring legend “On his own”; after spending the 60s as a Beatle, and the 70s with Wings, from right here on, Paul was a solo artist.
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Paul McCartney – Tug of Battle
(1982, paintings by Brian Clarke; pictures by Linda McCartney)
The critics beloved Paul McCartney’s 1982 Tug of Battle album – Rolling Stone journal referred to as it a “masterpiece.” The hanging blue-and-red paintings was a collaboration between Linda McCartney, who took the quilt {photograph}, and the British artist Brian Clarke, recognized for his work with stained glass and mosaic. Clarke achieved the completed work by utilizing oil paint over a transparency of Linda’s portrait. It might be the primary of a lot of collaborations between the McCartneys and Clarke, together with 1989’s Flowers within the Grime cowl, and an exhibition in 1997.
Seven years later, and after a decade away from the stay enviornment, Paul returned to Brian and his blocky Tug of Battle idea and commissioned the artist to create the units for his 1989-90 World Tour, with huge backdrops recalling this album design.
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Paul McCartney – Pipes of Peace
(1983, photographed by Linda McCartney)
For the quilt artwork of his 1983 Pipes of Peace album, Paul McCartney combined the outdated with the brand new. A lot of this album was written and recorded similtaneously the earlier yr’s Tug of Battle LP. As Paul defined, “It was supposed to be the Tug of War album, and then a sort of answer album. So then I thought of the idea of pipes of peace: what would be the opposite of a tug of war? Peace pipes, pipes of peace and stuff. Then I got the idea to play the pipes of peace instead of smoking them.”
Slightly unusually, all you see of Paul on the entrance of the wrap-around gatefold sleeve is his hand, clutching a set of pan pipes. Unfold the paintings, and the 41-year-old is surrounded by a number of pipes – for each taking part in and smoking. Central to the entrance is a chrome sculpture primarily based on the portray “Chair with Pipe” by Vincent van Gogh – entitled, merely, “Van Gogh’s Chair I.” Apparently, this sculpture, by the pop artist Clive Barker, had first been exhibited in 1966, on the Robert Fraser Gallery in London. Fraser was an outdated pal of McCartney’s. He launched Paul to a lot of artists, and had even art-directed the quilt of Sgt. Pepper’s.
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Paul McCartney – Off the Floor
(1993, designed by Hipgnosis; pictures by Clive Arrowsmith)
Maybe Paul McCartney’s most playful album cowl, 1993’s Off the Floor options nothing however the band’s ft, disappearing into a transparent blue sky above a panorama far beneath. As Paul defined, “I had an image to go with the Off the Ground title, which was a picture where people accidentally cut heads off whenever they try and take a picture. So I thought, ‘Perhaps we should try and cut the whole thing off and just have feet disappearing off the top of the CD.’ It would just be the band’s feet. That was the image I kept seeing. You can explain it, ‘Well, we didn’t quite get a picture of the band but here is their feet.’”
For the shoot, the band dangled their ft from a bench suspended over a blue display screen, and the credit embody some outdated mates. The bundle was designed by Hipgnosis, who had labored on a lot of Wings albums, in addition to Tug of Battle; the photographer was Clive Arrowsmith, whose earlier credit embody taking pictures the quilt for Band on the Run, 20 years earlier; and, in frequent with Crimson Rose Speedway, the album contained a booklet that includes the artwork of Edinburgh sculptor and artist Eduardo Paolozzi.
Oh, and if you happen to’re questioning, Paul’s are the third pair of ft in from the left, subsequent to his spouse Linda’s.
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Paul McCartney – Paul Is Stay
(1993, Paul {photograph} by Linda McCartney)
For the reason that late 60s, followers learn clues in Beatles songs and paintings, essentially the most well-known of which pointed to Paul supposedly having died in 1966, and been changed by a doppelganger (who simply occurred to be a world-class singer and songwriter). As Paul defined, “There had been this rumor, Paul is dead… In 1992, I went back to Abbey Road to record an album; it was a live album, so I called it Paul Is Live.”
For the Paul Is Stay paintings, Paul clearly had a whole lot of enjoyable, superimposing a contemporary picture of himself onto an edited model of the quilt of Abbey Highway. For instance, Beatles followers would love that he’s being pulled throughout Abbey Highway by his canine, Arrow, a descendant of Martha (of “Martha, My Dear” fame). Paul is dressed equally, however this time along with his footwear on – on Abbey Highway, the truth that he was barefooted was seen as a logo of his having died. As album covers go, this one is the final word “spot the difference” sport.
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Paul McCartney – Run Satan Run
(1999, {photograph} by Dave Superb)
Run Satan Run largely comprised covers of outdated rock’n’roll songs Paul and his just lately departed spouse Linda had a shared love of. However the title monitor – and the quilt – got here to Paul in a second of divine – or maybe diabolical – inspiration. “I was in Atlanta with my son and he wanted to visit the funky side of town,” Paul defined. “So we went down there and were just wandering around the block and we came across this sort of voodoo shop selling cures for everything. I was looking in the shop window and I saw this bottle of bath salts called Run Devil Run. I thought that was a good title for a song.”
The album cowl contains a picture of the store in query – Miller’s Rexall Medicine – albeit with Miller’s identify modified to Earl. Nonetheless, as soon as phrase received out, Miller rapidly turned a buck on the affiliation, with the mom-and-pop reportedly boasting web gross sales of over a million inside a decade of the album’s launch. As for the tub salts? “I’ll be taking a bath with them,” Paul joked. “Not that I have got many demons to get rid of.”
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Paul McCartney – Driving Rain
(2001, self-portrait {photograph} by Paul McCartney)
At first look, the low-resolution album cowl of Paul McCartney’s 2001 Driving Rain seems to point out a shadowy McCartney, hand raised as if to dam the photographer. This was Paul’s first album of latest materials since shedding spouse Linda to most cancers in 1998, so it is perhaps comprehensible that he would need to cover within the shadows.
The picture was taken on a state-of-the-art Casio watch that included a digital camera. It’s doable that Paul was impressed by his pal Neil Younger’s Silver and Gold album the earlier yr, which featured a pixelated shot Younger’s daughter had taken on a Sport Boy Digicam. Both means, this low-resolution cowl is complemented by a number of Paul’s candid watch snaps all through the remainder of the paintings.
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Paul McCartney – Chaos & Creation within the Yard
(2005, {photograph} by Mike McCartney)
In relation to cowl paintings, Paul McCartney has by no means been averse to conserving it within the household. His spouse Linda took the quilt photographs for a lot of his albums, whereas he himself offered paintings for Driving Rain and Egypt Station. For 2005’s Chaos & Creation within the Yard, nevertheless, the hanging cowl picture was taken by Paul’s child brother, Mike McCartney. Snapped in 1962 by means of the kitchen window of their childhood residence at 20 Forthlin Highway, Liverpool, the image was initially generally known as “Paul Under Washing,” earlier than being rechristened “Our Kid Through Mum’s Net Curtains.” The picture reveals early Beatle Paul on the cusp of worldwide mega-stardom, sat on a deckchair strumming his guitar.
Right now, the home is a Grade II listed constructing, owned and run by the Nationwide Belief. In 2018, as a part of a Carpool Karaoke TV particular with James Corden, Paul returned to the home for the primary time for the reason that Nineteen Sixties, remarking that coming again “just made me realize how long the journey has been – to date.”
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Paul McCartney – NEW
(2013, cowl picture by Ben Ib)
As new album titles go, few are as direct as Paul McCartney’s sixteenth solo outing, merely named NEW. Reflecting the fashionable sound (among the many album’s 4 producers are Paul Epworth, who produced Adele’s 21, and Amy Winehouse producer Mark Ronson), the quilt paintings is vibrant, in a really literal sense.
It was impressed by the work of the American minimalist artist Dan Flavin, recognized for his fluorescent-tube sculptures, and the straightforward thought was to spell out stylized letters of the phrase “new” in tube lights. Paul recruited design crew Rebecca and Mike, who in flip introduced in Ben Ib to deliver the idea to life by means of CGI. “It was a great team to work with under Paul’s guidance,” Ib recalled.
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Paul McCartney – Egypt Station
(2018, paintings by Paul)
Paul McCartney’s 2018 Egypt Station was his first solo album to enter the Billboard charts at primary. A critically acclaimed double album, the idea of the paintings and the music itself was intrinsically linked, as Paul informed Mojo journal: “I happened to be thinking about a painting I’d done quite a while ago, called ‘Egypt Station.’ ‘l like those words,’ I thought. Then I saw a picture of the painting and thought, ‘That could be an interesting album cover.’ I’m not gonna do a big picture of me on the front, smiling. I thought this painting might be interesting: it’s crazy enough, and it’s a place. A mystical place…”
The concept started to develop for Paul that the whole album may happen inside the station, to which finish Sgt. Pepper-esque sound results open and shut the LP to create the station ambiance. “Once we had the title… we knew what we were going to do, making it all take place, sort of start in the station and then going through with all the songs at different stations and we end up at the destination.”
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Paul McCartney – McCartney III
(2020, design by Ed Ruscha, pictures by Mary McCartney and Sonny McCartney)
The third in an eponymous trilogy spanning his whole solo profession so far, McCartney III was, in Paul McCartney’s punning phrases, “Made in rockdown.” With the COVID-19 pandemic forcing UK residents to remain residence, Paul set about recording in the identical selfmade style that had served him on McCartney (1970) and McCartney II (1980). “I was living lockdown life on my farm with my family and I would go to my studio every day,” he defined.
And simply as McCartney I & II had featured pictures by Linda McCartney, so did Paul once more flip to household for this 2020 album, with daughter Mary McCartney taking the lion’s share of the pictures used, and Paul’s nephew, Sonny McCartney, additionally contributing. For the quilt artwork and design, Paul turned to American pop artist Ed Ruscha, who Paul had met by means of his daughter Stella. Ruscha devised a particular cube design, which was rolled out throughout a sequence of other variations, every in a distinct colour.
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Searching for extra? Discover the story behind each Beatles album cowl right here.
