20 Best Album Covers of the 1970s

Before digital downloads, before CDs — every long-playing record you bought came with 12 square inches of artwork. Artwork that seemed every bit as important as the music contained inside.

This article is part of a series — you can also check out the 20 Best Album Covers of the 1980s.

We are losing one of popular culture’s natural canvases in the transition to digital; the album cover.

In the late ’80s, record art began to shrink, first to CD size. Now, in the iTunes and Spotify era, an album cover is little more than an avatar in the corner of the screen.

Vinyl is already tangibly different from its digital brethren. There is a ritual to its consumption. You have to gingerly remove the record from its paper sleeve, thumb at the platter’s edge and fingers on the label. Sometimes a brief wipe with a static-free cloth delays gratification a little longer. Carefully, you slip the record over the spindle and lower the needle.

While the new music is played, you can pore over every detail of the sleeve, read each word and study the design until the runout groove crackles and pops to a stop.

Here, in the first of a series, I want to celebrate amazing album covers, beginning with the split-personality ’70s.

It was a decade that stumbled out of the ’60s with little direction, the ash of the ash still waiting to fall from the spliff. Somewhere in the middle, it snorted a wrap of speed that it bought from a bloke down Kilburn High Road, and sobered up. Adrenalised and angry, the end of the ’70s was mad as hell and wasn’t going to take it anymore. We chart the changes as we sample some of that decades best cover art.

01. McCartney: McCartney (1970)

A few months after The Beatles split, Paul McCartney’s solo debut is a document of the bass player’s breakdown. The album’s one of McCartney’s best too.

Flip it around and the back cover has Macca grinning, title set jauntily in Cooper Bold. It’s goofily on brand — but the front of the disc features an image that’s more difficult to decode. Then you realise you’re looking at cherries scattered around an empty bowl.