My dad says that album cover art is dead. Is he right

A. He's probably harking back to the days when buying an album meant carrying home 12" of vinyl, which meant an album sleeve, and that meant a nice large space to devote to some artwork. Most of the bands that grew up in the world before compact discs and the Internet took full advantage of their 'sleeves'. If you made an album that was going to sit in a record store rack along with hundreds of other albums, it made good sense to make your album cover stand out from the rest.

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Q. Sounds interesting, what sort of artwork was around then, and why isn't it around now

A. Asking about artwork on albums from the sixties and seventies opens up an entire universe of imagination used to market the 'product' (it was still the music business even then) and it is still around now, it's just a lot less essential, thanks to the shrinkage in available space caused by the take-over of the CD, or even the irrelevance increasingly caused by marketing music via the internet.

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Q. What about some of the better examples

A. Various ones spring to mind.�In the seventies, 7" singles were sold with picture sleeves, one of the most famous being The Sex Pistols' God Save The Queen, which many believe to be the finest example of cover art there is.

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In terms of album sleeves, Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon is reckoned to be in the upper reaches of popularity,�mainly because it's one of the biggest selling albums of all time. An artist called Roger Dean became as famous as the bands he designed covers for, reaching the zenith of cover art which stretched over triple-album gate-fold sleeves for bands�such as Yes.

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Q. And the worst

A. Amazingly enough, The Beatles of all people hold the honour of the worst taste in album sleeves. The original sleeve for the Yesterday And Today album shows the loveable mop tops in soiled white coats, holding pieces of raw meat, and dismembered baby dolls, still grinning their famous grins. Now known simple as 'The Butcher Sleeve', originals are highly collectable, as are the withdrawn sleeves which had a more innocent picture pasted on, and re-issued.

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John Lennon as a solo artist caused quite a furore when his Two Virgins album featured a cover showing John and Yoko in the nude. Rather touchingly, American record stores insisted on putting the album in a special brown paper bag before letting people on the streets with it. Other equally dubious lapses in taste include German band The Scorpions, who's Virgin Killer album would not get selling space in any self-respecting record dealer's shop sporting its original cover photograph.

Q. What's wrong with just having the band's photo on the sleeve

A. Nothing at all, except it's just not original, and with so many other people out there trying to catch the eye of browsing music fans, it helps to be a bit different. Take David Bowie, who' s albums often include pictures of him, but in somewhat unusual disguises, the most famous being the Diamond Dogs sleeve, which shows him as half man and half, er, dog actually.

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Q. Does anyone avoid having their photographs on their albums

A. Plenty of people.�The aforementioned Pink Floyd�allowed the famous art studio Hipgnosis to do all their selling for them, making their album covers works of art in themselves. The finest example of modesty has to be Led Zeppelin, who's fourth album doesn't mention the name of the band anywhere on the cover, or the album itself, and doesn't even have a title, but still shipped multi-platinum sales.

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Q. What's the future for album art

A. Pretty grim really. Album sleeves ceased to be a vital ingredient in enticing record buyers when vinyl albums were superseded by CDs. With about a quarter of the space to use for a cover, expensive artwork failed to be cost-effective. The album itself, as a cohesive collection of material will live on in some form or another, but the means of promoting it is changing all the time, especially with the advent of music via the Internet, which renders album art totally redundant, except as a curiosity, and the subject of misty-eyed nostalgia among the more mature music collectors.

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By Andy Hughes