The Beatles were the most influential band in history, and it wasn’t just their music. Their hairstyles, fashion choices, and opinions impacted the youth of the 1960’s and beyond. That innovative spirit included The Beatles’ album covers.
The group always used professional photographers and artists to help them with the covers. Some became iconic, and others were less successful. So here are the covers of their original thirteen studio albums ranked from weakest to best.
The 1965 movie HELP! is a colorful comic romp, and the album is filled with great songs like “Ticket To Ride”, “Yesterday”, and of course “Help”. So there’s no explanation for having a boring white cover with the guys simply waving their arms. You’d think they were at least spelling out the title of the album, but no they’re just putting their arms in positions the photographer thought looked good.
Yes it was winter when Beatles For Sale was released in late 1964, but having The Beatles cold and miserable on the cover was not a great look. The downer cover has always seemed to unfairly affect perceptions of the quality of the music on the album. Songs include “Eight Days A Week”, “No Reply”, & “I’ll Follow The Sun”, Sure there were “down” songs like “I’m A Loser”, “Baby’s In Black”, & “I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party”. But they’re good songs, and the cover is simply too uninviting.
There was another lost opportunity with the A Hard Day’s Night album from 1964. The music is excellent and exciting, and the movie is a lot of fun. The best representation of the album and movie is not five little pictures of each of the Beatles trying to make a variety of faces. The American version was slightly better in that it’s more dramatic, and accents their haircuts which were an important part of their image as they were still breaking in the U.S. at the time. Certainly the movie would have been better represented by one of the action photos taken during filming.
The Magical Mystery Tour album cover from 1967 is a little too busy, but did a good job of conveying the spirit of the film, especially with the colorful logo. Although we’d normally like to see The Beatles faces on their covers, maybe having them hidden by costumes was part of the mystery. It was also a good idea to put the song titles on the cover since this was a unique album. It was a combination of six new songs, and five recent singles. This American version became the official British version when Beatles albums came out on CD’s.
Another psychedelic album cover was used for the Yellow Submarine soundtrack in 1968 (shown above on the left). It’s a good cover in that it provides a lot of the artwork from the animated film. Next to the original cover is the Yellow Submarine Songtrack that included a lot more songs from the movie in remixed form. It was released in 1999. The cover is a nice eye-pleasing update.
The 1963 cover for The Beatles’ first album, Please Please Me, was The group looking down from the stairwell at EMI’s London headquarters. The photo was taken by Angus McBean. It’s an interesting shot that has held up well, and was even recreated in 1969 for the planned Get Back album that became Let It Be. That 1969 photo ended up as the cover for The Blue Album hits collection.
Here’s another innovative photo from 1963 that was on The Beatles second album, With The Beatles. It looks like a studio shot with carefully placed lighting, but in reality, photographer Robert Freeman took the photo of the group in a hallway, and simply used the natural light. The photo style made the album cover one that was imitated by other artists.
This might seem like a boring cover, but knowing when it came out shows the genius of it. 1967 was the height of psychedelia with everything bursting with colors and complicated designs. In 1968, The Beatles decided to change that up big time by creating a minimalist cover. The idea came from Paul McCartney who was immersed in the London art scene. The cover was all white, with “The Beatles” embossed. That was the name of the record, but it quickly became The White Album. I remember some fans even saying they felt cheated that there wasn’t a photo of The Beatles on the cover. Of course inside were four individual colorful photos of The Beatles that were suitable for framing.
In 1970 the final studio album was released by The Beatles. Let It Be has a dramatic black background, colorful photos with white edging, and the title all capitalized in white. Maybe the black color, and the use of individual photos (instead of a group photo) were representing the end of the group. The result is a classy and dramatic cover that stands out among any group of album covers. Credit goes to Art Director John Kosh who also did Abbey Road.
The Revolver cover from 1966 is an example of The Beatles trusting their friend, bassist & artist Klaus Voormann. He used a combination of line drawings and photos to create a very unusual look for the album. It reflected the extremely innovative recordings found inside. The cover told us that Revolver was unlike any album that had come before it. Reportedly, Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein was overjoyed Voormann was able to create a cover to match the music… “Turn off your mind relax and float downstream.”
The 1965 album Rubber Soul has a cover that really reflects the name. The story is that The Beatles were looking at the photo being projected onto a white piece of cardboard that fell backwards slightly and made the image look warped. The Beatles asked photographer Robert Freeman if the cover could be similarly altered to give it that stretched look. Then illustrator Charles Front designed the title to match the look of rubber kind of oozing from a rubber plant. That style of lettering was used often during the psychedelic era that followed.
Album covers don’t get much more iconic than Abbey Road. It might be the most imitated and parodied cover in history, and the location of the photo shoot has become a tourist destination. After dismissing complicated ideas, like shooting a photo at Mt. Everest (with Everest a possible album title), they finally settled on Paul McCartney’s photo idea and the title Abbey Road. Photographer Lain Macmillian was on a ladder and took just six photos. Here they are.
What’s amazing is that the photo they used is the only one that’s any good. The other photos look like four disorganized guys kind of stumbling across the street. It seems they were lucky to get the shot of them in full stride. One of the defining aspects of the cover is Art Director John Kosh deciding to not put the name of the group or the title on the front of the album.
As simple as the photo shoot was for Abbey Road, the exact opposite is true for our top Beatles album cover, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Like the music on the album, this is The Beatles’ most intricate and hardest to produce album cover.
Pop artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth were asked to design the cover. Blake suggested it be The Beatles with a crowd of fans, and said it could be a “magical crowd” made up of whomever The Beatles wanted. After the group submitted a list of names, the design team had to get clearances to use the images. In all, the cover has 57 cardboard cutouts and 8 wax figures, including The Beatles. Today, such a cover would be done electronically, but in 1967 The Beatles dressed in colorful military band costumes and stepped into the complex art piece.
The amount of money spent on the cover was about 70-times higher than normal, but everyone knew the Sgt. Pepper album needed a truly unique cover, so it was worth it..
It’s likely the quality of the music on an album at least somewhat affects our perception of the quality of the cover. Upon completion of this list of best covers, I noticed the top four selected are probably The Beatles’ four most popular albums. You can decide what order to rank them musically.