Record Cover of the Day: Babes Forever

Naked chicks on skateboards (Babes Forever EP by Coolrunnings). How cool is this? Need I say more?

Okay, a bit more. Lots of bands are using amateur 70s-style ‘found’ photos or Polaroids for their album covers nowadays, such as Vampire Weekend’s recent Contra, Wavves’ Wavvves, the Dum Dum Girls and Wolf Parade. I guess the Found magazine and website helped make these kind of retro-images cool, so why not use them for album covers? Pitchfork have written an article all about it if you’re interested. They cite William Eggleston as a precursor, and indeed his seemingly random snapshots of small town America have been adorning album covers since the 1970s when Big Star used a photo of his for their Radio City cover. Since then his snaps have been used on covers by Primal Scream, Joanna Newsom, Silver Jews, Spoon and more besides... I was going to do a visual post of all Eggleston’s album covers but someone’s beaten me to it... like over a year ago.