A nice review of Covered in the April 2012 issue of Record Collector magazine, which also happens to be their 400th edition. I remember buying it when it was a small pocket size A5 magazine stuffed full of classified adverts from buyers and sellers, poring through on the lookout for stuff I wanted. Those days are largely gone, and the magazine is a different beast now, but still good for a browse. Anyhow, their reviewer really understood what the book was all about:
Wearing their art on their sleeves
There we were thinking that record sleeve books had been exhausted. Well, we’ve been proved wrong with this: a bizarre and well-researched project, compiling record sleeves that copy classic record sleeves. What’s great about Covered is that it’s been staring us all in the face for ages, but only now, and across 160 pages, do you realise just how much has been used and abused by so many.
Highlights and lowlights decorate every page, while the book is presented with the same graphic enthusiasm and anarchy that has created the homages in the first place. The depth and multi-genre studies that must have gone on over the years to put this together must be admired; the results are fascinating. We had no idea there were so many classic sleeve rip-offs, nor so many totally obscure ones. There are, alone, 20 sleeves mimicking Abbey Road, nine for Warhol’s VU banana and at least 19 for Never Mind The Bollocks. Mast fascinating are the unexpected oddities: hilarious homages to Saturday Night Fever, insane King Crimson send-ups. A classic folk album becomes Japanese metal deconstuctivism in a blink of an eye.
Reviewed by Jonny Trunk
easy on the eye books 