The second picture was his draft of what he was going to do. Revolver was when The Beatles’ covers went very arty! The cover was drawn and collaged by Klaus Voorman, a friend of the band going back to Hamburg days. There’s still debate over whether it’s legitimate, but I like to think it is… The Beatles really liked the way it looked, hence the cover… However, an uncropped and unstretched version resurfaced a couple of years ago, and that’s the outtake for here. The famous distortion of the photo happened when Freeman was projecting the picture onto cardboard to show The Beatles, and the cardboard wasn’t straight. It was shot in the gardens around John’s house. Rubber Soul was just the last Robert Freeman-taken cover. But I found a picture of John and Ringo in slightly different poses to the cover, so that’ll do. It was kind of hard to find outtakes for Help! - maybe there aren’t any, or maybe they’ve just not been released. Their poses were supposed to read ‘HELP’ in semaphore spelling, but that didn’t work, so they spell ‘NUJV’ instead.
The cover was inspired by The Beatles’ snow scene in the film of the same name, and Freeman recreated the scene in his London studio. The cover shows The Beatles looking serious, showing how they were quickly becoming disillusioned with their fame…Īnd Help! is again Robert Freeman’s work. The coloured spots on each image are leaves, which an assistant held in front of the camera. Apparently, it was 7 PM (and getting dark!), so the pictures were taken within half an hour. The Beatles For Sale cover was shot by Robert Freeman, too! The pictures were shot at the end of 1964 in London’s Hyde Park. Although only 16 were used on the actual album, many photos were taken so there are heaps of outtakes! The above are only a few… Many of the photos were also used over the credits of the same name. Apparently the idea for the shots was to make it look like a roll of film, and each Beatle does a different facial expression with every frame. The cover of A Hard Day’s Night was again shot by Robert Freeman. But The Beatles won, and hence the creation of a very iconic album cover! When they received the shots, EMI were originally unhappy with the sultry expressions of The Beatles, and wanted something a little cheerier. The “shadow” technique was suggested by the band, from when their German friend Astrid Kirchherr would take similar shots of them in their time in Hamburg. So The Beatles and Freeman set up a makeshift studio in their hotel. Photographer Robert Freeman was hanging with the band, and they needed an album cover. In the Summer of 1963, The Beatles were touring England and were staying in Bournemouth. Since it was a session, it’s no surprise that there’s a number of outtakes. The Zoo, however, didn’t consent, so the cover was famously taken on the stairwell at EMI headquarters by a guy called Angus McBean. ‘Cos George Martin was an “honorary fellow” of the Zoological Society of London, the original plan was to shoot the cover in front of the Insect House at the London Zoo. The cover of Please Please Me was shot in around February or March, 1963. Each of these are either pictures that are a little different to the final image, or a discarded piece of cover art, or a draft for the cover - or maybe even all three! So here goes… You may have seen a picture of The Beatles walking the opposite way across Abbey Road, or maybe the uncropped and unstretched Rubber Soul cover. (Or any of the following shots, too.) After seeing a few of of these different images, I decided to try and find an unused photo for each album.
And not to mention the millions of artists that have recreated the images for their own albums: among them Gorillaz, Queens of the Stone Age, The Red Hot Chilli Peppers and, oh, The Rutles.īut like a lot of iconic things, The Beatles’ album covers went through a few changes before settling on the iconic images we all know and love.
It seems like an obligatory tourist thing when one is in London to stop by the Abbey Road crossing and recreate the cover of the album of the same name. And whenever someone makes a list of the ‘best album covers’, The Beatles feature pretty prominently in them. It goes without saying that the covers of The Beatles’ albums are iconic.
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