Hidden details in famous album covers you've probably missed
There is a lot of nonsense written about hidden meanings in album covers. Most of it is invented after the fact by people looking for patterns.
This isn't that. Every detail below is a documented, deliberate decision by the people who made the sleeve — the kind of thing you can check, and then never un-see.
Abbey Road — the number plate
Abbey RoadThe Beatles · 1969
Parked on the pavement behind the band is a white Volkswagen Beetle with the registration LMW 28IF. It was simply a car belonging to someone who lived on the street, but it became one of the most scrutinised objects in pop history once fans decided the "28IF" referred to Paul McCartney's age had he lived.
He was 27 at the time, which rather undermines the theory. The plate is still there in every copy.
Licensed to Ill — the tail number
Licensed to IllBeastie Boys · 1986
The illustrated jet carries the tail number 3MTA3. Hold it up to a mirror and it reads EATME.
The sleeve folds out too — the front is the nose of the plane, and the back reveals it crashed into a mountainside.
The Velvet Underground & Nico — the peelable banana
The Velvet Underground & NicoThe Velvet Underground · 1967
On original 1967 pressings, Andy Warhol's banana was a sticker you could peel off, revealing a pink, peeled banana underneath, alongside the instruction "Peel slowly and see".
It was expensive and slow to manufacture, contributed to delays, and is a large part of why an original first pressing with the sticker intact is worth so much. Almost every reissue prints the banana flat.
Wish You Were Here — the man is genuinely on fire
Wish You Were HerePink Floyd · 1975
The handshake between two businessmen, one of them alight, is not a photographic trick. It is a stuntman in a fire-retardant suit, set alight for real on a Warner Brothers backlot.
The wind changed during the shoot and the flames blew back into his face; the shot that was used is reportedly a reversed image, because the safe takes were all from the other side.
Houses of the Holy — it was never one photograph
Houses of the HolyLed Zeppelin · 1973
The children climbing the causeway are two siblings, photographed many times over several days at the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland — and then composited.
The famous orange-and-purple colouring wasn't the light on the day either. It rained almost continuously; the tint was added afterwards, which is why the sky looks like no sky you have ever stood under.
Sgt. Pepper — the flowers spell something
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club BandThe Beatles · 1967
Everyone examines the crowd of cut-out figures. Fewer people look at the flowerbed at the front, where the floral arrangement spells out BEATLES.
The crowd itself had to be legally cleared, figure by figure, and several requested faces were dropped before printing.
Nevermind — the hook was added
NevermindNirvana · 1991
The underwater photograph of a swimming baby is real. The dollar bill on a fish hook is not — it was added afterwards, at the band's request, to turn a pleasant stock-style image into a statement about the record industry.
Without the hook it is a photograph of a baby swimming. With it, the sleeve argues.
Animals — the pig broke loose
AnimalsPink Floyd · 1977
The inflatable pig over Battersea Power Station was really flown, and on the second day of the shoot it broke its moorings and drifted away — reaching, by most accounts, several thousand feet and prompting warnings to aircraft before coming down in Kent.
The image finally used is a composite: the best photograph of the building, with the pig added from another frame.
The pattern worth noticing
Almost every detail here comes from the same instinct: do the difficult thing for real, then under-sell it.
Fly an actual pig. Set an actual man alight. Print an actual peelable sticker. Then present the result flatly, with no explanation on the sleeve at all, and let people find it decades later.
That is also why these covers survive being cropped to a fragment — a photograph of something that genuinely happened has a texture that a rendered image doesn't.
Test how much of them you've actually absorbed: today's VinylPeek hides a cover behind 64 tiles and scores you on how little you need to see. Or browse the whole album archive and look properly at a few.