In 1980 Andy Warhol created a series of now iconic portrait paintings of Blondie’s frontwoman Deborah Harry, herself of course a living icon on her own artistic merit. The portraits were not made as a commission for a record cover. Debbie Harry bought one for […]
All posts tagged: lp cover art

Music and Flowers Matter: Johnny Griffin’s The Congregation on 45 rpm
There is an unwritten rule in the community of Warhol covers collectors: one can never ever have enough copies and versions of Johnny Griffin’s excellent Blue Note album The Congregation. So, here we go again! I seemed somehow to have missed the 2011 release of […]

Billie Holiday drawing part of ACT Art Collection
About a year ago I wrote a post about a jazz album by the Nils Landgren Funk Unit, on the German label ACT. The cover illustration was borrowed from a Warhol drawing I already mentioned a few years earlier, a cover design for an imaginary […]

Velvet Underground’s Scepter master tapes (and 100 bananas) at The Warhol
Last year November I received an email from Matt Gray, manager of archives at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, with truly fantastic news: “We recently identified the master tapes to The Velvet Underground & Nico album from a large donation from Warhol’s estate. Exciting to say […]

Kenny Burrell and Andy Warhol: Tone Poet & Design Master
The re-issue of Kenny Burrell’s Blue Note 1543 album in the audiophile series Tone Poet finally got its release. At first it was planned for June, but boy, it was worth the wait. What a brilliant release this is, both in regards of music production […]

Funk Is My Religion: new record, old drawing
Funk Is My Religion is the title of an album by Swedish funk and jazztrombonist Nils Landgren, released with his band Funk Unit in July of 2021 on the German label ACT. The cover art is credited as “inspired by Andy Warhol (detail)”, but it […]

Designer Acy R. Lehman: the cool gabriels and the peelable banana
During my visit to the archives of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, two years ago, I noticed an interesting name on the purchase order for the cover art of the 1956 jazz album Cool Gabriels on RCA’s Groove label: A.R Lehman. To fans of […]

Elvis has never left the building
Now let’s throw some Elvises in the mix! The famous Silver Elvis paintings Andy Warhol has created in 1963 for Irving Blum’s Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, have proven to be immensely popular for appropiation, and they still are. Also on record covers. I know, […]

Enzo Avitabile and his not so comfy chair
What makes writing this blog very rewarding, is when fellow collectors get in touch, and share their knowledge of local Warhol (or Warhol inspired) covers. Recently I got a message from Paolo Verda, an Italian architect, art and music lover, writer of prestigious books on […]

Andy Warhol was mad, David Shrigley is bananas
This post is not about an Andy Warhol design, but about a record cover done by the British artist David Shrigley that has a lot of Warhol going on. In 2012 the Californian label Castle Face released the tribute album The Velvet Underground & Nico, […]

“Andy and André”, a Viennese operetta in three acts
Although I have a copy of Warhol’s (in)famous Diaries for years already – including the two unofficial indexes of celebrity namedropping published by the magazines Spy and Face – I decided to also purchase a Kindle version. At a low price of $3.60, how can […]

Green Paul Desmond covers in France and Italy
Two years after the release of Paul Desmond’s album Take Ten, its cover design was used on two other albums in Europe. Recordings for Bossa Antigua, the album that followed Take Ten, were made in the Summer of 1964, and the album was released in […]