Category Archives: WTF?

WTF Album Covers: Not Even Gustav Holst Is Safe

WTF?, , , , , ,

The Planets by Holst gets a cheeseball marketing spin, cooked up by someone who clearly believed that if you just put a sci-fi theme and plenty of cleavage on the album cover, stupid kids will buy it thinking maybe it’s some kind of new wave record or science fiction LP.

Can’t you just hear the board room conversation around this one? “Hey, dead guys don’t get paid royalties, right? These kids today love spaceships, right? Let’s CASH IN!”

And doesn’t the hero in this picture look like someone out of Wall Of Voodoo? I wonder what Sir Adrian thought when he saw this little beauty come out with HIS NAME ON IT.

Join me on Facebook

NME’s “Worst Ever” Album Covers

WTF?, , , ,

The NME jumped on the WTF album cover bandwagon with a list of its own “Worst Ever” album covers, but this once cutting-edge music pub has clearly fallen out of touch. Naming the Beatles (Magical Mystery Tour), Black Sabbath, and a few other luminaries in their worst-ever list was not only lazy, but a little bewildering. There are PLENTY of MORE awful LP covers than the ones they pictured…

For example, get an eyeful of the boring, stupid, but ultimately NOT “worst ever” cover for a Chris Brown recording called Graffiti,

Now granted, I don’t know anything about Chris Brown aside from the fact that he beat the living daylights out of his girlfriend a few years back and that his music does NOT appeal (give us old-school Isaac Hayes funk over reheated me-too hip hop any day of the week), but this album cover certainly is NOT one of the “worst ever” in spite of what the NME staff coughs up.

Granted, NME gets points for the Chumbawumba “live birth” album cover for Anarchy, and one from Royal Trux which is so vile it beggars belief. If NME were running a “three worst album covers ever” post, they might have something, but the other 47 or so are nowhere near close to being the worst ever made. No, this is just sad, lazy and pretty weak. Not to get all record nerdy about it, but five seconds worth of digging will come up with far more horrifying images, believe me.

NME doesn’t even get a pass on the sourcing of these covers, as many other collections of “best ever” and “worst ever” photos are tagged “as voted by you”. Not so on this particular group of awful album covers…ahh, NME, once upon a time you were tops in your field. Today?

And when it comes to “worst album covers”, with few exceptions, none of the records in the NME collection come close to being topped by this:

You may commence screaming now.

WTF Album Covers on Youtube

WTF?, , , , ,

We aren’t the only ones on the web obsessed with bad album covers–there are more bad album cover vids on Youtube than you can shake a copy of a Village People 12-inch single at. Which is probably a subtle hint that Turntabling should get into a bit of that, eh?



When I get some of the Turntabling Collection’s most horrifying album covers posted for posterity on Youtube, rest assured you’ll learn about it here.

–Joe Wallace

Join me on Facebook…and don’t forget that you can also become a fan of the Facebook page for the Turntabling.net book WTF Records: The Turntabling Guide to Weird and Wonderful Vinyl which is coming soon.