Ode to Album Covers

SHOOT: Have a look at the last one, right at the bottom.

That’s the wonderful life and spirit in this sleeve. It celebrates spontaneity, doing stuff ‘cause it’s fun, having a drink and a laugh and a joke whenever you can.It’s fun, and it’s infectious, and track three says it all: “I just cannot contain this.”

clipped from www.themorningnews.org As an adult, I can nod enthusiastically during dinner parties while my fellow guests discuss their favorite record sleeves of all time. I can go out and waste money on books that claim to list the top record sleeves of all time. But I’ll know my favorite record sleeve of all time when I see it, and it will be this one. This sleeve is life itself. On the front, beautiful singer Róisín Murphy wobbles drunkenly, thuggishly, threateningly before me. She holds those two pints of beer and looks like she’s going to hurl them in my face, simply for being cheeky enough to look at her. She’s snarling, aggressive, soaking wet. Not, um, wearing a bra. And she doesn’t care. She gives not a flying fuck what I think, what you think, what anybody thinks, because she is having the time of her life larking about in freezing cold seawater with her mates. Did the band ask photographer Elaine Constantine to do a shoot while they larked on a beach?