From Pink Floyd to Black Sabbath: Five classic album cover locations you can visit
Visual art has a huge influence on the way we perceive music. It helps us assign an identity to what we’re about to hear, building up our expectations and reflecting our hopes back at us. In the same way, writers have used landscape to evoke a certain mood; album cover artists have relied on the urban and the pastoral to convey something unspoken. Whether it’s Pink Floyd painting a grim picture of modern life in Animals or Black Sabbath harking back to England’s pre-industrial past, album artwork always carries a certain thematic weight.
Of course, a lot of artwork simply reflects where an album was made. Think Bob Dylan walking down the streets of New York in The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan or The Beatles marching outside Abbey Road Studios. On the surface, these album covers seem the product of ease and necessity, but that doesn’t mean they don’t convey something about the circumstances of the album’s creation.
All this is to say that music and place are interwoven. Here, we’ve bought you a selection of album covers that feature locations and landscapes you can visit in real life. We know how much music fans love a pilgrimage, so we’ve included sites from all over the world, each of which is well worth exploring. Happy travelling.
Five explorable locations from classic album covers:
Battersea Power Station, London: Pink Floyd – Animals
Few albums evoke the grime of London’s industrial past quite like the cover of Pink Floyd’s tenth album, Animals. Throughout the 20th century, Battersea Power Station had been a symbol of progress and modernity. But in 1977, it took on a set of new, distinctly dystopian connotations.
The album cover, which features a giant inflatable pig floating between the building’s soaring chimneys, was conceived by Roger Waters and designed by long-term collaborator Storm Thorgerson. It remains one of the most striking visual representations of post-hippie pessimism and societal corrosion to emerge during the 1970s.
Luxemborg Garden, Paris: Tame Impala: Lonerism
The light-leaked photo that serves as the artwork for Tame Impala’s decade-defining 2012 album Lonerism was taken by Kevin Parker on a Diana F camera. The musician was peering through one of the exterior gates around Paris’ Luxembourg Garden, an ornate house and garden inspired by the Boboli gardens in Florence.
Created under the order of Queen Marie de Medici in 1612, the garden features over 25 hectares of beautifully designed English and French gardens, orchards, greenhouses, forests, fountains and ponds. Visitors will also find apiaries, the Orangerie, the Pavillion and over 100 statues.
Gullfoss, Iceland: Echo and The Bunnymen – Porcupine
Released in 1983, Porcupine is one of Echo and The Bunnymen’s best-selling albums, reaching number two in the UK album chart. The album cover, which features the band standing under banks of snow, was shot at the Gullfoss waterfall near Reykjavík, Iceland.
Gulfoss, or “Golden falls”, was named for the high sediment content of the glacial water, which makes it shimmer in direct sunlight. One of the most beautiful sights in Iceland, Gulfoss descends in three layers, beginning with a gentle, three-step staircase and ending with a 21-meter waterfall.
Abbey Road, London: The Beatles – Abbey Road
Every Beatles fan should visit Abbey Road once in their life. It is the ultimate musical pilgrimage and continues to attract shoals of tourists to this day. That being said, if you go at the right time, you might be lucky enough to find the iconic zebra crossing completely empty.
The crossing is just a few minutes’ walk from St John’s Wood Underground. When you leave the station, cross over onto Grove End Road and walk down the hill. Keep going, and you’ll see the cream columns of Abbey Road Studios, where The Beatles recorded everything from Please Please Me to Revolver. Turn right, and the crossing is right in front of you. History was made here. Soak it up.
Mapledurham Watermill, Oxfordshire: Black Sabbath – Black Sabbath
The building on the cover of Black Sabbath’s self-titled debut might look nightmarish, but the real location is actually fairly quaint. Mapledurham Watermill is a picturesque mill from the 1690s. Today, it’s open to visitors looking to soak up the tranquil atmosphere. There’s even a tearoom where you can get a freshly baked scone. Honestly, it’s all very un-rock ‘n’ roll.
The model who appeared as the cloaked woman on Black Sabbath was Louisa Livingstone, who later told Rolling Stone that it was “freezing cold” when photographer Keith Macmillan took the photograph. “I had to get up at about four o’clock in the morning. Keith was rushing around with dry ice, throwing it into the water. It didn’t seem to be working very well, so he ended up using a smoke machine… I’m sure he said it was for Black Sabbath, but I don’t know if that meant anything much to me at the time.”
