The Cover Uncovered: The Story of Delia Smith’s cake on The Rolling Stones album ‘Let It Bleed’
The Rolling Stones have a long history of excellent album covers. The band’s visuals have always been striking, from the Sticky Fingers cover designed by Andy Warhol to the iconic packaging of Some Girls or Goats Head Soup. However, with all that said, the cover of the 1969 album Let It Bleed has always stood out as one of their most unique.
Feeling astonishingly modern for the time, the composition rejected the classic photo cover trend that most records went for and continue to employ to this day. There could be an obvious reason for this. During the Let It Bleed sessions between 1968 and 1969, tensions within the band hit boiling point. The Rolling Stones’ founder and original leader, Brian Jones, was at the height of addiction, becoming more and more absent from the band. During the recording sessions, Jones was totally unreliable, regularly not showing up for sessions and leaving Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Charlie Watts to figure out how to function without him.
Halfway through the sessions, Jones was fired when the band realised how easily they could replace him with the far more reliable Mick Taylor. Only a few months later, in July 1969, Jones was found dead in his pool, leaving his old bandmates in a state of shocked mourning.
Two days later, the band played their infamous Hyde Park show in memory of their late founder. Their set list included ‘Midnight Rambler’, a track that would appear on Let It Bleed as one of the only songs Jones is a credited musician on, having made it to very few of the album sessions.
It makes sense, then, why the band might not want a photo on the album cover. Due to the timing of Brian Jones’ death, no one wanted to make a fanfare of Mick Taylor replacing him and joining the band. Similarly, the original band members may not have wanted a portrait to be shot, making the loss of their friend glaringly obvious with his absence. So, instead, the quintet got creative.
Originally, Jagger wanted the Dutch surrealist artist M. C. Esher to design the cover, but he declined. The job was then passed onto Robert Brownjohn, who had previously designed title sequences for 1960s James Bond films, becoming known for his witty graphic design concepts. However, the image wouldn’t have been created without the help of one celebrity chef.
The cake on the cover of Let It Bleed was actually baked by the now-legendary TV personality Delia Smith. At the time, Smith was just another unknown baker. Her involvement was sheer luck as she happened to be friends with the photographer, Don McAllister, who booked her the gig to help her out.
Smith was simply instructed to make a “gaudy cake”, so she chose the bright-coloured green, cherries and mauve icing, taking inspiration from 1950s American cookbooks. Only when she arrived at the studio did she learn the cake would be used for a Rolling Stones album cover.
Two months after the album release, Delia Smith’s own cookbook How To Cheat At Cooking was published, going on to make her the UK’s best-known TV cook by the end of the decade. There’s no record of whether the band ever tasted the cake, but it looks as delicious as the iconic LP artwork.
