Witchfinder General: The album covers so distressing they broke up a band
Let me state for the record that album covers were once nothing special. Until the wind-up of the 1950s, the only artist who ever treated the album with the respect it deserved was Woody Guthrie.
This is no slight on the artists from that period. People recorded, released and consumed music a lot differently with a much bigger emphasis on the single. Where now we know them as teasers for an album, they used to be one-off songs that had no connection to anything outside of those three minutes. Just ask The Beatles.
Because of how people consumed singles, the idea of releasing an album with interlinked songs devoted to a storyline seemed unnecessarily ambitious. Instead, albums were compilations of singles like a box of chocolates, and the cover was either completely blank or a photo of the person singing for easier identification.
What we have now are songs interlinked with themes, styles, and sounds. This is what spurned the term “concept album” as it was a phrase frequently used by music journalists applied to albums which were more than compilations. This stuck to a legion of albums throughout the 1960s began the label lost all merit.
The whole definition didn’t find strict parameters until The Beatles came along with Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, written from the point of view of a fictional band. The story contained within the tracklist also trickled onto the cover, which presented the newly minted group. There had been other iconic album covers before this, but Sgt Pepper’s really showed people how crucial that could be.
Since then, there have been plenty of instances where people have used the canvas of an album cover to tie together a record and represent what people can expect from it. This led to covers that completely shook up the music industry, varying in whether that was because they were offensive, rude, or shocking.
Two such shocking album covers were the product of Witchfinder General, a rock band who tried to stay true to their name on their covers by posing as witchfinders arresting and distressing women, much to public chagrin.
While the images offered inroads into the brand, their artistic direction earned them a ban on their visuals. The two records particularly affected were Death Penalty and Friends of Hell, released in 1982 and 1983, respectively, both featuring Joanne Latham as the cover model in undressed distress. Unfortunately, the negative backlash garnered by the covers, paired with other problems within the member dynamic, led to them eventually splitting up.
Witchfinder General wasn’t the first and won’t be the last artist to have controversial album covers. Only recently, Sabrina Carpenter received criticism for the cover to her recent album Man’s Best Friend. Artists try hard to ensure their record is a window into the art that they’ve created, and while this is noble, it frequently results in public outcry, and in very specific circumstances, bands unravelling, which makes the art form all the more significant.
