Some album covers are just iconic, like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon or that Guns N’ Roses one with the spaghetti. The sleeve is a visual representation of the record, so artists are usually picky about what graces the cover. Often it’s a moody picture of the musicians themselves or a pretentious piece of artwork. But sometimes the band chooses a random photograph of some other idiot.
So whatever happened to the stars of these iconic covers? You’ll be amazed that the biological ageing process has taken its toll on the physical appearance of these human beings!
Ah, the year 1999. Dawson’s Creek was still cool, Christina Aguilera released ‘Genie In A Bottle’ and Oliver Reed failed to complete filming Gladiator due to a fatal drinking binge with some Royal Navy sailors. It was also the year of Blink-182’s puerile masterpiece Enema Of The State and who can forget that cover with the hot nurse snapping on a rubber glove? But what does she look like today?
The years have not been kind.
David Fox threatened to sue Placebo for the inclusion of his image on their debut album. He claims he was bullied at school for appearing on the cover but it could’ve been worse. The New Radicals, Stereophonics and Texas all had albums out in 1999. Imagine the stick you’d get for being on the front of one of those atrocities. Performance And Cocktails would get your head flushed down the toilet at the very least.
Who would’ve thought that the little boy on Placebo’s debut was as susceptible to aging as you, me and every person who ever lived? Here he is today, his skin ravaged by time, the lines on his face like craters on the surface of a distant planet with hardly a glimmer of hope in those dead, dead eyes. The decaying fool.
Everyone smoked in the 1980s, as accurately depicted in the period drama Mad Men which I reckon was set then or thereabouts. Even the babies smoked. Well at least the coolest babies did, like the one on the front of Van Halen’s 1984.
It was based on a photograph of four-year-old Carter Helm. And get this, that baby is no longer a baby but has since grown and matured and sleepwalked through life just like we all do and one day he will die, just like we all will die, probably from lung cancer or some other merciless disease.
This could be the most iconic album cover ever, but at the time photographer Kirk Weddle didn’t have a clue who Nirvana were or what a success the band and their album would become, the shortsighted fool.
So what’s that baby up to today? Psychologically scarred by being plunged into a swimming pool against his will and forced to swim after a dollar bill by a bunch of selfish rock stars, Spencer Elden thereafter associated money, power and fame with water and thus spent most of his life submerged in baths, pools and tides. The effect has prematurely aged him, turning him into this wrinkly freak.
