Last Licks: Rolling Stones Album Art That Missed the Mark

Emotional Rescue, Dirty Work, Undercover and more

The Rolling Stones’ visual presentation has often been as iconic as the music itself. From Michael Cooper’s lenticular effort on Their Satanic Majesties Request to Andy Warhol’s zippered brilliance for Sticky Fingers—and of course, the tongue-and-lips logo that rivals Nike’s swoosh—their legacy in album art rocks on. But not all of them worked. Some were bizarre misfires. Others were just boring. Here are five sleeves where the Stones rolled in the wrong direction.

Aftermath (U.K. version, 1966)

Musically, Aftermath marked the start of the Stones’ creative ascent with all tunes by the Jagger-Richards songwriting duo. Visually, however, the U.K. cover was a muddled letdown. This monochrome photo, with the band stacked diagonally on a dirty pink background, lacks cohesion and energy. It was designed by Andrew Loog Oldham, the band’s manager, under the pseudonym Sandy Beach. The cover seems rushed and derivative. Worse, it echoes the distorted aesthetic of Rubber Soul without its charm. The original concept—an album titled Could You Walk on the Water?—was scrapped after Decca deemed it sacrilegious. What replaced it failed to match the ambition of the music inside.

Emotional Rescue (1980)

This one is almost universally panned and deservedly so. It launched a run of albums with a number of visual clinkers. The cover features a cluster of thermal images that achieve the bad cover hat trick by being visually cold, emotionally flat and conceptually aimless. Created from a shoot by Roy Adzak using infrared photography, the intent may have been avant-garde, but the result looks like a pile of distorted X-rays. Designer Peter Corriston, who’d nailed it with Some Girls, delivered a conceptual dead-end this time. Fans were bewildered, critics were unkind. Even today, it remains one of the least loved covers in the Stones’ catalog. You can’t tell who’s who or even that it’s Mick and the boys without squinting at the small text.

Undercover (1983)

This design by Peter Corriston, featuring graphics by Hubert Kretzschmar, tried to be daring but ended up disjointed. The fleshy swells of the unknown model strategically covered by brightly colored stickers excited some male buyers. The stickers, once removed, revealed nothing more than another series of images chosen by Kretzschmer. This left the main image feeling like a half-hearted attempt to blend pop art and softcore sleaze. The cover comes off more like juvenile provocation than artful subversion. And the aesthetic hasn’t aged well.

Dirty Work (1986)

Ask anyone over 40 the decade when this album was released and they will all get it right. This cover is an aggressively ’80s color explosion. Dirty Work finds the Stones awkwardly posing in neon pastel suits like a detergent commercial gone rogue. The hues clash, the composition is awkward and the overall vibe is chaotic. This perhaps matched the troubled dynamic of the band at the time. With Mick and Keith feuding and Charlie Watts battling addiction, the album’s dysfunction leaked into the visual. Even Annie Lebovitz could set things right. The image is oddly flat for such a dynamic band and Jagger’s semi-absent posture only accentuates the negativity.

Blue & Lonesome (2016)

Fast forward three decades and you’d expect something striking for a back-to-the-blues record by the Rolling Stones. But Blue & Lonesome just mails it in. The iconic logo is recolored in electric blue and placed against a flat background. No band name. No faces. No controversy. Blue & Lonesome was recorded in three days in December 2015. The art looks like it might have taken half that time. Designed by Studio Fury, the sleeve was meant to signal a shift, a raw return to roots. Instead, it looks more like a marketing placeholder than a finished concept. Mick Jagger reportedly rejected early drafts for being too muted and demanded a bolder shade of blue. He got that, but not much else. For a band with such a visual legacy, this felt like corporate minimalism—slick, sterile and utterly forgettable.

The Rolling Stones have always taken risks in art as in music. Not all risks pay off. These covers show that even rock royalty can miss the mark. But if nothing else, they remind us that bad art often has great stories behind it.