Sex, drugs and album covers

by Aidan O'Donnell

Article published on the 2009-08-14 Latest update 2009-08-17 08:38 TU

Paris's Erotica Museum welcomes an exhibit lined with the sexiest album art money can buy. With the internet, even those hard-to-find trashy albums from the seventies can now be yours.

It all started innocently enough with a book called Eros vinyls, put together by Mathieu Flory.

His book presents a collection of 400 LP record covers whose unifying theme is the “erotic”. This was all Paris’s Erotica Museum needed to select 120 covers, pop them on one floor of its multi-storey building and invite visitors to look back at how record-sleeve artists have worked with the idea of eroticism over the last six decades.

The whole thing is organised into musical genres – French, Jazz’n’Blues, Cabaret, Rap & Hip-Hop etc. – but also into what curator Alain Plumey calls “topics”. A topic, it seems, can be anything from “Stockings” to “Tie Me Up”.

The tasteometer plunges right down with many of the covers, which can involve women drenched in honey, or toting automatic weapons. As they do. You’re left wondering what people thought they were designing, particularly in the 1970s. But you are often forced to acknowledge their ingenuity.

The exhibition lives up to its promise to move through all the decades and includes covers from artists like Julie London, Betty Page, Brigitte Bardot and Jane Birkin. Hard-core rap could hardly be left out (and who better than 2 Live Crew?) but the collection is sufficiently well-balanced that they’re the sole representative and a few steps away you’re examining the sleeve for a recording of Offenbach’s Vie Parisienne.

One visitor at the exhibition says that it’s only when you see the albums collected in this way that you think of them as deliberately erotic. “I was surprised to see them because I really didn’t perceive most of them as erotic or overly sexual,” the young woman says. “I just think it’s marketing and promotion and selling something. But it was interesting”. Visitors to the exhibition, says Plumey, tend to be young. This is not for want of risqué pictures, but because of the newfound interest in vinyl LPs.

Assembling a collection like this is much easier than it used to be, says Plumey, since you can find anything on the internet. A copy of the Village People’s 1979 Sleazy or Ice-T’s 1988 Power is probably out there somewhere on the web - for a price.

There’s always that elusive album-sleeve however, and Plumey searches for the name of the one he wasn’t able to hang in the exhibit. “Jimi Hendrix with nude girls,” he says. “It’s one cover, famous one, really rare and expensive”.

This then would be the scandal-starting, epoch-making Electric Ladyland and while Hendrix might not be on the wall of the exhibit, plenty of other big names are.

If it’s too early in the day to navigate the Erotica Museum, you can take yourself off to 25 years of the Mac at Paris’s Computer Museum.

A History of Eroticism through 60 years of LPs is running at La Musée de l’érotisme, 72 Boulevard de Clichy.