No doubt everyone is familiar with this Zardozzy cover.
But I hadn't really clocked that there was a whole discography of releases from Westminster Gold with a similar visual look presumably pitched at the younger, "with it" generation. The work of a designer called Christopher Whorf.
Lots of cheesecake imagery
That one made me think of PiL's Metal Box, of course.
Also visual puns and japes that are vaguely in the vicinity of what Hipgnosis would do, or the Island samplers like El Pea. I'm not totally sure what the joke is with the one below
Most of the Westminster Goldcovers are not illustrations or designs but photographs of objects or assemblages.
Or it will be a photograph of a person or group of people posed in an absurd or quasi-erotic scantily clad posture or tableau.
That one combines the cheesecake and the visual pun - "phwooar, take a look at her bust(s)"
Mostly the covers are notable for the brightly-lit clarity of the photograph, but some go in for a vaseline-on-the-lens blurriness that seems quite modish to the era. This one looks like it could be from an advert for condoms, or perhaps an Emmanuelle-type softcore skinflick.
Even the labels are snazzy and un-classical.
Mostly the releases are middlebrow, well-known classical composers and works (I have no idea how well regarded these versions are by cognoscenti). But there's a few oddball and avant inclusions. e.g.
This one below by Professor Emerson Myers of the Catholic University of America (!) was considered sufficiently avant to be Creel Poned. (The vinyl is the only Westminster Gold album I own, I think).
Below you will find an immense number of Westminster Gold sleeves, but falling a little short of the full set (on Discogs, often I'd click on the promising looking Christopher Whorf-style image only to end up with a different, more standard-classical sleeve.
