Culture

Cover Songs: Here's What Famous Albums Would Look Like as Novels

Many classic albums could also make great novels. So graphic designer Christophe Gowans set out to make some.
  • Purple Rain
  • Horses
  • Bad
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Sometimes great albums also tell great stories – Pink Floyd's The Wall, Nine Inch Nails's The Downward Spiral – but they hardly ever get the full-on novel treatment of their own. The Record Books, an art series reimagining famous albums as novels, is looking to change that – or at least create a good cover version of it. Created by Christophe Gowans, a freelance graphic designer who lives in London, The Record Books creates a different kind of narrative for classic albums like Michael Jackson's Bad and Radiohead's OK Computer, making each album a cover to a non-existent novel. Prince's Purple Rain, for example, becomes a sci-fi tale of Earth on the brink of collapse from – yes – acid rain that is saved when the peach is discovered to be the only plant unaffected. (See above.) Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, in turn, is the diary of a 9-year-old boy with a misleading title, because "his most extreme fantasy extends to driving a Royal Mail overnight delivery train without wearing his glasses." The Beach Boys' sonic epic Pet Sounds becomes simply a children's book to acquaint pre-schoolers with barn animal noises. Sort of. "They're so much fun for a designer to do, it's a bit like mining for gold," said Gowans, who makes his creations in Illustrator before aging them with Photoshop tools. "When you find the right combination of title and book genre, it's such a rush." Most recently, Gowans tackled Depeche Mode's Violator (about a lesbian TV star who goes on a blood-sucking rampage for reality TV) and Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral (a fictional autobiography of adult film star Tyrone "Nine-Inch" Nails), and is currently planning some variation on a Guns N' Roses album as well as a Van Halen book cover. He also recently started selling some of the images as prints and postcards (send that Downward Spiral number to your mom!). Check out some of Gowans' favorite Record Books in the gallery here. Above:

Purple Rain by Prince

Purple Rain got a movie, not a book. So Gowans worked up a sci-fi tome. "Growing up, these second-hand bookshops were full of these slightly-narrower-than-our-paperbacks American pulpy sci-fi beauties," he adds of his inspiration for the design.

Images courtesy Christophe Gowans