Nudity on album covers, to the extent that album covers exist anymore, remains taboo in the mainstream music industry. As recently as 2010, the cover of Kanye West’s now-classic hip-hop album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was barred by many retail outlets, including Amazon, for its cover artwork that featured an impressionistic painting of West straddled by a naked woman — with wings.
But 50 years ago this week, the then-most famous rock star in the world (or at least one of the four most famous), John Lennon, who was still a very much a member of the Beatles, announced his affair with Japanese performance artist Yoko Ono to the world with what was then a shocking album cover that featured the couple nude from head to foot.
The photo, which may be viewed at this link, adorning the couple’s collaborative, avant-garde recording titled Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins was also possibly the least sexy nude album cover ever released. And that was by design, as Lennon and Ono appeared to anticipate what would later become known as the “body positivity” movement.
“What we did purposefully is not have a pretty photograph; not have it lighted so as we looked sexy or good,” the then 28-year-old Lennon said at the time, according to The Beatles Bible. “There were a couple of other takes from that session where we looked rather nice, hid the little bits that aren’t that beautiful; we looked good. We used the straightest, most unflattering picture, just to show that we were human.”
Lennon snapped the photo himself with a camera on a timer, in the basement of a house owned by Beatles drummer Ringo Starr. The couple were living there after the still-married Lennon had left his wife, Cynthia. The Two Virgins album, a noise collage consisting of tape loops, “found” sounds, and improvised, free-form instrumentation, was released—nude cover and all—on November 29, 1968, in the United Kingdom. (The official United States release date was earlier, November 11.)
The nude cover caused a sensation, as EMI, distributor of the Beatles’ Apple record label, flatly refused to release the album at all, and independent label Track agreeing to do so only if the album was displayed in brown wrapping with only Lennon and Ono’s faces visible through a hole in the paper. Though the record itself reportedly sold only 5,000 copies, police in Newark, New Jersey, seized a shipment of 30,000 imported Two Virgins records, claiming that the nude photo on the cover in which Lennon and Ono (who was 35 years old at the time) do nothing but face the camera with one arm rather chastely around each other’s back, was pornography.
The other Beatles were less than thrilled with Lennon’s plan to release the experimental album and its nude cover image, believing that, as Starr said, “It doesn't matter whichever one of us does something, we all have to answer for it.”
But ultimately the album hit record store shelves in the U.K. just one week after the Beatles’ monumental double LP that came to be known as The White Album, which featured a cover that was also controversial, for entirely different reasons. As the album’s unofficial name implied, the cover contained no photo at all, just the band’s name embossed on a pure white background.
Lennon explained his idea behind the nude cover, and the title of the Two Virgins LP it contained, saying that the couple saw themselves as “two innocents, lost in a world gone mad.”
Photo by Eric Koch/Wikimedia Commons
