The peasants are doing what peasants do - lighting candles for the Devil, bringing a basket of light into the day, filling the well after the calf has drowned. A woman in a red dress puts a blue cloak on her husband, signifying cuckoldry. This is Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Netherlandish Proverbs, sometimes known as The Blue Cloak from one of its most haunting details, painted in 1559 and visualising the folklore of the Low
Countries. When I saw it recently in a record shop, I was entranced. A detail from the work decorates the cover of the Fleet Foxes album. Nice cover, you might have thought if you've seen it, but you were probably more interested in the music within. Not me. Or rather, it's not that I don't like the music - just that it was a secondary issue. I fell in love with that cover in its own right. I loved to see the blocky mass and deep colours of Bruegel's painting on a CD package and the way the band's name was written so simply in the upper right-hand corner. So I bought it.
This isn't the first time I've judged an album by its cover. My tastes as a teenager developed almost entirely on this premise. I would spend hours on Saturdays in the grey 1980s looking through racks of vinyl LPs in dingy record shops. I was looking for the most beguiling, beautiful, mysterious-looking covers. I believed an arty sleeve must hold art within. This was of course a dangerous theory, for it made me a Pink Floyd fan.
Looking back now at the record sleeves that entranced me - the inflatable pig flying over Battersea Power Station on the cover of Animals, the cow in a field on Atom Heart Mother, not to mention The Wall - I still think Pink Floyd probably had the best album covers ever. I know, Peter Saville is cooler. But is the best art cool? Pink Floyd's covers have an uneasy mixture of bad taste and brilliance that gets under your skin.
My adolescent admiration for a group much, much older than I was came to an end when I saw The Wall live at Earl's Court. Somehow playing behind an actual wall seemed ... uncharismatic. Instead I became obsessed with the Doors and the Velvet Underground who also had entrancing sleeve designs - the freak show on The Doors' Strange Days, and of course the Velvet Underground's Warhol banana.
Then a record swap introduced me to Joy Division, whose covers are now so famous, and left the most beautiful girl in the school wondering what to make of Lou Reed's live version of Vicious.
Not all great albums have great covers - indeed, some of the best records come in the worst packaging. After the Velvet Underground drifted away from Warhol, their last LP, Loaded, came in a sleeve decorated with a soppy painting of pink smoke drifting out of a New York subway station. This didn't stop Sweet Jane being a beautiful song.
As for Fleet Foxes, the thrill of their cover is that it ignores all convention and fashion - instead of a designer image here is raw art. It is a classic, and so is the recording inside.
