Meet the man whose collection of unusual and amusing record covers is going on display in Yorkshire

Goldman later lost the record and didn’t give it much thought for some time.

Almost three decades on, in 2016, now with the power of the internet at his disposal, he was curious about the long lost cover but found nothing but references to BeatrixPotter.

However, when someone told him about Discogs – an online second-hand marketplace for vinyl – he tried there and found it, immediately buying it for a fiver from Germany.

“When it arrived, it was one of the happiest moments of my life,” he recalls. “I said to my family that very evening: I think I’ll collect bad record covers.”

And so began a journey that Goldman says quickly became “an obsession”.

Goldman’s hunt for the strange, surreal and plain terrible has seen him amass a collection of around 600 records worth thousands of pounds, exhibit them all over the country and even have them pop up on a segment of Have I Got News for You.

Now 300 of them have been collected in a book: The Art of the Bizarre Album Sleeve,written in collaboration with Sheffieldpublisher and sleeve designer Simon Robinson.

Inside is an eye-popping assortment of covers that range from the side-splittingly funny to the bemusing to the terrifying.

“I have a few rules,” explains Goldman of his selection process. “First and foremost, the sleeve has to make me laugh. Secondly, there are plenty of bad album covers which are just sexist, racist, homophobic or plain unpleasant. You won’t find any of these in my collection. My favourite bizarre covers are where the concept or context has gone horribly wrong. With the band, artist, photographer, design agency and record label all letting it pass.”

Robinson was one person who shared Goldman’s gut feeling about them all being funny.

“My wife and I went to Stoke on Trent for the exhibition of Steve’s covers and I was laughing for an hour,” he says. “We were just literally doubled up laughing. So we had a chat and I mentioned I was a small publisher and here we are.”

However, the book is not just a collection of the weird and wonderful world of bad album sleeves. Robinson wanted to go a little deeper than that.

“I also wanted to research each one,” he says. “So, the Peter Rabbitt sleeve is just astonishing. But why is it like that? So, we went digging. The group seem to have been from Southern California, as their fan club was located in La Jolla, but we found out that nobody knows who Peter Rabbitt is. We think it may be a pseudonym for the producer of the record but it remains a mystery.”

Robinson founded the reissue record label RPM in the 1990s, and so has a longstanding history of albums, artwork and the processes involved in putting it all together.

“I’ve been a sleeve designer myself so I naturally have a curiosity,” he says. “Because I’ve done projects to deadline and you have to make compromises. I’ve seen how things can go wrong. It is easily done if you’re not careful. But it’s strange, this process has started to warp me because I’ve spent my life trying to do good design and researching classic sleeves and now I’m focusing on rubbish.”

It’s impacted Goldman too. “I exclusively look for bad covers these days,” he says. In fact, while a lot of these records were once staples of charity shops, jumble sales and bargain bins, they are now becoming collectors’ items in their own right.

“Some of the albums now are £300 or £400,” says Robinson. “We can’t work out who would want to pay that much money for them; I think it’s an exclusivity thing.”

Whenever Goldman hosts exhibitions, he takes votes on which covers the public thinks are the worst with regular high places going to records such as Oil and Vinegar by Dave McKenna / The Wilbur Little Quartet, Hier Aujourd’hui by Carlos and Before I Go by The Vietnam Chain. But occasionally some of Goldman’s selections can cause controversy.

“Sometimes people come up to Steve at exhibitions and have a go if their favourite artist is included,” laughs Robinson. “Lovesexy by Prince is the worst example of that,” Goldman adds. “At the Shambala festival, I got so fed up with justifying its inclusion in the collection that I took it down in the end.”

As part of the research to tell the story behind many of these covers, Robinson has contacted some of the artists and designers involved. However, he says it’s been a bit of a balancing act.

“There’s been a fine line between, do you approach some of these people and ask, why is it so rubbish? Or do you think they are going to injunct me? ” he says. “Like the Dolly Parton album, Bubbling Over. She’s such a powerful artist that we didn’t want to risk upsetting her but we got a quote from her autobiography where she disses the sleeve herself, so we thought, we’re on safe ground. Generally, we’ve approached people who’ve been fairly self-deprecating about the covers already.”

The bulk of the records are made between the 1960s and 1980s, making the book a bit of a deep dive into a specific era when these kinds of dubious creative decisions seemed more prominent.

“I don’t see as many rubbish ones these days,” says Robinson. “I see things that are poorly designed or executed but this era does seem to be slipping into history now.”

Goldman keeps a wish list of record covers he hopes to purchase on his Discogs, as well as constantly keeping an eye out for the strange.

“The Beatles one with the babies is the holy grail,” he says of the 1966 compilation album Yesterday and Today.

“It was a greatest hits release which came out in America and for some reason the band appeared on the cover dressed as butchers with all these baby dolls and meat wrapped all over them. They released it and the American audiences were so appalled that they recalled them all. Those original covers can go for up to £20,000; they are so rare.”

However, the good nature shared towards the exhibition – which is now so popular that it is booked up across various towns and cities until 2026 – has even seen people going out of their way to donate their own strange finds to Goldman’s collection of oddities.

“At the last Huddersfield exhibition Steve did, these two burly paramedics came in and we were like, ‘Oh god what's kicking it off here?’” recalls Robinson, “But they were like, we found this in a charity shop for you. It was a cracker too – a Miss Piggy aerobics album.”

However, despite demand and interest being at an all-time high, it does make Goldman’s job all the more difficult the more he collects.

“It’s potentially an infinite task but it gets exponentially harder to find them,” he says. “Every time I finish an exhibition, I turn back to finding new covers but every time I get half as many as the last time because I've now got so many of them. However, that won’t stop me. I’ll never stop searching.”

Steve’s collection can be seen at The Williamson Gallery in Birkenhead until January 27, 2024. After that it will be at the Bailiffgate Museum in Alnwick (February 5-April 21) with further exhibitions at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford next summer.