Warrington Museum to exhibit the ‘worst record covers in the world’

Steve Goldman has collected around 500 obscure albums and singles over seven years, many of which will make up The Worst Record Covers in the World exhibit.

For a cover to make his collection, it has to be ‘sufficiently bad’ and make him laugh – typically due to a concept or design choice that has gone wrong.

However, there are rules to Steve’s extensive collection – the artwork can’t be gory, violent, sexist, homophobic, transphobic or racist.

The collection started three decades ago, when Steve bought Roadstar by Peter Rabbit for 10p.

“I picked it up simply because it had such an extraordinarily bad cover – rabbits picked out of a hat, with the band’s award faces amateurishly superimposed,” he said.

Subsequently I lost it. Then the internet came along, and I thought: ‘I’ll find it now’ but every time I typed in ‘Peter Rabbitt’, Beatrix Potter came up.

“Then someone said: ‘Have you tried Discogs? It’s the marketplace for all things vinyl’. I typed it in, and it came up straight away! So, I ordered it. It was a bit more expensive this time, £5 plus another fiver to have it shipped from Germany.

“But when it arrived, it was one of the happiest moments of my life. And that evening, I said to my family: ‘Do you know what, I think I’ll collect crap record covers…’”

Roadstar by Peter Rabbitt was the first record he collected (Image: Supplied)

Steve has since bought hundreds of records from Discogs and charity shops, and have been exhibiting them across the country, with Warrington being his ninth stop.

Remarkably, one artist has even come along to Steve’s exhibition and agreed with him.

“There’s an LP called Cirkus One from the early 70s – it depicts the Earth with a pair of massive beer pumps and an adult with an umbilical cord being born from it,” said Steve.

“When we had an exhibition in Alnwick, the singer from the band turned up – and agreed that it was a crap cover!”

The exhibition will open on Saturday, October 19 and will run until January 19, and visitors can even listen to some of the songs and vote on their favourite ‘worst record’.

The Worst Record Covers in the World exhibit will be the first at Warrington Museum to focus on humour, and curator Roger Jeffery hopes it brings a smile to visitors faces.

“Recent exhibitions focusing on the work of Andie Airfix, the late graphic designer who worked in the music industry, and Curtis Jobling, an artist, author and animation creator, have been really popular with our visitors and have shown that there’s an appetite for going beyond the traditional mediums of fine art,” he said.

“I think it’s really powerful to see familiar items that people have grown up with, such as album covers, displayed and celebrated in museums, and we’ll be building on that line of programming in the future.

“This is another exhibition about music and album design, but it takes it in a very different direction because instead of celebrating good design, we’re seeing what happens when it goes wrong.

“But we’re still celebrating creativity in the sense that, what is creativity without the risk of failure? With this show, we’re also leaning into the realm of comedy, which is another interesting new direction that I hope visitors will enjoy!”