At some point in the last couple of decades, the album cover faded in significance. It is difficult to pinpoint the precise moment at which this happened, and hard to explain exactly why. It was possibly something to do with the arrival of Punk; it definitely happened before the appearance of the CD. Certainly as a vehicle for design, the CD cover just doesn’t work: it is not just the piddling scale with its visibly screened photographs and illegible five point type, but the fact that you are looking at the image through a millimetre-thick block of scratched, poorly-moulded plastic
