From Tubular Bells to Horses: 10 of the best pieces of album artwork

The most eye-popping record sleeves, including Pink Floyd's floating pigs, De La Soul's flower power and Patti Smith's simple portraiture

Pre-internet, it could be hard to find anything out about music, so a record cover might be the only information you had access to. At primary school, I learned that Tubular Bells was in a controversial film called The Exorcist (which at the time I thought was porn). I got the album for its mysterious shiny tube floating in the clouds like a UFO - and the music inside matched that soaring image.