Led Zeppelin IV: The real people photographed on 7 iconic album covers

It’s one of the most famous album covers ever – and yet it’s always been shrouded in mystery. Led Zeppelin’s IV, which includes the band’s hit “Stairway To Heaven”, was released on 8 November 1971 with an album cover that gave nothing away. No title, no band name: just some peeling wallpaper hung with a Victorian image of a stooped man carrying sticks on his back, which was purchased in an antique shop in Berkshire by the lead vocalist, Robert Plant.

Yesterday, though, the mystery appears to have been solved. Brian Edwards, a visiting research fellow at the University of the West of England, came across the image in his research, and it can now revealed to be a Wiltshire thatcher named Lot Long, who was born in Mere in 1823 and died in 1893 (the photograph is thought to have been taken in 1892).

It’s fascinating news for Zeppelin fans – and it’s far from the only album cover with a backstory. Behind many great albums lies a real person – here we delve into seven more.

Nirvana – Nevermind (1991)

Nirvana’s 1991 album Nevermind was the subject of controversy last year when Spencer Elden, an image of whom as a naked baby was used on the cover, attempted to sue the band, claiming it was child abuse, since he could not consent to the image being used at the time (he is shown in a pool reaching for a dollar bill on a string). His family were paid $200 in 1991; he sought £170,000 in damages. Nirvana’s lawyers argued that Elden had “spent three decades profiting from his celebrity as the self-anointed ‘Nirvana Baby’” – and the judge eventually dismissed the claim. The image remains as iconic as ever.

Funkadelic – Maggot Brain (1971)

Along with George Clinton’s other band The Parliaments – who would later go on to become the fully-fledged Parliament – Funkadelic helped to pioneer the iconic funk sound of the American 70s. Their third album, Maggot Brain, was the last in a run of albums, before the group expanded into a funk collective, that were also heavily influenced by psychedelia. Its cover was the perfect blend of the two genres, showing a woman’s head screaming (in either pleasure or pain) sticking out of bare earth covered in roots. All very trippy. The woman in question, though, was the African-American model Barbara Cheeseborough, known for her Afrocentric image – and a symbol of the black culture that is inextricable from funk and soul music.

Roxy Music – For Your Pleasure (1973)

The second album by the British rock band Roxy Music, which consisted of Bryan Ferry and Graham Simpson, For Your Pleasure was also the last to feature Brian Eno, who played synths. The cover is an overexposed photograph that has been described as being “as famous as the album itself”: it depicts the French model and singer Amanda Lear, who was Ferry’s girlfriend at the time (and, in an impressive claim to fame, the closest friend of Salvador Dali), in a skintight dress and boots, posing in front of a cityscape, with a panther on a lead. Its plastic effect is surely a nod to the album’s song “In Every Dream Home a Heartache”, an ode to a blow-up doll.

Blink-182 – Enema of the State (1999)

As if the album title wasn’t enough of a tribute to the taboo, the infamous cover for Enema of the State also features the porn star Janine Lindemulder dressed as a sexy nurse. She is, somewhat ominously, pulling on a rubber glove – and on the back cover, the band are depicted with her, topless, ready to receive an injection. Blink-182 were reportedly unaware that Lindemulder worked in porn before they selected her to be their cover girl. Still, the high-saturation image of her in her white coat and hat would become iconic, and the album cemented blink-182’s status as one of the most commercially successful rock bands of their era.

Rihanna – Anti (2016)

By the time Rihanna released Anti in 2016, we were used to her face appearing on the front of her albums, in a slightly different guise each time, consistent with the different musical styles and “eras” of each record. But Anti had a different look: an image created by the Israeli artist Roy Nachum, mainly black and white, with red paint spilling down the top half, and a blurry image of a toddler with a crown obscuring their eyes. The toddler in question is Rihanna on her first day of day care. Given the album also felt less commercial and more serious than her previous work, maybe the cover was designed to represent a rebirth, or perhaps a move away from Rihanna’s own objectification as a woman.

Lana Del Rey – Norman Fucking Rockwell!

Lana Del Rey’s 2019 album Norman Fucking Rockwell! marked the artist’s transition from slightly niche pop star to cult obsession. Featuring songs like “Venice Bitch”, “Mariners Apartment Complex” and “Hope is a Dangerous Thing for a Woman Like Me to Have – but I Have It”, it was full-blown Americana caricature, the title (and corresponding song) another nod to the nostalgic feel. On its cover Del Rey is depicted at sunset on an old-fashioned sailing boat flying the American flag, reaching longingly to camera with her arm around a man.

The man in question is Duke Nicholson, the grandson of the legendary American actor Jack Nicholson, known for his roles in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Shining – yet another nod to the hazy old-Hollywood world that Del Rey so skilfully emulates in her music.

Bob Dylan – The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan

Though The Freewheelin’ was the sophomore album by a little-known folk singer named Bob Dylan, it represented his first foray into (almost) fully original writing – where his first album had largely consisted of trad songs, this was almost all his own compositions. The cover is an image of casual, intimate authenticity: it shows Dylan walking down a New York street arm-in-arm with his then-girlfriend Suze Rotolo. In 2008, she told the New York Times that “every time I look at that picture, I think I look fat” – a stark contrast with the rest of us, for whom it simply represents the gateway to some of Dylan’s most famous and celebrated work.