Green Sleeves: The Irish Printed Record Cover at The National Print Museum

Green Sleeves: The Irish Printed Album Cover

Exhibition at The National Print Museum, Haddington Road, Dublin

Curated by Dr Ciaran Swan and Niall McCormack

           Iconic images are scarce in this collection of album sleeves printed in Ireland – U2’s Boy being perhaps the sole exception – but for anyone with an interest in the social and cultural history of Ireland from the 1950s to the present day, this is an exhibition worth visiting.     

           The sleeves on display can be roughly divided into two eras, from the fifties to the mid-seventies and from the mid-seventies to the present-day. In the first, it’s hard to escape the feeling that these albums are the product of a deeply conservative backwater, with lps featuring pictures of smiling young men and women (The Bachelors, various showbands) in countryside or pub scenes sharing space with those devoted to religious and political affairs. As well as John F Kennedy in Ireland and Pope John Paul II in Ireland, there is an album of Eamon De Valera’s recorded voice; a Hal Roach comedy album rubs shoulders with Ray McAreavy’s The Blood-stained Badge and Frank Mooney’s The Ireland of My Dreams. Appropriately enough, these sleeves are displayed on the walls of a narrow, darkened corridor.

                The sense of stale conformity is broken by the Dubliners’ album Revolution which shows the band scowling from the doorway of a dilapidated Georgian house in the inner city, a precursor to the later post-punk albums that depict bored young men in urban landscapes.  In the context of the first half of the exhibition, the garish gatefold sleeves of Horslips seem heroically different, the stark monotone images of the new wave refreshing, the day-glo garage psychedelia in the mid-eighties (Guru Weirdbrain, The Golden Horde) positively subversive.            

                Like the vast majority of album covers, most of those on display were originally designed to be recognised in a shop, but in the post-vinyl era, in which the format is little more than a cult and a marketing tool, there is much more emphasis on the album cover as beautiful artefact.  When Little Green Cars’ latest opus can be downloaded immediately onto one’s phone, its cumbersome vinyl version needs to have a selling point beyond the music. 

                 While it would be hard to champion any of the sleeves as works of art –  Thin Lizzy’s Johnny the Fox is the stand-out in terms of originality – these covers will no doubt transport many visitors into nostalgic reveries. For rest of us, they are a useful reminder of how much Ireland has changed over the last sixty years.

Green Sleeves: The Irish Printed Album Cover is at The National Print Museum, Haddington Road, Dublin until 1 October