Bad Cover Version features over 100 images of home-made punk record sleeves over 120 pages. Made by the fans and lovingly presented for the first time by Paul Burgess and Russ Bestley. Punk's embrace of autonomous, do-it-yourself artistic production has been widely documented as a key element of the punk explosion. From home-made fanzines that merged cut-and-paste and collage with typewritten text and photocopied reproduction to extremely limited record and cassette releases on independent labels run out of bedrooms and kitchens, the mythology of an authentic DIY punk practice and aesthetic runs deep in our cultural memory.
Since the creators of most of these examples of home-made fan art are long lost to the mists of time, and in any case they display little in the way of artistic merit or sophistication, they occupy something of a hinterland between desirable artifacts and mutilated detritus.
They do, however, offer a fascinating insight into the ways in which a set of stylistic visual conventions relating to punk filtered down to punk fans and were emulated by amateur designers. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but the raw and ready nature of these graphic objects - usually acting as pastiche or homage, rather than offering any sense of parodic intent - might help us to understand the essential nature of a punk visual aesthetic, at least in the United Kingdom at a certain moment in time.