Album Cover Trivia
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110 free Album Cover trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
46 free album cover trivia questions with answers. This album cover trivia quiz is about the pictures on the sleeves rather than the songs inside: who took the photograph, where it was shot, what was hidden in it and what got it banned. It covers the sleeves everyone knows, from Abbey Road and Sgt. Pepper to Nevermind, The Dark Side of the Moon, Rumours, Born in the U.S.A. and Thriller, along with cult favourites like Unknown Pleasures, London Calling, the Velvet Underground banana and Pink Floyd's flying pig. There are questions on the designers behind the sleeves too: Hipgnosis, Peter Saville, Peter Blake, Roger Dean, Andy Warhol and Klaus Voormann. Some are easy enough for anyone who has flipped through a record shop; the hard ones will test people who read liner notes for fun. Every answer is checked against Wikipedia and cited on the question, so you can see where each fact comes from before you argue about it.
30 of 110 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01On the cover of Abbey Road, which Beatle is barefoot and out of step with the others?
Paul McCartney
Paul McCartney had simply kicked off his sandals on a warm day, and he is wearing them in other frames from the shoot. That did not stop 'Paul is dead' theorists reading his bare feet as a corpse's in a funeral procession.
Q 02Roughly how long did Iain Macmillan have to shoot the Abbey Road cover while a policeman held up traffic?
Ten minutes
Ten minutes is the usual figure, and he spent them perched on a stepladder in the middle of the road. The frame chosen for the cover was the only one that caught all four pairs of legs in a perfect V.
Q 03What make of car is parked to the left of the zebra crossing on the Abbey Road cover?
A Volkswagen Beetle
A Volkswagen Beetle that just happened to be parked outside the studio. The cover made it so famous that it was bought at auction in 1999 for the Volkswagen museum in Wolfsburg.
Q 04Which two pop artists designed the Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band cover?
Peter Blake and Jann Haworth
Peter Blake and Jann Haworth, then husband and wife, shared a Grammy for the sleeve. Blake's fee was a flat £200 with no royalties, a deal he later complained about.
Q 05Which two figures did John Lennon want on the Sgt Pepper cover, only to be overruled?
Adolf Hitler and Jesus Christ
Adolf Hitler and Jesus Christ were judged too controversial. No Jesus cut-out was even made, a year after Lennon's 'more popular than Jesus' remark, while a Hitler figure was built but kept out of view.
Q 06Which Beatle offered no suggestions for the Sgt Pepper crowd, saying 'whatever the others say is fine by me'?
Ringo Starr
Ringo Starr left the choosing to the others. Mae West at first refused, asking what she would be doing in a lonely hearts club, and agreed only after the Beatles wrote to her themselves.
Q 07Which musician designed the Beatles' Revolver cover and won a Grammy for it?
Klaus Voormann
Klaus Voormann, a friend from the Beatles' Hamburg days, says he drew it in the kitchen of a London attic flat. EMI paid him no more than £50, which it called its limit for a record sleeve.
Q 08Pink Floyd's Richard Wright wanted The Dark Side of the Moon sleeve to look like which box of chocolates?
Black Magic
Black Magic: Wright wanted something stylish and simple, like its plain box. The designers left the studio depressed, yet when they returned with several ideas, the whole band picked the prism at once.
Q 09Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon prism was inspired by a picture in what?
Physics textbook
Physics textbook: the design studio Hipgnosis found a picture of light split into a rainbow by a piece of glass and had it redrawn, after one of the band asked for something simpler than the studio's usual surreal images.
Q 10On Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here cover, two businessmen shake hands while one of them is what?
On fire
On fire, and for real: stuntman Ronnie Rondell wore a fireproof suit under his business suit, and on the fifteenth take the wind turned and burned off part of his moustache.
Q 11Pink Floyd's Animals cover shows an inflatable pig floating over which London landmark?
Battersea Power Station
Battersea Power Station was Roger Waters's choice, a building he had always loved. During the shoot the 40-foot pig broke its moorings, drifted into Heathrow's flight path and came down in a Kent field, scaring a farmer's cows.
Q 12Nirvana's Nevermind cover shows a naked baby underwater reaching for what?
A dollar on a fishhook
A dollar on a fishhook was added to the photograph afterwards. Kurt Cobain first wanted a water-birth picture, but the footage was too graphic, so the label sent an underwater photographer to shoot a friend's baby in a pool.
Q 13What did Spencer Elden, the baby on Nirvana's Nevermind cover, do in 2021?
Q 21On the cover of Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, Stevie Nicks poses in which stage persona?
Rhiannon
Rhiannon, the 'old Welsh witch' of her song. Beside her, Mick Fleetwood has two wooden balls hanging between his legs: lavatory chains he once took from a toilet and kept wearing on stage as a lucky charm.
Q 22Which real Los Angeles hotel is pictured on the cover of the Eagles' Hotel California?
The Beverly Hills
The Beverly Hills Hotel was shot at dusk from a cherry picker 60 feet above Sunset Boulevard, an angle so unfamiliar that few recognised it. Once they did, the hotel threatened to sue, then backed off when its bookings tripled.
Q 23Which band's 1976 debut album cover, four men against a brick wall, began as a shoot for Punk magazine?
Sued the band
Sued the band over it, calling the image exploitation of a minor. A judge dismissed the case in 2022 and again in 2025, the second time likening the photo to a family snapshot of a baby in the bath.
Q 14Kurt Cobain said the only cover-up he would accept on Nevermind was a sticker with what message?
The offended are closet pedophiles
The offended are closet pedophiles: his wording was 'If you're offended by this, you must be a closet pedophile.' Geffen had an alternate cover ready, then backed down and released the photo untouched.
Q 15Which artist designed the peelable banana on The Velvet Underground & Nico?
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol's is the only name on the front, not the band's. The banana was a sticker marked 'Peel slowly and see', and the label paid for a special machine to make it, counting on his name to sell the record.
Q 16What working feature did the original vinyl sleeve of the Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers have?
A real zipper
A real zipper, at Mick Jagger's insistence. An extra panel was added behind it to protect the vinyl, yet in transit each zip pull still dented the record stacked on top, right on the grooves of 'Sister Morphine'.
Q 17Who took the photograph of Bruce Springsteen's backside against a flag on Born in the U.S.A.?
Annie Leibovitz
Annie Leibovitz shot it. Some thought Springsteen was relieving himself on the flag; he said there was no hidden message, only that the picture of his backside looked better than the one of his face.
Q 18On the cover of London Calling, Paul Simonon is smashing which instrument?
A Fender Precision bass
A Fender Precision bass, and his favourite: Simonon wrecked it on stage at the Palladium in 1979, furious that bouncers would not let the audience stand up and dance.
Q 19Photographer Pennie Smith argued against using her London Calling cover shot because it was what?
Out of focus
Out of focus, because she had stepped back as Simonon came towards her. Joe Strummer overruled her, and in 2002 Q magazine named it the greatest rock'n'roll photograph of all time.
Q 20The cover of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures is a plot of radio signals from what kind of object?
A pulsar
A pulsar, and the first ever discovered: the stacked lines are its radio pulses, plotted by a student for his 1970 thesis. One of the band spotted the chart in an astronomy encyclopedia and took it to the designer.
Ramones
Ramones: an earlier cover shoot had been rejected, so the label turned to a picture Roberta Bayley had taken for the magazine, the one, she says, where the four evened out their heights.
Q 24At which city's zoo did the Beach Boys feed goats for the Pet Sounds cover?
San Diego
San Diego Zoo. Al Jardine blamed Capitol's art department, saying it had not listened to the record and thought it was about animals.
Q 25Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy cover was photographed at which landmark?
The Giant's Causeway
The Giant's Causeway, where just two models, a brother and sister, were multi-printed into eleven figures. The designers' first pitch, a tennis court punning on 'racket', so angered Jimmy Page that it nearly cost them the job.
Q 26Led Zeppelin's untitled fourth album is often called what, after the symbol Jimmy Page chose?
Zoso
Zoso is only what Jimmy Page's symbol appears to spell. After lukewarm reviews of their third album the band left off both title and name, and each member chose a symbol to stand on the sleeve instead.
Q 27Which photographer shot David Bowie with a lightning bolt across his face for Aladdin Sane?
Brian Duffy
Brian Duffy shot it in his London studio. Bowie's manager ordered an expensive sleeve, reasoning that the label would then have to promote the record hard, so it was printed by a costly dye-transfer process.
Q 28On which David Bowie album cover does he stand in a London street beneath a 'K. West' sign?
Ziggy Stardust
Ziggy Stardust: K. West was a furrier at 23 Heddon Street, just outside the photographer's studio. The black-and-white shot was hand-tinted afterwards, and in 2012 a plaque went up where the sign once hung.
Q 29On the cover of Purple Rain, Prince sits astride what?
A Honda motorcycle
A Honda motorcycle, the customised Hondamatic he rides as the Kid in the film. The tenement street is a fake, a set on the Warner Bros. backlot in California, and the woman in the doorway is his co-star Apollonia.
Q 30The white suit Michael Jackson wears on the Thriller cover belonged to whom?
Photographer Dick Zimmerman
Photographer Dick Zimmerman lent his own suit, by his account. The gatefold shows a tiger cub at Jackson's leg, which he says Jackson kept away from his face for fear of being scratched.