I have not been able to find any record or CD covers with Banksy art since the release of Danger Mouse‘s set of limited edition 12″ singles “Keep It Real/Laugh Now” in 2008, so in December 2015 I was surprised to see an LP advertised that uses a modified version of Banksy‘s “Flower Thrower” image where a ball had been substituted for the bunch of flowers.

This record is purported to be a test pressing for Junichi Masuda‘s unofficial album entitled “Pokémon“released in 2015 with a sort of “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” pastiche cover. The album was released on red/white swirl vinyl, which I suspect is the reference for the red/white ball being thrown. The test pressing album, however, was only available on black vinyl.

Junichi Masuda (born 12th January, 1968) is extremely influential in the field of computer games and is a director of the Pokémon company and designs games for the company and composes music to accompany them.

Apparently, the idea for the test pressings of this album was to stencil 100 covers with the “Flower Thrower” image but something happened during the spraying and (I suppose) the stencil was damaged so the final ten copies were sprayed with a stylised rabbit chasing a balloon – a pastiche (to my mind unsuccessful) of Banksy‘s “Girl With Balloon” artwork.

This one, however, seems too far from the Banksy original for my taste. I was lucky to be able to get hold of the “Flower Thrower” version at a reasonable price but this “Rabbit” version would cost between $300-400, which helps solve my quandry as to whether or not to include one in my collection.