Back way back when, I was a Van Dyke Parks fan and I had his albums Song Cycle, Discover America, Clang of the Yankee Reaper and Jump! I also picked up the single The All Golden / Sassafrass (that one because of Klause Voormann’s pastural cover painting.)

A year (or more) ago I received Klaus Voormann’s limited edition book It Started in Hamburg and therein were pictures of Klaus’ record cover designs I had never seen, among them were Jesper Munk’s Favourite Stranger and Gaby Moreno & Van Dyke Parks iSpangled! I emailed Klaus to ask whether these records actually existed or were just designs, and he replied that they were soon to be released. I found the Jesper Munk album relatively quickly but I have been looking out for the iSpangled! album for some considerable time. It was finally released on 4th October 2019, but I didn’t get my hands on a copy until 1st August 2020, when I popped into Bengans Stockholm record store and found a copy with the blue background. I knew there were two colour variations of the cover picture, The one I found with a blue background to the aeroplane and the a grey, ghost-like figure on the left and a cover with a purple backgound for the plane and a beige figure on th eleft who looked less like a ghost. However, the salesperson at Bengans couldn’t order a copy of the purple cover for me.

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I saw copies of the purple cover on Ebay and emailed a record store in England whether their copies were blue or purple but never received an answer. I finally tracked one down from Chalkys_UK and it arrived in pristine condition on 29th October 2020, a little more than a year after its release.

There are a couple of Klaus Voormann record covers that seem impossible to find. The first is his cover for The Typhoons’ 1964 single Walk…Don’t Run–a cover of the Ventures’ hit–and the second is a 1979 bootleg with the (at least for me) tongue-twisting title Wir nie im Bett Programm gemacht. I once saw a copy of the Typhoons single for sale on Ebay (without the record) that sold for a whopping €110! The record is quite easy to find without the cover and can be bought for abut €5-10. So I bought the record.

Then decided to make my own cover and found the design on Klaus Voormann’s site. So that was easy!

Finding a good quality picture of the Wir nie cover wasn’t so easy. And I had to photoshop the pictures I finally found to make a reasonable facsimile.

I’m sure there ar still more klaus Voormann covers waiting to be discovered. The man himself doesn’t have a list of all the covers he has designed, so I’ll just have to keep looking to see if any new ones turn up.