Singer Kurt Cobain had come up with the idea while watching a TV documentary on water births with drummer Dave Grohl.

And its unusual cover was attention-grabbing to say the least. Nirvana's second album brought grunge into the mainstream, following the success of their number one hit Smells Like Teen Spirit. Then came grunge, which brought everything back to its basics and acted like a big 'reset' button, just as punk had done two decades earlier. Nevermind by Nirvana has one of the most unusual and memorable covers of all timeĪt the beginning of the 1990s, it seemed like rock music was starting to go stale and repeat itself. As he left the courtroom, the group's singer, Johnny Rotten, joyfully exclaimed to a reporter: 'Great! Bollocks is legal. In the resulting court case, Virgin was successfully defended from obscenity charges by John Mortimer, now best known as the author of Rumpole of the Bailey. The use of 'bollocks' (a term in British English that means both 'nonsense' and 'testicles') led to a police raid on a Virgin record store that stocked the record.

The effect was heightened by the sleeve's lurid colour palette, which was based on a series of stickers distributed by the Situationalist political movement (the originals read: ‘This Store Welcomes Shoplifters’). The use of obscenity, cast in the kind of cut-out lettering commonly associated with criminal ransom notes, was shocking to audiences of the time. And the debut album of Britain’s loudest and angriest punk rockers Sex Pistols, designed by Jamie Reid, was a true statement of intent. While the psychedelic era saw album covers commonly feature intricate, surreal and lavish illustrations, punk stripped everything to its bare essentials.

The cover that established in court, once and for all, that you could put a rude word on an album

Walk the moon album cover'=