Israeli Cover Stories: Iconic Album Sleeves Revisited
What better way to mark International Record Store Day then to set out to the sites where iconic Israeli album covers were photographed?
Evidently, Tel Aviv is the city that appears most often on the album covers of Israel’s LP records and 45s. Like New York, the city offers a wealth of outstandingly photogenic locations: the Yarkon River, the narrow streets, cafes, Bauhaus buildings, bridges and boulevards. Jerusalem is also well represented on record covers, with the most highly documented sites being, without doubt, the Western Wall and the walls that ring the Old City.
Nevertheless, the locations where record covers have been photographed have not become shrines that draw crowds of visitors, unlike the crosswalk opposite the EMI studios on Abbey Road, for example (note the humorous send-up offered by Isolirband in homage to the Beatles’ 1969 record cover). Did the choice of locations stem from a desire to show the artist in his “working environment”? Or were they based on considerations of the film crew’s convenience? It’s hard to know.
Inspired by the album-cover project published earlier this month in The Guardian and in honor of International Record Store Day, which was marked last weekend, we headed out to the streets – actually, to Google Street View – and located the spots where the covers of several iconic albums of the Israeli music scene were shot:
The writer is a music editor at Israel Radio, a vinyl collector and a student of Hebrew song. His forthcoming book is “At 45 RPM: The History of the Israeli Single.”









