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6 March 2008

Graduate is music icon

Saville's album sleeve ' the greatest'

Image for Graduate is music icon

PETER Saville's Unknown Pleasures has been voted the most iconic album cover of all time.

The MMU art graduate's design for the 1979 Joy Division album topped a poll which included LP covers of The Beatles, Sex Pistols and Pink Floyd.

The imagery for the album cover was taken from an encyclopaedia of astronomy and was said to represent 100 successive pulses from the first pulsar discovered.

Joy Division, from Manchester, were one of the biggest names in post-punk British music and their frontman Ian Curtis’s suicide was the subject of the recent hit film Control.

The Unknown Pleasures cover contained neither track listings nor reference to the band - a concept thought at the time to be marketing madness. Instead, it afforded the band and other Saville designs for Factory Records with cult status and reinvented the relationship between music and image.

Peter Saville, who earned a first class degree in Graphic Design at the then Manchester Polytechnic, was appointed creative director for Manchester in 2004 and has sought to brand it the "modern original city".

The poll was conducted by music website, Music Magpie.

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Photo courtesy of David Oates.