Celebrity doppelgänger album cover

Some album covers will stick in your brain longer than the "Never Gonna Give You Up" video by Rick Astley, and we all know how bad that is. I have had a long, tortuous history with the cover of the "Singles" compilation by The Smiths. All of the album covers by The Smiths, and the solo releases by Morrissey as well, have an iconic quality about them, but this one unnerved me when I first saw it in a record store more than a decade ago. There was no way I was going to buy a CD with a girl that beautiful on the cover, so for years I would fondle it in the store and then put it back in the shelves since I had far more important things to do like buy other compact discs to somehow try to feed my music buying addiction.

I know that doesn't make much sense, but it was what it was. Then, about a decade after it was released in 1995, I picked up the album in a store and wondered, "Wait a minute, how did Scarlett Johansson get on this album cover?" I had never actually looked inside a copy of the disc to learn who the blonde bombshell on the cover actually was. It is a publicity photo of Diana Dors, and if I had ever watched British movies from the fifties and sixties, I would have known she was the Brit version of Jayne Mansfield, Mamie Van Doren and Marilyn Monroe all wrapped up into one movie star.

So, at that moment, I finally bought the CD, brought it home, opened it up and found out that the cover was indeed a picture of Diana Dors. However, to this day, the first thing I think of when I look at that over is, "That is a celebrity doppelgänger of Scarlett Johansson!" Of course, Scarlett Johansson wasn't even born yet when the original photo was taken, and she wasn't yet a teenager and had just started acting when the album was released. All of this goes to prove that something must be very wrong in my head if I still think this way when I look at the compact disc.

There are other things I think about when I look at it. I like the orange typeface used on the cover which is the same color as the disc itself. I also try to remember all the autobiographical things about myself when I first saw the cover and when I finally bought it ten years later. I could probably do a routine similar to this for many of the albums in my collection, however there is only this one that has a celebrity doppelgänger that throws me for a loop every time I see it.