Whitney Houston - Whitney Houston
It's 1985 and I was an impressionable six-year-old who didn't own a record player and only had a cassette recorder. My older sister used to let me in her room to use her record player while she was out on her roller skates and I would listen to my Michael Jackson records and dance in front of her full-length mirror with a hair brush. Saturday evening I was fingering through her small stash of LPs and found a record that not only confirmed my sexuality but also gave me my first erection. It was a garish orange cover with an Amazonian beauty queen on the front cover. Flip it over and you are met with a bright white bikini-clad sex goddess. Putting my headphones on gingerly and turning my big volume knob up I lay back on the bunk bed and fell into this swampy love-soaked sun-kissed bliss. I would love to say that it was the lush synth magic, the soaring vocal melodies or the heavily-processed drum machines, which gave me the goose bumps. But to be brutally honest it was much more than that. It was the cover. That cover.
Rhys Llewellyn