Spanish New Skin For The Old Ceremony Cover – It’s Like The English Album Cover But With Another Side Of Wings

At the end of New Skin For New Skin For The Old Ceremony,¹ guest author Guy Minnebach admonished

Cohen fans around the world: – check your copy of New Skin For The Old Ceremony. Who knows what other versions might turn up?

Peter Torbijn of The Netherlands did indeed check his albums and, as a result, there yet another variant of New Skin For The Old Ceremony cover art fig leaf species has been cataloged.

Front Cover: New Skin For The Old Ceremony

The front cover art of Spanish and English pressings of the vinyl New Skin For The Old Ceremony album is displayed below.

Front Cover of New Skin For The Old Ceremony – Spanish pressing on left; English pressing on right.

Both the Spanish and English pressings are blessed with an abundance of wings. Specifically, the lower figure has a total of three wings (rather than the two attached to that same figure in the original cover), one of which conveniently shields any potential nasty bits from the eyes of Spaniards and Brits wandering innocently through their local record shops.

Original cover art (Holland)

Back Cover: New Skin For The Old Ceremony

The back covers of the same Spanish and English pressings are shown below.

Back Cover of New Skin For The Old Ceremony – Spanish pressing on left; English pressing on right.

Peter points out that that the Spanish version also has the extra wing on the smaller picture on the back cover while the lower figure depicted on the back of the English version, as Dave Curless noted in the seminal post in this series, has molted, returning to the two-winged format of the original cover art.

For easier comparison, I’ve isolated the two figure below (slightly distorting them in the process)

Figures from back cover of New Skin For The Old Ceremony – Spanish pressing on left; English pressing on right.

Peter speculates that the difference had to do with the strict censorship in those days at the hand of the Franco regime in Spain (Franco died in 1975).

The Cassette Of The Reversible Inlay

As a bonus of sorts, Peter also included photos of various versions of New Skin For The Old Ceremony cassette cover art.² Worthy of special note is the final image of  the inlay which can be switched to choose either the uncensored original picture or the Sam Tata photo.

New Skin For The Old Ceremony cassette inlay with both original cover art and Sam Tata photo, either of which can be displayed

1. All posts in this series can be found at New Skin For The Old Ceremony [↩]
2. The original article, Leonard Cohen’s New Skin For The Old Ceremony: The Cover Art Cover-Up, included New Skin For The Old Ceremony cassette covers, EP covers, songbook covers, and 8-track covers as well as ads for the album all contributed by Dominique BOILE and all displaying one form or another of the now familiar cover art. [↩]