Deface Value - Phil Collins Albums Defaced by Celebrities for Charity (GALLERY)

Phil Collins’ No Jacket Required and Face Value vinyl sleeves will be defaced by celebrities and artists for an auction to raise funds for the ‘Children In Hunger’ charity.

Tracy Emin, Fatboy Slim, Robert Plant, Jimmy Saville and Franz Ferdinand are just some of the names that have agreed to create genuine artworks from album sleeves such as ‘Face Value’ and ‘No Jacket Required’.

The project - entitled “Deface Value” - was created with the help of East London art business Art Vinyl.  The defaced album covers can be viewed from April 19 until May 7 at the Art Vinyl Gallery in Broadway Market in Hackney (London).

The exhibition’s organisers said they chose the sleeve because the image of Phil’s face represented, quite literally, a blank canvas - pesky inconveniences such as a beard, glasses or hair not posing much of an obstacle. Originally, it was easy to pick up the first 20 of the second-hand albums for £1, but as the curators neared their stated target of 36 copies they noticed prices on eBay had begun to rise to nearer the £5 mark. At auction, the collection could fetch up to 1,000 times that, as collectors endeavour to outbid one another in a pop music story so surreal you couldn’t have made it up.