Cover art comparison

Don McCullin’s photograph was replaced with a compositionally similar image. On different print runs, the initials of Nikolai Kibalchich appear either on the right or on the left, but the cover designer is Yuri Trifonov.

“The front cover is mine,” Trifonov says. “This photo was re-shot from some English book. And in my view it fit perfectly. I’d grown tired of the original photo: it always annoyed me with its lack of sharpness. We would have found a better-quality replacement, but we had to work with what we had — there was no internet back then. Later this photograph appeared in the book Mad Day Out.

I was surprised they ended up making it yellowish. Depending on the print run, the tones came out differently: sometimes yellow, sometimes gray, sometimes more saturated — later a different print shop handled it. On the back, Kibalchich just stuck on whatever was at hand.”

Back sleeve

On the back, Nikolai Kibalchich used the same original design:

Like some other releases from 1993, the back of this sleeve has a very bad print quality.

Tracklist

The Russian Hey Jude LP is a one-disc roundup of late-1960s singles and compilation tracks. Think of it as a tweaked Hey Jude (some songs swapped out, others added) and a partial Past Masters: Volume Two.

It drops the two openers from the original Hey Jude — “Can’t Buy Me Love” and “I Should Have Known Better” (both from A Hard Day’s Night) — and the three closing tracks from Past Masters: Volume Two: “Across the Universe,” “Let It Be,” and “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number),” likely to fit the LP’s time limits.

Instead, it features The Inner Light, Day Tripper and We Can Work It Out.

There is no other edition in the world with this exact track list. Trifonov recalls:

“Kolya Vasin personally took charge of the track list. As usual, he tried to cram in some of his own picks. In the end I didn’t even get a copy: everything was gone — blink, and there were none left.”

Hey Jude in the USSR

In the Soviet Union, Lady Madonna was translated into Russian and sung by Emil Horovets. It also became a homophone with ironic meaning (read about Beatles mondegreens in the USSR).

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© 2024 Artur Netsvetaev, interviews with Yuri Trifonov & Nikolai Kibalchich