I once had this double album on vinyl. The grey cover had a thin linnen fabric affixed, giving it a nice tactile feeling. It took me years to be able to listen to this without my mood turning grey too. The sound is indeed very Manchester… Recorded in 1980.
Original design is by one of my favorite graphic designers, mr. Peter Saville. He did a lot of the covers for Factory Records at the time. I find this one in particular to be both elegant and powerful in its apparent simplicity.
I couldn’t figure out what typeface that “f” was set in, so I adjusted a glyph from Bodoni72 wich was close, but not quite. (It also wasn’t any Garamond or Caslon, as far as I could find, so it might be something custom drawn for Factory.)