As with the naked children on the sleeve of Zep’s Houses of the Holy in 1973, the period’s belief in natural childhood innocence, expressed also in late 60s psychedelia’s Lewis Carroll acid whimsy, is now looked at through modern eyes obsessed with paedophile effect. Seidemann chose the 11-year-old over his initial interest in her 14-year-old sister precisely because of her just-forming breasts. The beginning of the transition from girl to woman, that’s what I was after.”

“If she was too old, it would be cheesecake,” he explained, “too young and it would be nothing. The age of the girl exercised him greatly, though not in the way it would today. “The spaceship would be the fruit of the tree of knowledge,” its photographer and designer Bob Seidemann, a friend of Eric Clapton, recalled of his vision, “and the girl, the fruit of the tree of life.” The 60s album which sits most uncomfortably in the racks today is Blind Faith’s 1969 self-titled debut, with its 11-year-old girl on the point of pubescence, naked from the waist up and flying a model spaceship, with England’s rustic green behind her. When Japanese 'singing synthesizer' Hatsune Kaiden released her Noisy Killer album in 2015, the cover was spoofed (opens in new tab). The sleeve was rapidly replaced by a band pic in most countries, the UK included, and the original maintains the power to shock. “Today when you think of child pornography on the net,” he said in 2010, “you would never do something like that…the label was pushing the idea because they wanted to get the controversy to help the album sale, and you cannot get better promotion than that.” Virgin Killer, though, was something else.

The Scorpions’ had a decade-long ethic of going “over the edge” with sleeve art, singer Klaus Meine later admitted. It’s the pose, more than the nudity, that puts it beyond the pale. The sleeve showed a naked 10-year-old girl, her back arched like a model, with her genitals mercifully hidden by broken glass.

The title song’s lyric referred to time’s effect on innocence. You have to wonder what was going through the minds of RCA's marketing executives as they brainstormed the cover for The Scorpions’ Virgin Killer.

Thank me later album cover explicit