Roger Waters presents the dark side of Dark Side Of The Moon

I’ll admit to wrestling with my conscience about giving Roger Waters any airtime at all over the release, today, of his, on first consideration, bizarre remake of The Dark Side Of The Moon. 

To say that he is a polarising figure is an understatement: quite where he fits into the post-truth culture spectrum is anyone’s guess. The conventional take is that Waters has always been a troubled individual: the death of his father, a former conscientious objector and Communist Party activist, during the Battle of Anzio in 1944 when young Roger was just five months old has loomed large in his work, one way of another.

But of the various world issues Waters has been vocal about, his views on Israel have generated the most controversy, to the extent that his performances of songs from The Wall, in which he dresses in quasi-Nazi uniforms have lead to his solo shows been banned, with accusations of an anti-semitic agenda continuing. All of which, of course, Waters has denied.

Even this week, on the eve of his reinterpretation of The Dark Side Of The Moon being released, the topic was thrust back into the spotlight when David Gilmour seemingly reignited his feud with Waters by retweeting a post about a documentary produced by the Campaign Against Antisemitism, in which musicians and producers who’ve worked with Waters recall their experience of him making anti-Semitic remarks. Gilmour’s wife, the writer Polly Samson, has played her own part in the froideur, earlier this year branding Waters “antisemitic to [his] rotten core”, “a Putin apologist” and “a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac”. Which told him.

Waters has inevitably dismissed the film as a “flimsy, unapologetic piece of propaganda”, but the flare-up of antisemitic accusation provides a profoundly uneasy context for Dark Side Of The Moon Redux to be released. Because it is, in fact, genuinely intriguing. 

Remakes of anything are rarely any good. Name a film reboot or “updated” TV show that doesn’t suffer the foreshadow of the original work. Albums are no different, whether the stream of ‘unplugged’ reinventions in the 1990s or the occasional novelty reggae reworking of a Beatles record. Covers albums by the original artist are inevitably regarded as “lazy”, no matter how inventive the treatment, or feted the artist (Bowie’s Pin Ups, anyone?). 

The original Dark Side was and remains seminal, even if Waters himself once dismissed its lyrics as adolescent “lower sixth” drivel. Released 50 years ago, and providing a platform for Waters, largely, to expand upon on life, death, wealth, fame and his own complex psychology, it became totemic of 1970s progressive rock and should, today, still be regarded as one of the most important albums of the entire rock era. 

So why remake it, 50 years later? Why jeopardise the original’s justifiable legacy in what might seem a petulant attempt to reclaim it as Waters’ own? 

Waters will (and does) argue that Dark Side was his to begin with, and he can do whatever the hell he likes with it. “I wrote The Dark Side Of The Moon. Let’s get rid of all this ‘we’ crap,” he told The Telegraph recently. “Of course we were a band, there were four of us, we all contributed – but it’s my project, and I wrote it.” In the same interview he also accused his former bandmates of being unable to write songs: “They’ve nothing to say. They are not artists! They have no ideas, not a single one between them. They never have had, and that drives them crazy.” Ouch.

The origins of the Redux project date back to the pandemic, when Waters and his touring band got together virtually from wherever they were locked down to record stripped down versions of songs like The Wall’s Mother, Comfortably Numb and Vera. “When we recorded [the Lockdown Sessions], the 50th anniversary of the release of The Dark Side Of The Moon was looming on the horizon,” Waters explains on his website. “It occurred to me that The Dark Side Of The Moon could well be a suitable candidate for a similar re-working, partly as a tribute to the original work, but also to re-address the political and emotional message of the whole album.” 

He stresses that the new version is not “a replacement for the original which, obviously, is irreplaceable”, but serves as an opportunity for the now 80-year-old to look back 50 years into the eyes of himself on the cusp of 30. “And also it is a way for me to honour a recording that Nick [Mason] and Rick [Wright] and Dave [Gilmour] and I have every right to be very proud of,” a statement in marked contrast to his comments to The Telegraph. A penny, then for Gilmour’s thoughts, given that the remake is sparse and notably devoid of either his signature guitar solos, or his sweet, higher register vocals which provided a contrast to the darker, deeper sourness of Waters somewhat manic singing. 

Much of that sparsity comes from a significantly downscaled group of musicians around Waters than those who participated in the Lockdown Sessions. For the most part, Waters has worked with producer Gus Seyffert and multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Wilson as the album’s musical core, with Syrian singer Azniv Korkejian providing a very different approach to Clare Torry’s soaring vocals on the original Dark Side’s The Great Gig In The Sky.

In his reimagining, Waters turns narrator, speaking in a near-whisper instead of singing entirely new passages of words that provide the most telling reflections of his octogenarian perspective. As such, the songs acquire a poignancy, especially on the themes like mortality.

Elsewhere there is a more genteel pace to songs, most notably the original’s hit single Money, which turns into a blues shuffle, Waters’ cynical intonation possessing a Leonard Cohen-like timbre. Some still rankle at multi-millionaires like Waters and Gilmour (who has performed the song on his solo tours) singing about wealth, but it is still a unique piece of music that actually works well with Waters’ new treatment. 

Equally so with Us & Them, always my highlight of Dark Side, which takes on an even more reflective tone than the original, which ruminated in 1973 on the futility of war. Conflict, or at least highlighting its human waste, has always been one Waters’ passions, but in taking on the lead vocals (from Gilmour) on the reimagined version, Waters contemporizes its themes. Just don’t ask him about what he’s trying to say about the war in Ukraine.

That, though, does raise the question as to why Waters has remade Dark Side, beyond simply saying ‘up yours’ to his former bandmates. The 1973 release’s 50th anniversary earlier this year was marked by the inescapable celebratory box set (coming in a long line of reissues), so at least Waters has given Dark Side’s ten songs fresh thinking. In some sense, this new vision is overlaid on the original’s themes about the passing of time and human weakness with a current world view (even if Waters’ world view is somewhat jaundiced).

The Redux version, then, works as a curiosity. There is even a moment of levity on the new version of Brain Damage, in which Waters himself is heard asking “Why don’t we re-record Dark Side Of The Moon?” before responding with “He’s gone mad” (the original song, of course, was part inspired by Syd Barrett’s pychosis, opening with the spoken words of Floyd roadie Chris Adamson saying: “I’ve been mad for fucking years. Absolutely years. I’ve been over the edge for yonks, been working with bands so long.”).

Picture: Kate Izor

Musically, Waters has always been a conundrum. Technically limited (“it’s just the same bloody four chords”, a musical friend once observed, correctly, of Waters’ songwriting), he has nevertheless managed to create compelling theatre with his solo work. His first solo album-proper, 1984’s The Pros And Cons Of Hitchhiking remains a firm favourite of mine, and his last release of entirely new material, Is This The Life We Really Want? was essentially the de facto sequel to Dark Side with its rumination on authoritarianism, commercialism and greed. 

Inexorably, Redux picks these batons up again, perhaps demonstrating the political maxim that anything worth saying is worth repeating. You just wish that sometimes Waters would choose his words more carefully. At 80, that’s unlikely.

The other Quiet One

In the greater regard for Pink Floyd, a couple of things overshadow everything: firstly, The Dark Side Of The Moon and its enduring legacy, but secondly, Roger Waters’ relationships with guitarist David Gilmour, drummer Nick Mason and keyboard player Richard Wright.

The dynamic between Waters and Gilmour, in particular, has become something of a pyschodrama, with the pair (and Gilmour’s wife, the writer Polly Samson) trading barbs via social media over, mostly, Waters’ politics. But while Waters has been courting the wrong kind of publicity for his provocative world view, Gilmour has edged into what feels like semi-retirement, and Mason has sought to protect the band’s heritage through his Saucerful Of Secrets outfit (playing the music of the early, pre-Dark Side Floyd albums), Wright has largely been forgotten. 

Today, his debut solo album, Wet Dream - recorded and released between the Floyd’s Animals in 1977 and The Wall in 1979 (and in the context of a band dynamic that was starting to collapse) - is being re-released, remixed by Steven Wilson and repackaged with a load of extras, providing an opportunity to reassess The Quiet One of Pink Floyd, whose influence on the band from its very beginning can often be forgotten under the weight of the egos and internecine battles that raged increasingly as commercial success in the 1970s gave way to Waters’ dramatic exit in 1985. 

When he succumbed to lung cancer in 2008 at the age of 65, Rick Wright was eulogised by Waters, Gilmour and Mason for having had a bigger part in their musical canon than he was ever given credit for when alive. “In the welter of arguments about who or what was Pink Floyd, Rick's enormous input was frequently forgotten,” David Gilmour wrote in an online tribute. “He was gentle, unassuming and private but his soulful voice and playing were vital, magical components of our most recognised Pink Floyd sound.” Wright was irreplaceable, Gilmour wrote of his “musical partner and my friend.”

While these words might read like a carefully constructed ‘corporate’ statement, Gilmour had certainly remained close to Wright, having him play on his solo tour for the On An Island album. The Floyd-heavy set lists reminded audiences that Floyd hadn’t been just about Waters’ lyrical vision (or, in the early days, Syd Barrett’s flights of psychedelic fancy) or indeed Gilmour’s distinctly soaring guitar solos, but also of the melodic foundation that Wright brought to many of their songs from the off.

Richard Wright

Keyboard players tend to be cerebral introspectives, but also the most pivotal figures in a band, especially in the 1970s when guitar-based beat pop gave way to intricate, complex progressive rock. Tony Banks of Genesis, springs to mind here: hunched over his Mellotron, playing elaborate, classically-inspired solos, he was never the focal point (especially with Peter Gabriel charging about in his various costumes). Banks and Wright considered themselves songwriters first, and pop stars a very distant second. “Shy and unassuming” are also the mutually exclusive adjectives that sit before the words “keyboard player”, but if you were to analyse the contribution Wright and Banks’ multi-layered keyboard compositions made to the overall canons of their respective bands, I’d wager  they would outstrip the limelight chasers who sang or played the guitar solos. 

Wright’s “spacious, sombre, enveloping keyboards, backing vocals and eerie effects” were, in the words of the New York Times’ obituary, “an essential part of [Pink Floyd’s] musical identity. ” He was certainly responsible for some of the band’s signature moments: the epic Echoes, on the Meddle album, for example, but also the ambient, G-minor keyboard chord that heralds Shine On You Crazy Diamond at the beginning of Wish You Were Here. More significantly are two songs on The Dark Side Of The Moon: amid the album’s wiggy space rock and Waters’s jaded rumination about the human condition, the sonorous Us And Them and the mesmerising Great Gig In The Sky highlight Wright’s exquisite composition and piano work. 

“The blend of his and my voices and our musical telepathy reached their first major flowering in 1971 on Echoes,” Gilmour wrote in his tribute. “In my view all the greatest PF moments are the ones where he is in full flow. After all, without Us And Them and The Great Gig In The Sky, both of which he wrote, what would The Dark Side Of The Moon have been? Without his quiet touch the album Wish You Were Here would not quite have worked.” 

Despite his indelible stamp on the canon, Wright was fired by Waters during the making of The Wall album in 1979. Despite having been college friends, tension had built over the preceding decade. “There has always been friction between me and Roger,” Wright once reflected. In 2000 he revealed to Classic Rock magazine how unhappy he’d been during The Wall sessions: “Both myself and Dave [Gilmour] had little to offer, through laziness or whatever. Looking back, although I didn’t realise it, I was depressed.” At the time, he was in the throes of divorce from his first wife, Juliette. 

With some sort of divine retribution, however, Wright was rehired – on wages – to play keyboards on The Wall’s outlandish, theatrical tour. Ironically, as a jobbing musician, he was the only original member of the Floyd to profit from The Wall Tour, such was its extravagant staging. 

Wright’s exile from the band was, though, relatively short-lived. After Waters himself formerly quit in 1982, Gilmour and Mason reconvened to record 1987’s A Momentary Lapse Of Reason, with Wright effectively working as a session player. By 1994 he was fully back on board for Pink Floyd’s de facto final album, The Division Bell, on which Wright co-wrote several songs as well as contributed his own composition, the contemplative Wearing The Inside Out, a reflection of his experience of the band’s tensions prior to his original departure: “From morning to night, I stayed out of sight. Didn’t recognise what I’d become. No more than alive I’d barely survived. In a word – overrun”.

Rick Wright in David Gilmour's Remember That Night

In Mark Blake’s Pink Floyd biography Pigs Might Fly, Division Bell producer Bob Erin said of Wright’s composition: “There’s a lot of emotional honesty there. Fans pick up on the sad, vulnerable side to Rick.” In reality, the words came from former Slapp Happy keyboard player Anthony Moore, working with Wright, but there’s no doubt they came from a very personal place. Moore “had to climb inside Rick’s head to get the words out”, a band insider told Blake.

Pink Floyd’s first album, The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, was released in August 1967. While Syd Barrett was seen as the band’s prime creative force, he and Wright, in particular, had formed a particularly fruitful partnership - Wright’s melodicism acting as a counterweight to Barrett’s eccentric whimsy (they co-wrote Astronomy Domine and both provided vocals for the track Mathilda Mother). But as Barrett’s use of LSD intensified towards the end of 1967, leading to increasing psychosis and his firing, the band’s centre of gravity started to shift. Gilmour - an old cohort of the band from their teenage years in Cambridge - was brought in to, initially, augment Barrett, before his eventual exit. Gilmour’s appointment as the band’s lead guitarist set in train the band’s imperious phase, evolving from London underground darlings to the stadium behemoths that The Wall somewhat self-satirised a full decade later. 

This period also became the creative arena for Waters’ concepts, with Gilmour and Wright, in particular, providing the instrumental flourishes. However, Wright’s clearly more diffident personality would never get a look in as the band became an increasing power struggle between Waters and Gilmour. As so often is the case (Steve Hackett, again of Genesis, comes to mind), solo projects become an outlet when breaking open an established hierarchy proves impossible, Hence 1978’s Wet Dream and Broken China in 1986. Both were well received, but commercially underwhelming. Wright was said to be working on a new project at the time of his death, though there is no known plan for them ever to be released posthumously. 

Today, however, on what would have been Wright’s 80th birthday, Wet Dream is being reissued as an expanded edition, with Wilson - now the go-to-master of classic album reinventions - producing new stereo and multi-channel remixes. “Most people know that Pink Floyd have always been my favourite band,” he tweeted, “so it was a real honour to be commissioned by Richard’s children Gala and Jamie Wright to remix this relatively underrated and beautiful entry in the Floyd canon. For anyone hearing the album for the first time it will become apparent just how much of Richard’s DNA runs through Pink Floyd. His distinctive rhythm patterns, signature keyboard sounds, vocals, jazz influences, and style of play exude throughout.” A vinyl version of the reissue along with a Blu-ray Disc package will be released later in the summer.

At the time of its original release Wet Dream - self-produced by Wright and featuring all of his own songs - largely flew under the radar, a symbolic reflection of his under-appreciation within Pink Floyd. Roger Waters has somewhat vacillated over his former friend’s legacy: “It is hard to overstate the importance of his musical voice in the Pink Floyd of the ’60s and ’70s,” he said in a similar statement to Gilmour’s after Wright’s death in 2008. But in an interview with the Telegraph earlier this year, Waters in more vituperative form said: “David Gilmour and Rick Wright? They can’t write songs, they’ve nothing to say,” maintaining that his self-ascribed role as Pink Floyd’s creative centre after Barrett “went loopy” was that none of the others had any ideas. “Nick [Mason] never pretended,” he said adding that Gilmour and Wright weren’t artists. ”They have no ideas, not a single one between them. They never have had, and that drives them crazy.”No wonder Wright once said: “I think, ‘Why do you have to say these things?’”.  

When Pink Floyd reformed for the one-off Live 8 charity concert in 2005 there was a visible unease on stage between Waters and Gilmour, in particular. That, though, didn’t stop the clamour for the band to fully get back together. “Everyone who loves Pink Floyd wants it to happen,” said Wright at the time. “But I don’t feel I need it, not musically and not personally,” adding, cuttingly, “Maybe if Roger comes back as a different person – charming and nice, with really good ideas.”  

While Live 8 marked the final time all four members of Pink Floyd’s ‘classic’ line-up would share a stage. Wright’s role would be further extended by the release of their final record, The Endless River, which featured unused music from the Division Bell sessions. Released in November 2014, it was positioned as a tribute to Wright, featuring Gilmour, Wright and Mason seemingly improvising on what could be described as archetypal Pink Floyd songs – in particular built-out blues jams – that all featured Rick’s hallmark keyboard infusion. “I think this record is a good way of recognising a lot of what [Rick] does and how his playing was at the heart of the Pink Floyd sound,” Mason said at the time of the album’s release. “Listening back to the sessions, it really brought home to me what a special player he was.” 

In September 2007, a year before he died, Wright performed for the last time, joining Gilmour for an unexpected jam at a cinema in London’s Leicester Square at the premiere of Gilmour’s Remember That Night film, recorded at the Royal Albert Hall during the tour for his On An Island album. The tour had, in Wright’s own words, been the “happiest” he’d “ever been on”. 

A couple of months before he died, on 15 September 2008, there was talk of Pink Floyd reforming to play Glastonbury. It had transpired that Gilmour had enquired about the possibility of playing as an opportunity for one last show with Wright, knowing that he was ill. The idea never came off. Glastonbury founder was edging towards acts with a younger profile and appeal. Pink Floyd - easily, in the context of contemporary Glastos, would have been perfect for the ‘heritage slot’.

You could argue that without Rick Wright I might never have found Pink Floyd. Like many of my contemporaries, Another Brick In The Wall (Part 3) was probably my first conscious exposure, appearing at the end of my first term of secondary school, with that grammar police-baiting “we don’t need no education” refrain offering a note of pre-pubescent revolution. It would be later in my school career when my curiosity would be fully triggered. During an English Literature lesson, we were forced to listen to a Richard Burton-narrated BBC radio production of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime Of The Ancient Mariner. It began with that opening to Shine On You Crazy Diamond before the Welshman intones: “It is an ancient mariner, and he stoppeth one of three…”. 

I was captured. I asked my English teacher if he knew what the music was. “It’s Pink Floyd,” he told me. “Opening track of the Wish You Were Here album.” By chance, my brother had a copy, which I feverishly taped as soon as I got home from school. Inevitably, my interest would be piqued by Gilmour’s signature four-note motif two minutes into Shine On. But as I replayed that tape over and over again, before exploring Wish You Were Here’s more venerated predecessor, The Dark Side Of The Moon, it became apparent there was a lot more to Pink Floyd than their lyrical narratives, soundscapes and iconic guitar solos, but also the textures and colour palettes their classically-trained keyboard player was responsible for. Quiet, he may have been, but sometimes loudness isn’t just a matter of volume.

Squaring The Circle - the story of two of the most important figures in rock history

Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell and Storm Thorgerson
Picture: Hipgnosis

To men of a certain age – and it is, almost exclusively men – album covers are, or at least were, a big thing. They probably still are, but it’s actually hard to think of the last time you heard of an album cover making headlines in the age of streaming.

There was a time, though, when an album cover was almost as significant as the music contained on the vinyl within. Earlier this year I interviewed journalist Mark Blake about his book Us And Them, which tells the story of arguably the greatest purveyors of album design, Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell – collectively the design house Hipgnosis. Their work between 1968 and 1983 produced, most famously, the artwork for Pink Floyd (including their opus The Dark Side Of The Moon), but also more than 250 sleeves for artists as varied as Led Zeppelin, Paul McCartney, Peter Gabriel, Humble Pie, 10cc, Leo Sayer, Genesis, ELO, Black Sabbath, Olivia Newton-John and XTC. “The Hipgnosis story kind of follows the arc of the LP, and the LP ‘taking over’ from the single as the primary focus of bands,” Mark told me. “[The Beatles’] Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was a game changer in that sense. So, their career follows the art where the LP was king.”

That career is now the subject of a film by Dutch director and photographer Anton Corbijn, himself responsible for iconic album art of his own, having been most closely associated with Depeche Mode and U2, as well as taking iconic images of everyone from Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen to Robert De Niro and Clint Eastwood. 

Squaring The Circle, Corbijn’s debut as a documentary maker (having previously made dramas like Control, about Joy Division’s Ian Curtis and The American with George Clooney), pays homage to trailblazing legacy of Thorgerson and Powell and how they took the concept of cover art - which, for most of the pop era had largely been portraits of the bands - to conceptual pieces of art which complimented or even extended the often progressive, lyrical nature of music they enveloped.

With archive clips of interviews with the late Thorgerson, narration throughout by Powell (who brought the idea for the film to Corbijn) as well as new interviews with the likes of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour and Roger Waters, Sir Paul McCartney, Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, Noel Gallagher and Peter Gabriel, the documentary expands on the studio’s work amid the context of rock counter-culture.

Peter Gabriel’s first three, Hipgnosis-designed albums

“There was an enormous amount of goodwill towards Hipgnosis,” Corbijn told The Guardian recently about the involvement of many of Thorgerson and Powell’s muses. “People just wanted to make [the film] work. They were generous. Everyone was proud of their albums and the work they had done with them.”

“Growing up in the late ’60s and ’70s, I was obsessed with music and everything connected to it – especially the album covers,” Corbijn says as a pretext to the film, adding that “record sleeves were a huge part of my education. I clearly recall the moment I first saw the sleeve for Atom Heart Mother by Pink Floyd, and the Peter Gabriel sleeves [whose first three solo albums were untitled save for his name and an iconic image]. They just blew me away and this led me on a journey of discovery towards Hipgnosis, who designed these and some of the most memorable sleeves from that time.”

Without doubt, The Dark Side Of The Moon looms large in that pantheon, with Thorgerson and Powell knowing Pink Floyd since their school days together in Cambridge, before moving to London. “Hipgnosis were unique in these early days and they set the bar very high,” says Corbijn.

Thorgerson was very much the ‘ideas’ half of the duo, while Powell, a photographer, had a more instinctive, snappers approach. When combined with the creative freedom they were afforded by bands and their record companies, the gallery of Hipgnosis’ output deserves a chapter of its own in the history of popular music. “They conjured into existence sights that no one had previously thought possible,” says Corbijn. “They produced visuals which popularised music that had previously been considered fringe, and were at the white-hot centre of the maddest, funniest and most creative era in the history of popular music.”

Hipgnosis at work, 6 Denmark Street, London
Picture: Hipgnosis

Album sleeves, he says, during this period became a force in their own right. “In the ’80s, of course, we got CDs, so the album sleeve sort of deteriorated, and the art with it, Corbijn adds, saying that, as a photographer, he was drawn to Hipgnosis’ work by the images they used. He marvels at how they created works of art: “Before we had all the intricate things we can do now on the computer, they did it with a knife and glue, and pieces of paper,” he recently told Collider. “They made really incredible collages and made the impossible possible.”

As the film reveals, Thorgerson and Powell often went to great lengths - and expense - to produce their album art, notably the images for Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album and, of course, the ‘flying pig’ cover for that record’s follow-up, Animals. It’s this ambition that inspired the documentary’s title. “‘Squaring the circle’ means doing the impossible, but it also represents the circular record going into a sleeve, Corbijn explained to The Guardian.

“One of the craziest things - it’s also in the film - is a sleeve for 10cc [for the Look Hear? album],” Corbijn recalled to Collider. “They saw the idea of having a sheep on a couch in a beautiful ocean. So they went all the way to Hawaii, not realising [there were] no sheep in Hawaii, and there were no [psychiatrists’s] couches either. So they had a couch made, and they had one sheep, they found one sheep at the university, and they managed to give it a lot of Valium and shot it.”

While Noel Gallagher quips in the film that album covers represents “the poor man’s art collection”, there’s no escaping the fact that Hipgnosis have produced some of the most recognisable images of all time, with The Dark Side Of The Moon’s light-entering-a-prism seared in culture (receiving no more prestigious a nod to the zeitgeist than being parodied in an episode of The Simpsons). “I think both of them have a complicated relationship with  Dark Side,” Mark Blake told me earlier this year. “It’s not their favourite work, but it is their most famous work. I don't think it's a very simple design, and it doesn’t have the narrative quality to it as Wish You Were Here did a couple of years later, which I think was certainly one of Storm’s favourite Floyd covers.  So, I think they're both a little bit conflicted about Dark Side, really.”

For his film, however, Anton Corbijn had to negotiate around the frail relationships that exist between the surviving members of the band, most notably the fractious dynamics between founder member Roger Waters and guitarist David Gilmour, who joined in 1967 as co-founder Syd Barrett’s behaviour became ever-more erratic. Barrett himself makes a brief appearance in Squaring The Circle, in a poignant moment when Powell recalls an overweight and almost unrecognisable Barrett visiting Abbey Road studios in 1975 during the recording of Wish You Were Here, by then succumbing increasingly to poor physical and mental health. It is, apparently, a moment that continues to move the band’s remaining members.

Hipgnosis images used for Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album

“I guess everybody knows they have four managers these days – for every member there’s a manager,” Corbijn semi-joked to Collider with typically understated Dutch humour. “But I guess the love for Hipgnosis overrode all that, and they wanted to be part of this. I mean, they were not in the studio at the same, but they all said yes to it in the end.”

Pink Floyd, in particular, gave Thorgerson and Powell a platform. Their abstract, obtuse and often ethereal concepts led them to other exponents of early ’70s progressive music, like Wishbone Ash’s Argus, which in turn led to Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page inviting Hipgnosis to design the House Of The Holy sleeve (which depicted Northern Ireland’s Giant’s Causeway). That, then, attracted Paul McCartney’s attention, bringing the studio in to realise his concept for Wings’ celebrity-themed Band On The Run cover.

“I hope people see it as a fun documentary, as well as an educational one, regarding that period of music and graphic design,” Corbijn says of Squaring The Circle. However, it also addresses how the Thorgerson/Powell partnership came apart. Having moved to London during the 1967 ‘Summer Of Love’, the duo shared a South Kensington flat, first using university facilities to build their reputation for art (including their debut for Pink Floyd, A Saucerful Of Secrets in 1968) before opening the Hipgnosis studio at 6 Denmark Street - London’s musical mecca known as ‘Tin Pan Alley’. 

But by 1983 - a year after the launch of the CD - Hipgnosis as, largely Thorgerson and Powell (along with often forgotten Peter Christopherson) - they decided to call it a day. Powell addresses this in the film, breaking down in the process, much to Corbijn’s surprise. “I didn’t see it coming,” Corbijn says of the scene. “It was a beautiful moment in the film. He clearly misses Storm terribly.”

Po and Anton
Picture: Anton Corbijn

As much as Squaring The Circle celebrates an era of album covers that broadly paralleled the rock era itself, it also marks the decline of an art form, first by the introduction of the Compact Disc in 1982 (Hipgnosis gave up album design in 1983 and switched to making music videos) and more recently, by the advent of streaming. It’s a point Noel Gallagher makes in the film, highlighting the lack of appreciation for album covers shown by today’s younger consumers, which may be the result of both record companies trimming their artwork budgets, and the thumbnail formats of streaming platforms making the impact of album cover art negligible. “The importance of the record sleeve has diminished,” Corbijn agrees. “In the ‘70s, for young kids there wasn’t much else to spend money on. Yet you had to save up to buy something, so it was meaningful. Now nothing is meaningful because you can get it at the touch of a button.”

Squaring The Circle opens today in UK cinemas and via streaming services. It also be released as a collector’s edition Blu-ray Disc on 7 August.

Arc Of A Diver, my post on Mark Blake’s biography Us And Them can be read here.

Art of a diver

Just beyond the eastern extreme of California’s Yosemite National Park, not far from the border with Nevada, sits Mono Lake, a salty body of water formed three-quarters of a million years ago. I came across it considerably more recently than that - 1992 to be exact - but at the time had no appreciation of the cameo it had made in my musical adolescence when I stopped there for what Americans politely term a “comfort break”.

For context, I was midway through a month-long tour of the American West, albeit in December when the tourist hordes are elsewhere. Having driven from Los Angeles up the Pacific Coast Highway to San Francisco, and then north-east to snowed-in Lake Tahoe, I was heading south towards Death Valley along the scenic Highway 395, with California’s spinal Sierra Nevada mountains to my right. Just south-east of Yosemite, I came across Mono Lake and its seemingly abandoned visitor centre. Making use of its facilities, I then took in a view of the lake’s eerie stillness, framed by unique tufa formations. It would be another 25 years - and several visits further to that part of California - before I’d come to realise where I’d seen that tufa before. On a display wall at London’s V&A museum, as part of the Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains exhibition, was a blow-up of the inner sleeve of the band’s ninth studio album, Wish You Were Here, depicting a perpendicular diver performing a handstand in, yes, Mono Lake. 

The image was the idea of Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell, the photographer and co-founder with Storm Thorgerson of the Hipgnosis design studio which, from the end of the 60s to the beginning of the 80s produced some of the most distinctive album covers ever committed to 12 inches-square of cardboard. Over 15 years, they produced more than 250 sleeves for artists as varied as Led Zeppelin, Paul McCartney, Humble Pie, 10cc, Leo Sayer, Genesis, ELO, Black Sabbath, Olivia Newton-John and XTC, as well as Pink Floyd, with whom they became most closely associated.

It’s the perfect subject, then, for Us And Them: The Authorised Story Of Hipgnosis, a new book by journalist Mark Blake, whose previous work includes arguably the definitive Floyd account, Pigs Might Fly. “I’d always been quite interested in the idea of doing a book about Hipgnosis,” Mark declares. “I’d interviewed a lot of their associates for Pigs Might Fly - particularly the people who were around at the beginning of their work, their contemporaries, their friends from Cambridge and London in the early days.” A book about the creative duo was a natural next step, especially as Mark had come to know Powell and, in the later years of his life, Thorgerson, in particular, working on the very V&A exhibition I’d been to see. 

Hipgnosis and Pink Floyd’s histories are intertwined: Thorgerson and Powell had been cohorts of the band’s founder members, Syd Barrett and Roger Waters, in Cambridge before they all migrated to London to attend universities. There they met Nick Mason and Rick Wright, eventually becoming fixtures of the capital’s underground music scene as ‘The Pink Floyd Sound’. 

A year after Pink Floyd - as they became - released their debut album, The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn in 1967, Thorgerson and Powell established their working relationship with the band. “Storm was attending the Royal College Of Art, studying film, and Po got a job designing sets for the BBC,” says Mark. “Then Po got sacked and fell into low levels of criminal activity - bank fraud, stealing cars and so on. He got into an awful lot of trouble. It was then that they decided to talk Pink Floyd into letting them design the sleeve for their second album, A Saucerful Of Secrets.” Released in 1968, and made amidst the deteriorating mental health of Barrett (whose departure midway through recording led to David Gilmour joining the group), the album was only the second time that label EMI had allowed an artist to use designers from outside their own in-house art desk. Thorgerson and Powell took it as an opportunity to exploit the changing nature of record covers.

A Saucerful Of Secrets led to the pair designing for Pink Floyd’s labelmates at EMI and, later, its Harvest subsidiary, at first making use of the RCA’s photography faculty (even though Thorgerson wasn’t studying the subject and Po wasn’t even at the college), before being rumbled and thrown out. Instead, they turned the bathroom of Powell’s then-girlfriend into a dark room. This was to change towards the end of 1969 when the pair upgraded: “They moved into a studio in Denmark Street where they began doing stuff for bands like Argent, Quatermass, Toe Fat - all these late-60s, early prog rock,” says Mark. They also took on photographic work came for magazines and book covers. 

“Much of their success can be traced to that of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” says Mark, referring to the grandaddy of progressive rock and its ambitious pop art sleeve designed in 1967 by Peter Blake and Jann Haworth. That landmark inspired a decade of graphic design in rock which saw Hipgnosis, as well as their equally conceptual contemporary Roger Dean, taking cover art into new realms of creativity and expression. Prog bands like Pink Floyd, Yes and Genesis became fertile muses for such designers, turning cover art into an integral component of the narrative their records pursued, invariably conveying dioramic third dimensions through fantastical, somewhat lyrical and always unique imagery. 

For Thorgerson and Powell, getting their concepts across the line with some bands often owed more to the force of personality than creativity alone. “There was one slightly oddball character in Storm, and the slightly more measured character in the shape of Po,” Nick Mason tells Mark in the book. “And it stayed that way for the next fifty years.”

Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell

As their reputation grew, from 1968 and into the new decade, Hipgnosis became particularly prevalent working for artists sat on various degrees of the progressive spectrum, producing sleeves for myriad acts like Humble Pie, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Rory Gallagher, T-Rex, Wishbone Ash (for their album Argus, with its seminal cover) and even Syd Barrett, for his haphazard but still loved post-Floyd solo albums. At the same time, the relationship with Pink Floyd continued to bear fruit, with covers for the albums More, Ummagumma, Atom Heart Mother, Meddle and Obscured By Clouds.

However, the album that still defines the Hipgnosis legacy - and possibly the entire genre of LP art - came in March 1973: The Dark Side Of The Moon. Thorgerson and Powell’s brief from Pink Floyd was to produce something uncomplicated, a contrarian response to opinions amongst the suits at EMI that their previous sleeves for the band had been belligerently obscure and even unmarketable. What they came up with - with a little help from a school book - was the now singular black cover with its beam of light dissipating through a prism into a spectral rainbow.

“I don’t think there was so much foresight and forward thinking in it,” says Mark Blake. “A lot of the time it’s ‘We’ve got to get a cover out - there’s a deadline looming!’. The band wanted something simple so Storm and Po found the prism design in a physics textbook and ripped it off, getting their illustrator George Hardie to create a beautiful design.” To make up for the spartan outer cover, Hipgnosis included some visual extras. “You got the poster of The Great Pyramid and a load of stickers,” says Mark. ”That was Storm trying to shoehorn some bigger ideas in.”

Nowhere on the front or back was there any mention of Pink Floyd or the album’s name. Though not the intention, it reflected an undercurrent of growing distraction within the band (Roger Waters has, with customary misery, described Dark Side as “the beginning of the end”), and the lyrical themes of greed, fame, mortality and even the mental decline of their founder Barrett. Wrapped in a package not dissimilar to a box of Black Magic chocolates, The Dark Side Of The Moon became the standout release of 1973, a year which saw records like Bowie’s Aladdin Sane, Led Zeppelin’s Houses Of The Holy (with a cover also designed by Hipgnosis), Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells and Bruce Springsteen’s Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ amongst its pantheon.

Mark acknowledges Dark Side’s enduring success but doesn’t attribute it entirely to the legendary artwork: “I don’t think that it is just down to having the boldness of not having the band’s name anywhere on the cover. I know it wasn’t the first time Storm and Po had done that with Pink Floyd or, in fact, another band.” Music, he says, has clearly been the album’s defining character, but over time the cover has contributed to the record’s legend, albeit contentiously for Hipgnosis: “I think they got paid about 500 quid all-in for that. Years later, Storm tried to get more money out of Pink Floyd because he believed that the cover had contributed more to the sales.”

To date The Dark Side Of The Moon has sold more than 45 million copies worldwide - and continues to do so, even reaching new audiences. My 18-year-old step-daughter asked for a vinyl copy for Christmas two years ago, and even this last December the LP was selling steadily when I visited Fopp! in Covent Garden. While it contains some of the Floyd’s most revered music - Breathe, Money, Time, Us And Them, The Great Gig In The Sky et al - that cover art has found itself peppered throughout the zeitgeist of the last 50 years. “I think both Storm and Po had a complicated relationship with Dark Side,” says Mark. “It’s not their favourite work, but it is their most famous work. It’s a very simple design but doesn’t have the narrative quality that Wish You Were Here had a couple of years later, which I think was certainly one of Storm’s favourite Floyd covers.” 

That record, released in 1975 as a follow up to Dark Side, came with a significantly larger production budget for Hipgnosis, which is how Powell ended up in California for three weeks, an entourage in tow, taking the Mono Lake shot. At the same time, he captured the faceless bowler-hatted man for the back cover (shot in the Mojave Desert), and the front cover image of businessmen shaking hands on a Hollywood backlot, with one of the two stuntmen used for the picture actually on fire - a stunt that almost went very badly wrong.

The story of Hipgnosis isn’t, however, exclusively the Pink Floyd Story. Their work for other artists was equally as distinct, and sometimes just as complicated, though Mark feels they never came up with anything as singularly impactful as The Dark Side Of The Moon. “They became the hip guys to go to after Dark Side and Houses Of The Holy, and also, weirdly, Wishbone Ash’s Argus. That was the album Jimmy Page saw in a record shop: when I interviewed him for the book, he told me ‘I saw this album with a Viking on the cover. I never listened to it but I liked the cover.’ So he rang up Storm and said, ‘Come and do our next album’ [for Led Zeppelin]. After that they got the call from Paul McCartney, who asked them to do Wings’ Band On The Run.” That cover, Mark says, was entirely McCartney’s idea, and famously featured a Clive Arrowsmith picture of Paul and Linda McCartney, Denny Laine, Michael Parkinson, Kenny Lynch, James Coburn, Clement Freud, Christopher Lee and John Conteh posing against a wall, illuminated by a prison searchlight. Still, it had a domino effect, bringing many more bands to Thorgerson and Powell’s door.

Genesis was another band that enjoyed a run of distinctive Hipgnosis-designed covers, commencing with 1974’s The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway - Peter Gabriel’s final work as lead singer and a concept album about a Gulliver-like Puerto Rican street tough descending into the New York underworld. Its literal cover - including a new band logo - was peak Hipgnosis. “Storm was incredibly principled about certain things,” Mark explains. “He would go to the ends of the Earth and spend his own money on getting a cover right. There were certain ideas he wanted to do for bands that they rejected because they wouldn’t have been able to afford it. Storm would do it anyway, just because he wanted to. But by the same token, if Pink Floyd turned an idea down, he’d have no hesitation in trying to fob it off on another band.”

10cc and Genesis were, in particular, beneficiaries of Thorgerson’s ‘generosity’: “The cover of 10cc’s Bloody Tourists is actually a picture of Powell with a map across his face in the West Indies. They pitched that to Genesis for …And Then There Were Three, with the idea that they’d just lost Steve Hackett [who’d quit the band in 1977] and they’re now looking for a new direction.” Genesis, Mark says, weren’t having it, so Hipgnosis took the concept to 10cc who did.

Peter Gabriel recounted a similar experience to Mark for his first three solo albums, which had Hipgnosis covers. Every time he met Thorgerson, he’d be told: “I’ve got a great idea for you, Peter,” to which Gabriel would say: “You’ve fucking tried that on Led Zeppelin, haven't you?”. Mark reveals: “Storm would reply: ‘Yes, but it's perfect for you!’ So, there’s this sort of reject pile that Gabriel would always be confronted by. With Storm it was a weird mix of being incredibly principled and that art is everything, to ‘just have this’.” The covers Gabriel eventually agreed to were markedly different to those Hipgnosis produced for his old band and their contemporaries. While still surreal, they featured distorted images of the singer himself, but to his American record company’s frustration, Gabriel was naming his albums simply ‘Peter Gabriel’, with their covers the only means of distinguishing them. Eventually, the American label would remarket them respectively as ‘Car’, ‘Scratch’ and ‘Melt’, based on the Hipgnosis imagery, just to help the hard of thinking.

If Sgt. Pepper changed the nature of album covers, the early 1980s brought two shifts in the medium itself with industrial developments that, indirectly, altered Thorgerson and Powell’s trajectories. In 1982 Philips and Sony heralded the digital music age by introducing the Compact Disc. The 12-inch canvas that Hipgnosis had made their own became increasingly redundant. Until Gen Z’ers discovered their parents and grandparents’ vinyl collections - and a new romance began with cover art, appearing on bedroom walls and irony-nodding T-shirts - the designs that stood tall in my teenage years became minimised to fit 12cm ‘jewel cases’. Later still, with the advent of streaming, cover art would be minimised further to fit the postage stamp-sized screen real estate of online services. 

Mark Blake

To Mark Blake, the CD’s arrival marked an important pivot away from the ‘long-player’: “That’s another thing that was appealing about doing this book,” he says. “The Hipgnosis story follows the arc of the LP as a medium, which really began with Sgt. Pepper, which was a game-changer in that sense. Suddenly the LP was king. Bands made albums and didn't have to do singles. But, as I’ve been told, the arrival of the CD was one of the reasons that made Hipgnosis decide to wind up the company and go into making music videos.” 

The arrival of MTV in 1983 was the next industrial change, providing Hipgnosis with a new outlet: “All the money that might have once gone into sending them to the Sahara Desert to photograph footballs in the sand for a cover was now being spent on videos,” says Mark. “So that’s why they wound up the company and decided make music videos, which they did for a few years quite successfully…until it wasn’t.” 

While one of their first forays was the clip for Paul Young’s Wherever I Lay My Hat, the video age brought Hipgnosis back into contact with some of their older clients, who were finding new fans through the medium. “They did stuff for Robert Plant and Jimmy Page’s bands,” says Mark. “Owner Of A Lonely Heart [the hit single that revived the fortunes of Yes] was another big one for Hipgnosis. They got in on the ground floor with these older bands trying to relaunch themselves and having to make videos. And obviously, the bands went to the very guys who’d made their album covers, because they figured that they’d feel comfortable with them.”

Although Hipgnosis, as an entity, was wound up in 1983, there is a coda to their greatest legacy in designing covers for LPs. Vinyl sales grew for the 15th consecutive year in the UK in 2022, reaching close to 5.5 million - the highest growth since 1990. What began as baby boomers looking to reconnect with their long-discarded copies of classic Beatles and Bowie records has been boosted by the record-selling phenomenon that is Taylor Swift, as teenagers, moving on from raiding their elders’ records, have adopted their own heroine in the Nashville star. Visit any record shop - from independents to the few remaining chains - and a miasma of album covers will greet you. 

So, is Mark Blake’s celebration of arguably the greatest purveyors of album art perfectly timed? Not necessarily, he says: ”The 50th anniversary Dark Side Of The Moon was the main reason for writing the book. The thing about [the resurgence of] vinyl is interesting, though. I’ve got a 17-year-old son, and when he was first looking through my old records, he said to me, ’Some of these covers would look great if you had them framed on the wall,’ which I think is quite interesting. He listened to Dark Side a couple of years ago, because he’d heard a lot about it - and probably because of the cover.” The vinyl upswing does help, says Mark: “It shows there’s an interest in it as a format, but I don’t think there would have been interest in [a book] ten years ago. We’re moving on to a time where people maybe are reassessing some of this stuff a bit more now, especially after the Pink Floyd exhibition at the V&A. It just feels a bit more timely now.”

Us And Them: The Authorised Story Of Hipgnosis by Mark Blake is published on 2 February by Nine Eight Books

David Bowie: the Brilliant Adventure

This isn’t the first and won’t be the last time that I offer you, dear reader, thoughts on another posthumous David Bowie release, but since the old girl’s untimely demise on 10 January 2016 there hs been no shortage of reminders of why, musically, he was one of the most intriguing figures of the rock era. It’s an interest that inevitably appeals to the committed fan like me, but also provides the opportunity of discovery to those who’ve hitherto been indifferent throughout the six decades in  which Bowie spent time in recording studios.

Cynics will argue that the box sets and remastered reissues are exercises in reselling what's already been bought, but within each new package marketed since Bowie’s death there has usually been something to justify the outlay (always a tough ask - pricey editions of classic albums, offering alternative mixes and outtakes barely different from the established tracks rarely bring anything new). For some of us, of course, no justification is required, but the latest package - the fifth in a series of retrospective gatherings of original and live albums plus extras - is genuinely enticing. 

Brilliant Adventure (1992-2001) covers a period in which Bowie had to compete with Britpop, a not always fruitful exercise, despite his exalted status and the fact that many of that era’s bands were consciously doffing caps to the very era from which Bowie sprang forth. Brutally, he simply wasn’t  fashionable any more. That extraordinary run of albums, from Hunky Dory to at least Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) meant nothing. By the time the 1990s came along, David Bowie was simply another middle-aged rock star, one of those superannuated Live Aid veterans with nothing new to say. In fairness, the albums that comprise Brilliant Adventure would never match the creative zenith of the 1970s, but they don’t come up short for eclecticism - as did, frankly, every album he had committed to tape. What confounded critics at the time was there appeared to be an attempt by The Dame to look relevant, with the drum’n’bass of singles like Little Wonder suggesting cultural appropriation. The truth is, being the music magpie that he was, Bowie had always drawn influence from whatever genres took his fancy.

And so, Brilliant Adventure - which includes the albums Black Tie White Noise, Outside, Earthling, Hours and the Buddha Of Suburbia soundtrack - skips through a varied palette, from conventional pop to rock, electronica and other more ‘urban’ sources. They also reflect a maturing and, at times, more reflective Bowie, celebrating his marriage to Iman, and starting to loosen any residual hangups that may have been lingering about Being David Bowie. That is also reflected in Bowie’s live performances at the time, reflected on Brilliant Adventure with the terrific live album recorded in June 2000 at the BBC Radio Theatre in London as a companion to that year’s legendary Glastonbury headline performance. It was originally only available as a third disc in a limited-edition version of Bowie At The Beeb, which contained featured BBC sessions from the ’60s and ’70s. Notable to these live sets in 2000 was the breadth of ‘classic’ Bowie songs from his imperious phase, reflecting a relaxed reconnection with the big hits from that time that he’d try to move away from.

But the big draw of Brilliant Adventure is Toy, a semi-mythical album of new versions of songs from the very beginning of Bowie’s career, reworked by the singer and the touring musicians he was working with as the new century began. Recorded shortly after Glastonbury, the album was originally intended to be released in 2001, but the record company decided against it, for reasons probably best explained by them at the time. Returning to and revising early-career material is nothing new: Nick Mason put together his Saucerful Of Secrets outfit with Gary Kemp, Guy Pratt and others to perform the music of Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd, shedding remarkable light on the band’s early psychedelia with surprisingly current impact. Toy follows a similar philosophy, featuring new interpretations of tracks first recorded between 1964 and 1971, when Bowie was - pun intended - toying with a variety of musical styles, from Anthony Newley-style vaudeville to beat pop. 

He consciously returned to this era in 1999 when he appeared in an episode of VH1’s Storytellers and resurrected the frenetic Can’t Help Thinking About Me, the first time it had been performed in 30 years. This inspired the idea for Toy, taking his then-stage band (which included Gail Ann Dorsey, Earl Slick, Mike Garson and Sterling Campbell) into the studio and playing the old songs ‘live’, selecting the tracks with the best takes for the album. “The songs are so alive and full of colour,” Bowie said in 2001. “They jump out of the speakers. It’s really hard to believe that they were written so long ago.” 

Despite his enthusiasm, the Toy tracks didn’t appear until 2011 when they were leaked online, but from today we get to hear them - for most of us - for the first time. Toy is not revelatory: it may be a ‘lost’ album, but the songs are ultimately and obviously not new. But they do represent a phase of Bowie’s life that I have taken inordinate pleasure from, when he was happy in his own skin, happy in life, and comfortable with his legacy.

“I’ve pulled together a selection of songs from a somewhat unusual reservoir and booked time in a studio,” he wrote at the time Toy was originally due to be released. “I still get really elated by the spontaneous event and cannot wait to sit in a claustrophobic space with seven other energetic people and sing till my tits drop off.” That in itself indicates the carefree nature of Toy, seemingly - and, simply - having fun, a notion that rock stars, and especially rock stars with Bowie’s history - are not normally known for. For those weaned on Let’s Dance, Heroes, Life On Mars?, The Jean Genie, Changes and more, only the utmost completist will already be familiar 1967’s Silly Boy Blue, the groovy I Dig Everything from 1966, or the cover of Here Comes The Night recorded in the early 1970s. It still gives some sense of hearing new music. Even if it’s new-old music.

You could argue that, like 1973’s Pin Ups album, a stop-gap of questionable covers, retreading old material was nothing more than an exercise in rehashing but, at risk of sounding blinkered, it doesn’t feel like that. As his statement suggested, he was really having a laugh, the side of ‘Brixton Dave’ that has endeared him to me almost as much as the music. After the Toy sessions there were two more new albums, Heathen and Reality. And then, on the German leg of the tour for that last album, Bowie abruptly disappeared from view amid health concerns, only resurfacing, seemingly out of nowhere, with the incredible The Next Day in 2013, and then the semi-mystical event that was Blackstar, released on Bowie’s 69th birthday. Two days before his death.

Toy might, then, have a sentimental value, as all of the posthumous releases have. But it does plug a hole in our knowledge of David Bowie’s work. It certainly doesn’t feel like a scraping of the barrel, but it hardly represents a collection of missing gems. “Toy is like a moment in time, captured in an amber of joy, fire and energy,” says co-producer Mark Plati, who worked closely with Bowie in the 1990s. “It’s the sound of people happy to be playing music.” And he adds: “From time to time, he used to say ‘Mark, this is our album’, I think because he knew I was so deeply in the trenches with him on that journey. I’m happy to finally be able to say it now belongs to all of us.”

Toy is released today as part of the Brilliant Adventures (1992-2001) box set. An expanded three-CD edition, Toy Box, will be released on 7 January next year, the day before what would have been David Bowie’s 75th birthday.

Ticket to ride: The Coral return

It is the 5th of May. Spring has technically been with us since the end of March, but at the beginning of this week Britain experienced the coldest May Day bank holiday in a generation. Last night, the Etihad Stadium was coated in wintry hail. It still feels like the central heating needs to be on. 

Thoughts of a holiday somewhere more temperate continue to be dashed by that damn coronavirus and the convoluted rules restricting anyone from sensibly booking a holiday for fear of not being let back in. In fact, for the second year running, a holiday somewhere involving my dust-collecting passport seems as far away as ever. Couple all this with the fact that, post-foot surgery, I’m confined to the sofa, effectively still under lockdown, despite pubs, shops, swimming pools and all the rest being open again. I have never been in greater desperate need of escape.

Relief is at hand, thankfully, in the form of Coral Island, the bright, sparkling, nostalgia-laden trip back in time from The Coral. Drawing unashamedly from the same palette that decorated Crosby, Stills and Nash at their most whimsical (Our House), the Small Faces’ semi-psychedelic Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake or even, at an aural squint, The Beatles’ Penny Lane, Coral Island takes a thematic trip to an imaginary seaside resort, replete with funfair rides and, generally speaking, a carefree, jolly day out for everyone. And it is utterly delightful. 

It is also highly ambitious, at 24 tracks long - an unashamed double concept album in old money, not that you’ll have much issue with the length, the ambition or the music. Ah, the concept album: while the likes of Pink Floyd’s The Wall or The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway by Genesis might be the examples cited by critics of the form, it shouldn’t be forgotten that many’s the record with a narrative thread running right through it. Pet Sounds, London Calling, The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars - the list of classics is endless, but the genre hasn’t been totally consigned to the heritage trail. So why now? ‘Why not?’, say The Coral, happy to challenge conventions by putting out a double-concept in the age of pic’n’mix streaming and audience attention spans apparently unwilling to commit to anything more than individual songs, rather than sustained album consumption, and certainly not a collection of almost an hour’s worth of material.

Radical as that might sound, there is some unwitting logic behind it. The audience is both captive right now but also desperate for escapism, and what better route out of COVID confinement than an album of such joyous sentimentality as Coral Island. Over its two discs, the album captures the two sides of a seaside resort: the boisterous summer months of excited children, organ music and ice cream, and then the downbeat winter period, with the fairground rides covered up and just the sound of seagulls piercing the tourist-free air. It’s theatre of the mind, to some extent, with the music driving the mood and frontman James Skelly’s 85-year-old grandfather providing spoken interludes in much the same manner as Stanley Unwin did on the aforementioned Small Faces opus.

So, what makes it such a pleasing excursion? Coral Island is gentle theatre, all acoustic guitars and blended harmonies, giving it a folky feel without descending into the faux street busking of the Mumford clan. More importantly, it’s the combination of the music and the lyrical scene-painting that makes it so enjoyable, whether the melancholia of Summertime reflecting on fairground arcades, or Mist On The River evoking teenage frustrations of summer love going unrequited. Old Photographs blatantly breaks out the Werther’s Originals for a sepia-tinged vignette of yesterday, while Autumn Has Come almost celebrates the end of the summer season that Take Me Back To The Summertime harks after.

I sincerely hope that I get a summer holiday this year and, in particular, get to see somewhere with azure seas and sandy beaches. That, you can safely conclude, is not going to be on these shores, not even Cornwall. But as over-privileged a statement as that is, you could do worse than to take a trip to Coral Island, to escape to a place that does still exist, and does still fulfil its purpose. The Coral may be tapping into childhoods lost (or, simply imagined), but after the year we’ve all had, they’ve delivered a delightful break from reality. 

The future is here, finally, and it bites

In a week in which the UK passed the grim milestone of 100,000 coronavirus deaths, pretty much all other bets are off. Least of which, any carping about being denied life's simpler pleasures. You could, I suppose, measure the COVID timeline in terms of what has been curtailed and when.Take, for example, No Time To Die, the new Bond film: originally scheduled for November 2019, then shunted by reshoots to February last year, it was then kiboshed altogether by the emerging pandemic. The latest date, we're told, is this October. 

But whereas the Bond producers will easily earn their investment back, the music industry has been faring less well. There’s been no shortage of releases over the last ten months - many recorded stoically in home studio lockdown - but it’s live performance that artists seem to make their money from these days. Which means that if you’ve got an ambitious album and tour concept, these last few months will have been frustrating. 

Take, then, Steven Wilson, whose sixth solo album, The Future Bites, is finally released today. When I first spoke to him about it, it was the autumn of 2019, and the album was, by then, mostly ‘in the can’, bar some final tweaks. The next Christmas, when we met, he was justifiably excited by the concept being developed for the album, which would roughly follow a theme of commenting on the trappings of modernity (including online shopping - ironically before it became such a lifeline), and the ambitious, multimedia approach that would accompany its release. And then the virus struck, pushing back, first, the album's release, and then an extravagant tour that would see him headline London’s O2 Arena. 

That, in itself, was a massive milestone in his solo career. Because, let’s face it, you don’t just get to play the O2 if you don’t have the chops - or the audience - to fill it. Sadly, rescheduling has forced the O2 gig to be cancelled altogether, but a new tour will commence in September that will see Wilson play major cities, including a date at the legendary Hammersmith Apollo. It is, though, heartbreaking, as The Future Bites represents, without doubt, Wilson’s most adventurous breakthrough to date - in a more-than 30-year career that has seen him responsible for more albums than I can actually count, what with his Porcupine Tree, Blackfield, No-Man and numerous, relentless other projects. That’s a big claim, I know, but hear me out.

First, though, the history lesson, because I realise that I’ve been prattling away about someone you may not have even heard of. Which is, Wilson admits with heavy reluctance, par for the course. As a piece in The Times today points out, he may well be the most successful British rock star who can go shopping at his local Waitrose without being asked to pose for a selfie. And, yet, I’ve witnessed punters camped outside Parisian theatres hoping for a glimpse of him, or standing en masse in restaurants to raise their wine glasses in adulation. 

Despite this, however, and despite his last album, To The Bone, reaching number three in the UK (kept off the top by two blokes named Ed Sheeran and Elvis Presley…), and despite even selling out the Royal Albert Hall three nights running on the album’s tour, Steven Wilson is still the rock star you’ve never heard of. Mainstream radio even gives him a giant swerve, which I find baffling. To The Bone represented a change of direction, not only with a new record company (Universal offshoot Caroline International) and better promotion (which even saw him appearing in an extended live interview on BBC Breakfast), but with a record that blatantly embraced Wilson’s love of 80s pop. There was even an ABBA-esque single, Permanating, which delightfully confounded the fans that had followed him from the era of his proto-prog band Porcupine Tree, which had sort of evolved from an at-home bedroom project and into one of the more sizeable touring forces of the 1990s and early 2000s. 

However, that P-word - “prog” - may well be the sprig of garlic that keeps radio programmers at bay. He is unashamed of his association with the form (the oft-told story of his upbringing is that his first two musical influences were the Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon and Donna Summer’s Love To Love You Baby, gifts exchanged by his parents, Maureen and Mike, one Christmas). As an adult, his professional sideline remixing albums for King Crimson and Yes has maintained further links to the genre. However, he has also produced multichannel versions of albums by Roxy Music, XTC, Ultravox and Tears For Fears, revealing more than just an ear for more expansive pop.

Which brings us, kind of, to The Future Bites. Before getting into its thematic concept, it is a markedly different album to much of what Wilson has been known for. But not all. While Porcupine Tree may have been born out of a teenage soup of long hair and Home Counties rock guitar, Wilson’s own interests were being spread across an eclectic range of styles, some of which manifested themselves in the No-Man group with long-term friend and collaborator Tim Bowness. On his adolescent bedroom wall in Hemel Hempstead there was a poster of Prince who, along with David Bowie, has been a constant figure in his musical DNA. While his professional music direction would take a somewhat avant-garde rock route, electronic music would always be in his listening palette. Which is why the first thing you notice about The Future Bites is just how unlike a rock album it is. Throughout, it delivers atmosphere over bombast, restrained drum machine beats over epic tom-tom crashes, and while Wilson has always been quite deft at melodic songwriting, melodicism drives the textures of all nine tracks.

What also drives them is the underlying theme: the modern world. Wilson is, like me, 53 (we were actually born a week apart), but don’t mistake that statement for some prematurely aged fellow railing at things. The theme is more a reflection on the Internet age and how online behaviour pervades every aspect of life, from our perception of news to our absorption of information, how we relate to culture and even our addiction to online consumerism. Such a premise could sound dystopian, I agree, but the narrative Wilson puts forward is wry and observational. And it blends seamlessly with a musical approach that surely - surely - must place him more than ever onto the mainstream radar. In this regard, one track stands out for its employment of one Elton Hercules John, arguably pop’s most extravagant consumer, who Wilson arranged - through a friend of a friend - to have intone a series of consumer durables for Personal Shopper, a pulsing EDM track that offers a delightfully cynical take on online impulse buying. “Buy for comfort, buy for kicks/Buy and buy until it makes you sick”, Wilson sings, before Sir Elt kicks in with a shopping list that includes sunglasses, teeth whitener and even - cheekily - deluxe edition box sets…of which I confess to being guilty of…

Purist fans might baulk at the apparent absence of guitars on the album (there are, in fact, plenty, it’s just that they’re not turned all the way up to 11), but you get a sense that in being more atmospheric - and electronic - Wilson has given himself more room to move within. Thus, King Ghost is lush and reflective. On the other hand, 12 Things I Forgot chimes in with a snappy line in acoustic guitar accompaniment to a beautiful, strident pop song about regretful reminiscence. 

Both, however, bring out the best in co-producer David Kosten (aka Faultline), whose own solo work as well as production for Bat For Lashes and Everything Everything has accentuated a gift for texture. There are shades here, too, and in the background, of some of the myriad influences that play on Wilson’s ear, perhaps, labelmate Tame Impala on the scintillating Man Of The People (which, add Neil Tennant, could give the Pet Shop Boys a serious run for their money) or, at a squint, the funk of Wilson’s teenage hero, Prince, on Self IQ.

I may, in this review, have given the impression that The Future Bites is some wild departure from Wilson’s usual fare, and it is indeed another tonal shift. Some of his hardcore fans might rankle at that, but anyone who’s been paying close attention to his career will have noticed that change has been constant. Some changes, he’ll admit, have been more subtle than others, but he has never accepted the view that he is beholden to any one form of music, even if that dreaded ‘P’ word follows him everywhere. 

If there is any sort of compromise, it’s on the closing song, Count Of Unease. It’s what I call a proper closing song. I used to have this theory that, when putting albums together, artists would always programme them so that the final track of the record provides a sunset, a touch of autumnal melancholy. As a teenager, I would hear that final track fading out and feel sad that the whole experience was over. I later found out that, in the pre-digital days, how a vinyl record was sequenced owed more to the physics of certain types of songs requiring more plastic to accommodate bass and rhythm. I still don’t understand the science, so I will gladly settle for the notion that the closing song is indeed a farewell. Count Of Unease is that song, and to bridge to my previous point, is eminent of both the electronica throughout The Future Bites, but also the aural clues that have been there in Wilson’s music, right from the beginning. For all Porcupine Tree’s flights of prog-meets-metal grandeur, there were also lighter-touch moments of atmos and grace. 

Here is just that. But, rather than representing closure, it sets Wilson up for the next record (work of which is, I gather, already in progress), and the first strokes on a blank canvas that remind those just coming to his music that there are no rules to hit. He will always do whatever he damn well likes, and is all the more interesting for it.