 |
| Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell and Storm Thorgerson Picture: Hipgnosis |
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment