The British graphics agency Hipgnosis designed a large number of covers from the late ’60s to the mid ’80s, turning simple LP covers into works of art. Aubrey Powell, now 72, who co-founded the agency with colleague Storm Thorgerson, recalls some of his seminal work.
Her cover of the Pink Floyd album “The Dark Side Of The Moon” is world famous. What has fascinated people about it for 46 years?
The motif represented Pink Floyd, and it represented Pink Floyd at that very specific time.
Pyramid and spectral colors represented the musicians?
Think Pink Floyd before Dark Side, before 1973. They were an enigma. Nobody knew what they looked like. At that time there were almost no photos of them, hardly anyone interviewed them. When Pink Floyd performed, everyone only paid attention to the huge screen on the stage and the films shown on it. David Gilmour turned his back on the audience. Plus endless dry ice fog and the best surround music system. That’s when her Dark Side of the Moon image came into play: a prism suffused with light against a black background: this motif summed up the impressions of everyone who had seen Pink Floyd on stage. It describes recognition as an emotional reaction to a very simple graphic. The triangle was Pink Floyd.
Aubrey Powell 2017
How did Hipgnosis work with you?
My partner Storm Thorgerson (deceased 2013) and I were friends with the band. We visited them while they were recording at Abbey Road Studios. Their keyboardist Rick Wright asked us to come up with something a little less surreal for the cover: no second “Atom Heart Mother” please! Its motif only showed a cow, there was no band or record title. The image was an expression of lateral thinking, I called it a “non-cover”. But the pyramid was not first choice either.
What then?
Rick favored something reminiscent of the Black Magic box of chocolates: black, square. After that conversation, Storm and I couldn’t help but feel depressed. Graphics really weren’t our style. We considered ourselves photo designers. Okay, a week later: I was sitting on the couch flipping through a French physics magazine, then I saw sunbeams falling through the window onto white paper, creating a prism of rainbow colors. I showed it to Storm and he said, “There you have it!” I immediately drew it on with a colored pencil. We were amateurs.
The “Dark Side Of The Moon” cover cannot be described as plain.
This is your interpretation and it is indicative of the beauty of the Hipgnosis covers. Any interpretation is welcome. For me, hipgnosis has always meant seeing the world through a telescope: the landscape is in front of us and we pick out a certain detail from it and the magnification makes it grander, more meaningful.
? Order the vinyl of “Dark Side of the Moon” here
How did it go?
We took my little drawing to the band, one after the other said, “That’s us!” Then it was off to Egypt to photograph Pink Floyd for the interior. The Dark Side of the Moon isn’t my favorite cover, but it has sold 65 million copies to date. The motif can be seen all over the world. Billions of people have probably seen it at least once. If Pink Floyd from “Dark Side” had only sold a few thousand copies, the impetus would of course have been different. One hand washes the other!
Did Pink Floyd hide behind Hipgnosis motifs – didn’t the musicians think that being unrecognized also had its disadvantages?
I spoke to Roger Waters about this two years ago. They hadn’t enforced anonymity. When Pink Floyd was still playing in small clubs in the late 1960s, the light show was already very present, even cheap light bulbs were more noticeable than the musicians – because they were afraid their songs would not be good! After the success of “Dark Side of the Moon” they became superstars, performing in front of up to 90,000 spectators in the USA.
And disappeared in the distance.
Waters realized that for people sitting far away, they became little dots on a stage. But he had actually only been waiting for this – now he could experiment. Pink Floyd became what Rogers called “Electronic Theater,” the flying pig show. Everything should be inflatable: the nuclear family, father, mother, children. Then sofas and cars. Finally the rubber sheep with a parachute.
For the Scorpions, Hipgnosis created Lovedrive (1979) and Animal Magnetism (1980). Do you understand why viewers would find these photos, which depict women as objects, sexist?
“Lovedrive” is the abstract depiction of two people in the back seat of a car. And the best example of how representations are perceived distorted over the years. We were only interested in one question – the one about the relationship between two lovers: “What drives love?” Of course it’s also about tension. Hence the idea of the chewing gum that the man wants to peel off the woman’s breast – it’s about the durability of the relationship.
But why the chest?
The woman’s face speaks volumes. She is upset by the man’s behavior. This isn’t about chewing gum on the chest, it’s about the struggles in the relationship. The cover shouldn’t be sexy, nor should it make a “man vs. woman” statement. I can only disagree with anyone who says the motif is inappropriate today: It is more relevant than ever, because “Lovedrive” is like an image from the “Metoo” era. We live in a time of uncertainty. How can men and women work in the same office today, how do you go out together?
The Scorpions were happy, but which artists did they have problems with?
There are some covers that I don’t like at all. And some we did just for the money.
Which ones, for example?
Paul McCartney’s. They were based on his ideas, or his and Linda’s, at least not ours. We still felt honored, he was a Beatle. We liked him, became friends, and he paid well. We had to pay our rent, keep the studio running, pay our assistants. “Wings at the Speed of Sound” from 1976 is an example of a motif I wasn’t attached to.
Why?
I didn’t find it enlightening. Concept like final product. There was no context here, so it wasn’t a Hipgnosis image. We see red letters in front of a yellow advertising facade on a theater in London’s Leicester Square. Boring.
Couldn’t you veto?
Working with Paul was an interesting experience. He said: “I need an album cover! Get going with your ideas!” We brought him a number of sketches. His response was usually, “Everything looks great! But I’ve been thinking about it too.” We then rambled around: “We can also work on your sketches.” Whereupon Paul made the suggestion: “Understood. Let’s just work out my design and yours – and then we’ll see which one would work best, okay?” We would take the photos and he would always end up saying, “See? My idea was better.” It became a running gag. I liked working for him. The man has a sense of humor.
What’s your favorite cover?
One thing is for sure “Atom Heart Mother” for Pink Floyd. The cow. The non-cover. Nothing on it has to do with the content, nothing with the band, nothing with the songs, the titles, the lyrics. And it was all so easy. We drove to a meadow, photographed the animal, drove to Pink Floyd. We even wanted to make it a condition that the band name and the title are missing. And you? Loved that idea too. The record company hated her. They hated us vengefully. The label wanted to get rid of us.
How can you imagine that?
When I walked into EMI/Capitol Records with the cover, people buried their heads in their hands. They couldn’t cope with our lateral thinking, had no sense for “thinking out of the box”. But it’s like this: There were thousands of albums in record shops, and almost all of them were adorned with band photos. We had the cow and we stood out – the label should have liked that.
And the cow even risks a cheeky glance over the shoulder – like people on the red carpet.
You have strange views, my friend. It’s a cow in the field, nothing more. We were inspired by the work of Marcel Duchamp. The recording of an everyday visual impression. Does the picture match the record title “Atom Heart Mother”, does the cow stand for a mother? No! It’s a cow. Do you know how Pink Floyd got the title?
No.
Roger Waters read the Evening News Standard article “Atom Heart Mother” – about the first woman to have a pacemaker implanted. I walked the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles and there was the huge animal billboard for three weeks. And people in Hollywood were like, ‘What kind of movie is this? A horror movie? THE COW?” It was only weeks later that the band name was revealed on a second poster. And it was this game of hide-and-seek that made Pink Floyd the hot topic of conversation in America. Until “Dark Side of the Moon” “Atom Heart Mother” was their biggest hit there.
What other cover do you love?
“Elegy” by The Nice, the band of Keith Emerson before he formed Emerson, Lake & Palmer. 30 red soccer balls forming a line in the Sahara. It marked one of our first opportunities to create a surrealist motif in 1971. I literally drew it on the napkin and then presented it to the label. People freaked out: “Who is supposed to pay for this nonsense?”. Emerson, cool: “I.” So we bought the footballs, put them in boxes and flew to Marrakech. Once there, we got a car and drove to the dunes to Sangora.
It already sounds adventurous.
However: The balls were not inflated. And all we had was a bike air pump. I got to work and it took me 20 minutes – for a ball. Luckily there was a gas station nearby, we asked there and paid for inflation. At 5am we came back to pick up the balls. Everyone was ready, round and pumped up – 60 children had set to work. This is how one of the first surrealistic record covers came about. The picture was groundbreaking. We changed the world. And there is another motif that I am very proud of.
Which?
“Look Hear?” by 10cc, and then our words “Are You Normal?” The picture shows a sheep on a psychiatrist’s couch, I shot it in Hawaii in 1980. People are like sheep, one follows the other, everyone goes to therapy – because that was the fashion at the time. Why Hawaii? Dream sequences are often associated with the sea and the beach. Storm and I went into psychotherapy ourselves. On the one hand, because we had once taken LSD, but also to get to know ourselves. Well, so I wanted to go to the sea. But the weather in England was bad. Only: Sigmund Freud and CG Jung had never been to Hawaii. So there were no psychiatrist couches in Hawaii either. And neither do sheep. Except for one. I could borrow that. The poor animal. Because I only had this one, it had to go through all the recordings. For example in the waves. You can see it in their eyes: at the end of the day, it hated me.
Part 2: Hipgnosis Bootlegs and Syd Barrett:
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