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Hipgnosis' Life in 15 Album Covers: Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and More


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Hipgnosis' Life in 15 Album Covers: Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and More

Upon release of new book 'Vinyl . Album . Cover . Art,' studio co-founder Aubrey "Po" Powell unpacks striking images created for Wings, AC/DC and more

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/hipgnosis-album-covers-from-pink-floyd-to-led-zeppelin-w475109

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Imagine record sleeves without the advent of Hipgnosis, the photo-design company responsible for Pink Floyd's mysterious black prism, Led Zeppelin's flaxen-haired nudist children, AC/DC's censored everyday villains, Black Sabbath's copulating escalator robots and Peter Gabriel's melted grilled-cheese face. Although the psychedelic era produced beautifully filigreed LP sleeves like Love's Forever Changes and, of course, Sgt. Pepper's, album covers largely were portraits of the bands and artists. Hipgnosis – cofounded by artists Aubrey "Po" Powell and Storm Thorgerson in 1967 – flipped the script on rock art.

A new book, Vinyl . Album . Cover . Art: The Complete Hipgnosis Catalogue – due out May 16th – will celebrate the company's 50th anniversary. It collects the 373 sleeves Powell, Thorgerson and their compatriots made together between '67 and 1982 with commentary by Powell and Thorgerson, among others, and a foreword by Peter Gabriel. "You can see the development of Hipgnosis, and how we got more sophisticated, more sleek and clever at photography, graphics, lettering and text," Powell tells Rolling Stone. "We didn't have Photoshop. Everything had to be shot on film and done by hand. And average artwork could take three to six weeks, whereas you could do some of these album covers in an afternoon now."

As Powell looks back on the history that he made with Thorgerson, who died of cancer in 2013, he's most proud of the creativity they shared. "We always tried to think laterally and not go for the obvious," he says. "When we saw Sgt. Pepper's, we went, 'Oh, my gosh, there's another way of doing this.' We were both fresh out of art school, and we said, 'We can do this, but let's think differently.' By 1973, when we did Dark Side of the Moon, Houses of the Holy and Band on the Run, we had discovered our métier, and we had the great privilege of being trusted by the bands we worked for. It was amazing."

He recently took some time out from working on an exhibition at London's Victoria and Albert Museum celebrating Pink Floyd, for whom he is the creative director, and picked 15 covers he felt were turning points for the company. Here, he tells the story of Hipgnosis – which, he points out, is still a functioning company, making designs and films – through some of its most brilliant album sleeves.

Pink Floyd, 'Atom Heart Mother' (1970)

Pink Floyd, 'Atom Heart Mother' (1970)
S. Thorgerson © Pink Floyd Music Ltd

It's one of my most favorite album covers. With the power of the band behind us, it was one of the first times we were able to have an album cover that had no lettering on it: no title, no band name, no album title. There was no title at that time we came up with the image.

Moreover, the band didn't give us any instructions for the art. I don't think we ever heard any of the music or read any of the lyrics. Roger Waters said, "Come up with an idea. Anything you like." We were talking with a friend of ours called John Blake, who is a surreal artist himself, about ideas that would be so off the wall, so unexpected and so irrational in a rock & roll, record-company sense, that it would be well-noticed. And the idea of a cow came up. Storm and I went out to a field in North London and photographed a cow. They say, "Never work with children or animals," because they're difficult. But that cow just stood there and looked at us. We shot shot lots of other pictures that day, and on the back cover you've got three cows in a formation. It looks like three airplanes in a formation, wheeling out of the sky. There are moments in photography when you just go, "That's it." And Hipgnosis got lucky many times.

We took it back to the band. Everybody went, "That's it. As it is. That's it."

The title Atom Heart Mother came later, as a result of Roger Waters looking through The Evening Standard, and reading about the first time an electric stint was put into a person's heart. Somehow, the picture and the title fit together. It was just serendipity.

I'll always remember being on Sunset Strip in L.A. and seeing a huge billboard [for the album] of a cow, with no lettering on it at all, and thinking, "That's a very brave statement to make." The record company fought to have lettering on it, and to their credit, the band said, "Absolutely not." It was a perfect example of lateral thinking working absolutely perfectly, because as soon as the album was released, everybody understood exactly what the concept was. They wanted to know what was inside the album cover. They wanted to buy the music. And, of course, it was their first big success in America.

The Nice, 'Elegy' (1971)

The Nice, 'Elegy' (1971)
A. Powell/ S. Thorgersen © 2017 Hipgnosis Ltd

This was the first album cover where we went away to a weird location. We told Keith Emerson, "Look, I want to take 120 red footballs to the Sahara Desert and take photographs of them. It's going to cost a lot of money." And he trusted us. 

So we drove to south Morocco from Marrakesh with these balls that were deflated in cardboard boxes, and when we got there, we took out two bicycle pumps. Now if you've ever tried to blow up a red football with a bicycle pump, it'll take you about half an hour, and we realized this was not going to happen. Luckily, we were not far from a tiny place called Zagora, and there was a truck stop there. The guy there agreed to find some people to blow up the footballs, and when we came back at 6 o'clock the next morning, there were about 20 Arab boys aged 15 to 19, absolutely shattered. They'd spent all night blowing up the footballs and did about 40 of them. They said, "Would 10 dollars be all right?" We said, "No, have 20." [Laughs]

So we took the 40 red footballs into the desert, and gave the rest away to the kids. I began placing the balls as Storm was looking through the camera, and I'd taken a broom to brush away our footprints. It's hysterical now because today you just go straight into Photoshop and bang, they're gone.

But it was a magical moment. There was not a cloud in the sky. it was absolute perfection. Stillness. And the color on those red balls and the sun and that deep blue sky and the wonderful orange-yellow sand dunes just makes for the most perfectly calm shot. And, of course, it's called Elegy. Somehow, it summed up everything.

We took the photo at about 8 o'clock in the evening. We had to drive back at night through the desert to the place where we were staying in the dark. It was scary. But Storm and I had a bottle of whiskey with us to carry us from getting lost in the desert. It was really out there. But we were lucky.

When we got back to England, Keith just said, "This is the best album cover I have ever seen." And again, it wasn't a picture of a band. It was something radically different that represented everything Keith wanted. It was the first cover where people said, "These guys are different." It did a huge amount for our career.

 
 

Pink Floyd, 'The Dark Side of the Moon' (1973)

Pink Floyd, 'The Dark Side of the Moon' (1973)
G. Hardie © Pink Floyd Music Ltd

The interesting thing about Dark Side of the Moon was that we met the band at Abbey Road, where they were recording, and they had the title. I remember Richard Wright, the keyboard player, turning around to me and saying, "Ugh, do we have to have one of your bloody surreal designs again? Can't we have something that's really stylish, like a singular image, like a chocolate box?" In those days, there were these Black Magic Chocolates, which just had a single gold mark on a black background. The rest of the guys agreed.

Storm and I left Abbey Road rather depressed. We thought about it for a few days. And I was looking through an old French physics book, and there was a photograph of a glass paperweight with sunlight shining in through the window, and it created a rainbow prism. Storm looked at me and said, "I've got it: a prism. It's all about Pink Floyd and their light show." In the early years, they were all about their light shows; nobody knew who they were. Rarely would you see their faces. In fact, between 1972 and 1989, there is not one single piece of film footage of Pink Floyd. They say it wasn't deliberate, but I think it was a conscious effort to stay out of the limelight and let the light show and music speak for itself. So Storm was right. That prism, that rainbow, somehow represented that. And the white line is almost like a singular moment that refracts into wonderful color. 

We drew it up on a piece of paper and brought it to Abbey Road with a whole bunch of other ideas. We put just the one on the floor, and they all went, "That's it. That's the one. That's amazing. That's exactly what we want. That's Pink Floyd." And that was it. I remember Storm being upset about it. He said, "Well, what about all the other ideas?" And one of the other ideas was to do a Silver Surfer character, and they said no. So we employed a good friend of ours, George Hardie, to actually create the illustration. Because we had no idea how to do that. 

It was a moment in time, and Storm, who always had absolutely the wildest ideas realized the potential of it and went, "That's it. It's a triangle." So we got into triangles and the next thing, Storm and I were on a plane to Egypt, taking photos of the pyramids for the posters to go with the album. We had stickers in there, too, that were all about pyramids.

If you look at the original cover artwork, it's unbelievably dull. It's a series of three overlays on tracing paper with a little bit of airbrushing and lots of instructions to the printer. It's very interesting, because it became one of the most iconic album covers of my generation. And of course I'm very proud of the status it gained. 

1973 was the year that broke Hipgnosis. Two months later, we did Houses of the Holy with Led Zeppelin, and we started to make money.

Led Zeppelin, 'Houses of the Holy' (1973)

Led Zeppelin, 'Houses of the Holy' (1973)
A. Powell, P. Crennell © Mythgem Ltd

One day, the phone rang, and it's Jimmy Page. He said, "I've seen an album cover that you've done for a band called Wishbone Ash," which was Argus. "Would you like to do something for Led Zeppelin?" I said, "Sure. What's the title?" He said, "Don't have one." I said, "What's the music?" "Um, I'm not telling you." "What's the lyrics?" "I'm not ready to share those with you." Very Jimmy – very esoteric and weird. He said, "Meet me in three weeks, and come up with some ideas. You know the kind of band we are."

So we went to their office on Oxford Street, and there was the massive Peter Grant, who was their formidable manager, and the band was sitting around. In those days, we used to sketch things on a piece of paper. And one of the inspirations for them was [sci-fi author] Arthur C. Clarke. He'd written a book called Childhood's End. And in the end of that book, there was this image of all the children of the Earth rising up in this great firestorm and going up into outer space. Storm and I were very interested in that kind of thing. We loved William Blake, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí – surreal imagery and esoteric writing. So we presented Led Zeppelin that and some other ideas that day.

For some reason or another, Robert Plant had been to the island of Staffa, which is in northern Scotland. It's at the other end of the Giant's Causeway and of the North Sea, where there's all these octagonal rocks. And he said, "That's it. The Giant's Causeway. These children running up the rocks at the Giant's Causeway." And Jimmy went, "I can see it. Magical." 

But at the same time, we presented another idea, which was set on the plains of Nazca, Peru. We wanted to bulldoze out the "Zoso" logo there, which I don't think would have gone down to well with the Peruvian authorities. But because we did everything for real – we didn't fake it – we were prepared to do that and risk it. And we'd shoot the shot from a helicopter. So they were so trusting. I remember Peter Grant said to me, "You decide which one you want to do. We're going on a tour of Japan. We'll see you when we get back in about six weeks." And in his very formidable way, he said, "You better fucking have it done." I was like, "OK, Peter. What about a budget?" He said, "Whatever it costs. Just ask the accountants for the money. Just get on with it." It was unbelievable.

So I went to Northern Ireland with a crew of children that we'd chosen, the mothers of the children, chaperones, makeup people. Originally, it was going to be a family. We were going to have a mother and father, naked, and a Silver Surfer–type character, and two children, who were going to be on the rocks.

But it poured rain for a week, and I couldn't shoot the photograph. So I said, "OK, I'm going to create a collage in black and white, all made out of children, exactly the same as Arthur C. Clarke's imagery." And I realized that, because it was all octagonal rocks, you could actually cut around the rocks and stick them all together and make this montage that never necessarily joins. Then I hand-tinted it. The inside shot is an old castle, very close to the Giant's Causeway, and the image of the man, who's completely silver, is holding up the young girl, like a sacrificial thing. So Led Zeppelin. So suitable.

The retouching took about two months, so I was late for the album cover, and I had Peter Grant shouting at me. They were doing a gig somewhere in the north of England, and Peter Grant said, "You meet me at the railway station in your car, and have those artworks ready. I'm not waiting anymore." I said, "OK, Peter." So, I picked him and Jimmy up, and we drove to Victoria Station. I opened the trunk of my car, and I had the two artworks in there. Jimmy took one look at the outside and said, "That is amazing." I said, "I'm sorry, I couldn't have a family. But the kids look better." He said, "Unbelievable." I showed him the inside cover, and he said, "That should be the outside cover." I said, "No, no, no, no." Peter Grant, who's a mountain of a man, standing there, poking me in the chest going, "We'll have what we want." In the end, I persuaded them that the outside should be the outside.

So, we're standing there, and Jimmy's Jimmy, cigarette in his mouth, smoking profusely, long hair everywhere, still dressed in his stage outfit. About 200 people had gathered around the car looking at the artwork. It was surreal. And I got a round of applause form all the people in the station. It was fearsome and extreme. So bizarre.

Anyway, so it worked out really well, but it was a nightmare to shoot, and the kids got so cold. It was two siblings, Stefan and Samantha Gates. The boy, Stefan, now has a TV show, and he's a celebrity chef. He told me a while back, "It's the weirdest thing to be on an album cover like that. You couldn't do that now." And I said, "No, you couldn't. If you did an album cover like that now, you couldn't release it." Naked children on the cover? But it was done with such innocence.

In fact, in America, we had to put an obi, which is a strip of paper around the album cover, in order to hide the kids' bottoms. In the Midwest, it as considered "not appropriate." Even then, there were people who were concerned about it. But I always used the adage, "When you look at the Louvre's paintings, it's full of naked children. Nobody complains about that. So this is a piece of art. It's not something that was, in any way, devious."

 
 

Genesis, 'The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway' (1974)

Genesis, 'The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway' (1974)
A. Powell/ S. Thorgerson Graphics: G. Hardie NTA Retouching: R. Manning © 2017 Hipgnosis Ltd

This was very much a radically different approach than the others, because I went to see Peter Gabriel, and Peter said, "OK, here's the lyrics. This is the story about Rael," the character in the album. "I want you to illustrate the story." Now we wouldn't take that from anybody but Peter Gabriel. We didn't like being dictated to.

But the story was so fascinating and so interesting and the music was so good, Storm and I went, "OK, let's go and work out a way to do it. But we're not going to do it as a comic strip," which is what Peter wanted. So we took the best bits of the story and just created vignettes for each part of the story. You have the guy breaking through the glass, or the symbolism of where he's unable to speak, where people have no mouths or he's being pulled into his own image. All of this was directly related to the lyrics.

Each vignette had to be done by hand, and we didn't have the advantage of Photoshop, so it took weeks to do that cover. But I'll always remember taking it down to Peter Gabriel and the band in the studio, and just putting it up on the wall, because the artwork was quite big. I remember them just going, "That's unbelievable. How did you do that?" It was a great compliment. 

We sold Peter the original artwork some years ago. Storm was ill with cancer and a stroke, and he needed money so we decided to sell off some of the artwork to the original artists, like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Peter to raise money to help storm out of his predicament, and they really were willing to be very generous about that too. And Peter was so moved, emotionally. He hadn't seen the original artwork for, I suppose, 25, 30 years. 

Pink Floyd, 'Wish You Were Here' (1975)

Pink Floyd, 'Wish You Were Here' (1975)
A. Powell Graphics: G. Hardie Retouching: R. Manning © Pink Floyd Music Ltd

The idea for the cover came from the band talking about the insincerity of the music business. You know the lyric on "Have a Cigar," "Which one is pink?" That was a true story of a record company asking, "Well, which one of you guys is Pink?" So the album's lyrics were all about insincerity and absence, the latter particularly in the sense of Syd Barrett, like how the industry is a movable beast that actually takes casualties with it. Syd Barrett was one of them, and inspired "Shine On You Crazy Diamond."

So the band and Storm and I thought about ideas related to absence and insincerity in terms of business. There was a great expression at that time, "Man, I've been burnt," like ripped off. Storm said to me, "Why don't we set something on fire?" You know, it was kind of like, one of those mad ideas. "What about two businessmen shaking hands, and one of them is on fire."

So I flew to Los Angeles and found this guy, Ronnie Rondell, who was a stuntman. He agreed to be set on fire a number of times. So we did it on the back lot of Warners in Burbank. As you can imagine, it's a very unpleasant experience being set on fire, and it's very dangerous because you're standing still. Normally, with a fire shot, somebody's moving. They're running away from your face. But we were lucky that afternoon. There was no wind. I shot it 14 times. On the 15th time, a gust of wind caught up and blew the fire straight into his face. Immediately, his team jumped on him, sprayed him with extinguishing foam and saved his life. He just got up from that and said, "That's it. I'm never doing this again." But I had it in the can.

The singe on the corner of the cover was just an added little trick. That was Storm. I personally preferred it without that, but we worked as a partnership. Lots of people like the singing on the edge. It makes it another dimension. Yet another world.

The photograph that I love more than anything on Wish You Were Here is the diver, which is on the inside cover. I'd done a reconnaissance with a plane over Lake Mono in Northern California, and I thought, "This is an interesting place with all those incredible stalagmites and stalactites and that." And we had to get a special yoga chair made to sit in the mud, and I got a stuntman who could hold his breath for a long time. It had been windy all day, and as he went into position, the wind dropped and the lake went flat. And it was the most beautiful, beautiful, calm evening. And I got the shot. That stillness, without any ripples, is about absence. There's no sign of any splash.

 

Wings, 'Venus and Mars' (1975)

Wings, 'Venus and Mars' (1975)
Cover Design: P. & L. McCartney Cover Photography: L. McCartney with A. Powell © MPL Ltd

We'd done some work for the Beatles, and then after Paul did Red Rose Speedway, he came along to Band on the Run with us. Then he came up with Venus and Mars.

Storm and I flew to California to meet with him where he was recording. We had loads of ideas and, typical Paul, he said, "Great ideas. I love those, but you know I went to art school and I've got some great ideas too." He pulled out this piece of paper and said, "I see two snooker like this, red and yellow, Venus and Mars, and I want this shot on a bay's table, and that's what the front cover is going to be and then you put the rest of it together." Storm said, "I'm going home. There's nothing for me to do here. You deal with it." Paul was always slightly affronted with Storm. They didn't get along at all. And he said, "That's fine. You get out Storm and I'll just deal with him," meaning me.

So I stayed in California probably six weeks working with Paul and Linda. I got a billiard hall hall in L.A. I set the shot up, because Linda was wanting to photograph it. ... So she'd come in and take the shot. It was a concerted effort by both of us. 

But the interesting picture for me was the inside cover, which is this landscape way out between Lone Pine and Death Valley. There's this amazing talcum powder lake there and I said to Paul, "Listen, I found this incredible location." And he said to me, "Actually I've got another location. It's just outside of Palm Springs." So I drove to Palm Springs that night and met Paul, Linda and Wings in a Winnebago outside a hotel there. When I got there I opened the Winnebago door, and the place was absolutely trashed. I honestly thought there had been a Charles Manson situation. It completely freaked me out.

As I walked away from it, suddenly from the back of the Winnebago, where there was a private room, out jumps Paul who said, "Oh, man, I'm so pleased to see you." I said, "What's going on?" He said, "The other guys were all in that hotel that we're parked outside of. Me and Linda are in the back here. [Wings guitarist] Jimmy McCulloch got totally out of it last night and trashed the interior the thing. Let's drive back to L.A." I had just driven for eight hours across the desert to get there in a Mercedes sports car, and I said it's going to be cramped, so Paul and Linda said, "I don't care. Let's just drive straight back to L.A. We'll do this another day and do it properly." I said, "OK."

So we got in the car. We're going through Cathedral City, which is just outside of Palm Springs when a cop stops us. "You're speeding." I said, "I'm really sorry. We're very tired. It's a long story." And then he went, "Who's that in the back of the car? Is that John Lennon?" I said, "No, not exactly. It's actually Paul McCartney." So immediately our signature was required, an autograph and we were let off on our way. It was a great moment when he said, "Is that John Lennon?" I just thought, "Oh, here we go."

Anyway, about a week later, I said to Paul, "Listen, I have this amazing location. Trust me. Believe me. It's incredible." And he drove out the next day, and we stayed overnight in Lone Pine, in a little motel. Such fun. We had dinner together. It was great. We did that shot and then later on Paul sent out for some firewood and some steaks and stuff like that and we had a barbecue in the middle of the desert. That was a magical day. It was just one of those days where he wasn't Paul McCartney, the Beatle; he was just Paul and Linda and the kids. It was just family and it was beautiful and it was fantastic. I remember it so fondly doing that photograph. And we got the snooker balls in there. I've still got those deep in my archives.

10cc, 'How Dare You!' (1976)

10cc, 'How Dare You!' (1976)
Cover Design: Hipgnosis/ G. Hardie Photography: A. Powell © 2017 Hipgnosis Ltd

These photographs were inspired very much by the band and their lyrics. 10cc wrote the most extraordinary lyrics. I mean, who writes lyrics like, "Life is a minestrone"? These guys were so smart lyrically and Graham Gouldman, who I'm still great friends with, is a really sharp guy and they were interested in the visual covers. They were always interested in visual puns, and a lot Hipgnosis work is about visual puns. 

So we imagined a whole set up for How Dare You! almost like a soap opera, where you had a series of pictures of people who were all on the phone literally saying, "How dare you?" And if you look at the front cover, you've got the woman who's obviously been jilted in some way who's clearly saying "How dare you?" And you've got the businessman who she's talking to who is her husband probably – there's stories that go along just because that's what we did. He's saying, "How dare you?" On the back cover, you've got a dirty old man with a handkerchief in a phone box talking to some poor air hostess desk who's sitting in the hotel and she's saying, "How dare you?" It's inspired by old 1940s movies where they used to do a split screen when people talked on the phone to each other. 

On the inside was a premonition of what was to come with all these people on the phone. There's 50 people in the room and they're all on telephones. It was just a surreal idea that Storm had. It's hilarious. It is funny now because, how many times now do you walk into a room and everybody is on their mobile phone? I've always felt somehow that this was a premonition.

 

Black Sabbath, 'Technical Ecstasy' (1976)

Black Sabbath, 'Technical Ecstasy' (1976)
Robots Design: G. Hardie Robots Illustration: R Manning Graphics Design: G. Hardie © 2017 Hipgnosis Ltd

We had the title, and I remember sitting around with Storm and George Hardie, talking about it. This was before artificial intelligence, so we were thinking, "'Technical ecstasy' – what is technical? Well, robots, and what's better than two robots falling love?" So we came up with two robots passing on an escalator and they're falling in love. What's interesting about it is that it's part-photographic in the background, and part-illustration by George Hardie.

I remember going to meet Black Sabbath which was always an interesting experience. They could be quite vocal; let's put it that way. When I presented the idea, they absolutely loved it. It moved away from what you'd normally associate with Black Sabbath, which is black guitars, dark lyrics, heavy rock, themes of devil worship, and blood and daggers. It was a picture of a love story. I was pleased. Then Ozzy came over.

We were at Tony Iommi's house in the studio, and Ozzy comes in late after the other guys have already chosen. The door flung open and there was this guy, dark glasses, as you see Ozzy, all in black with a hat on, absolutely drunk as a skunk. He walked over and said, "What's going on here?" "We're choosing the album cover, Ozzy." And you could feel the tension in the room. It was really unpleasant, and he just looked down and said, "That one. That's the one," and I think Tony Iommi said, 'That's just as well, because that's the one we've all chosen" in that great Birmingham accent. And Ozzy suddenly turned on him and completely flipped. They started fighting. I was by the manager and I'll never forget when he said to me, "I think that went rather well, don't you?" I said, "What do you mean? It was mayhem and chaos in there. It was horrible." And he said, "Well, we got an album cover out of it." It was so rock & roll in a way. It was fantastic.

Led Zeppelin, 'Presence' (1976)

Led Zeppelin, 'Presence' (1976)
Pho / Cover Design: Hipgnosis/ G. Hardie Photography: A. Powell © Mythgem Ltd

At that point in Led Zeppelin's career, things were getting quite dark. They weren't getting along quite as well as they were around Zeppelin III or Zeppelin IV, and Jimmy was in quite a dark space, I think. But it was the same story as with Houses: I got a call from Jim; he said, "We need ideas." "Do you have a title?" He said, "I'm not telling you. Haven't any music for you to listen to." I think they were recording in Stockholm or somewhere like that and I always remember he said, "See me in three weeks and come up with some ideas."

Storm, myself, George Hardie, Richard Evans, a couple of other guys who used to work with us sat around and got a bit stoned to think up ideas. Somebody said, "Imagine a party where everybody has a black cat, because people love stroking cats. Imagine if people stroked cats and they got an energy from it, like a battery or something like that." Black cats – it's too silly, it's too obvious. So we said, "Let's think of something else that's not a cat that will be kind of interesting."

I said, "What about a black object?" The film 2001 has the black slab at the end of it when he's going through space. And it just fit into place. The original black object that we made up was made up of cardboard and black velvet, and actually it was straight; it wasn't twisted. I went to see the band, and I had the object sitting on a table in the hotel room. Robert and Jimmy walked in, and Jim took one look at it and went, "That is it. That represents everything that I feel right now." And I had a series of pictures that I had torn out of National Geographic magazines from the 1950s and just painted in black paint that exact shaped object with ordinary people in ordinary situations. In other words: This was something you needed to live. It was food. It was a symbol of energy, of power, which is what Led Zeppelin were. 

It was so brave of a very, very heavy rock band to take such a surreal idea. I mean, a family sitting at a boat show with a black object on the front is that Led Zeppelin? I don't think so. But if you take it another way, yes, it is Led Zeppelin. On the back cover, you've got a school teacher with a child with a black object on the desk teaching the child. The power of teaching. You know, it's all there. Again, I take my hat off to band for having the balls to take such an outrageous idea. It's all about power. That's what Led Zeppelin were about: power. 

 

AC/DC, 'Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap' (1976)

AC/DC, 'Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap' (1976)
Photography: A. Powell © 2017 Hipgnosis Ltd

I remember two skinny little Australian guys coming into Hipgnosis' studio, and I thought, "These guys aren't going to amount to a hill of beans." I really did. They were funny little guys and they started saying, "We need an album cover." I was going to L.A. the next day and I said, "Well, why don't I shoot something in L.A.?" And Storm called me when I got there and said, "I've got an idea. Remember those exposé magazines like National Enquirer, where they used to black out people's eyes so you wouldn't know who they were but you did really?" I said, "I'm just down the road from Sunset Strip where there's sleazy motels. Why don't we shoot something there and we'll get a load of characters?" I shot the background there, flew back to England, and we hired a bunch of models and dressed them up in different stuff, outfits, put them in Hipgnosis studios and then created this collage all the way across, as they are standing in front of it. And it's absolutely a perfect example of Hipgnosis work where everything is shot front to back, not how the eye sees it. So everybody is in sharp focus, yet the composition is as if they were there for real. That's what gives it that surreal, almost painted kind of atmosphere to it. 

And again, I don't think these two Australian kids, Angus and Malcolm, really understood it, and in fact they changed the cover later on to something that I would consider a bit more vulgar, a bit more obvious. But nevertheless, for me it went pretty well. It sold six million albums [in the U.S.]. 

Yes, 'Going for the One' (1977)

Yes, 'Going for the One' (1977)
A. Powell Graphics: G. Hardie “Yes” logo: R. Dean © 2017 Hipgnosis Ltd

Yes were managed at that time by a friend of ours who also managed Tom Petty. They had been through some ups and downs, but they got [guitarist] Trevor Rabin into the band and things were changing, moving into a more modern phase. [Artist] Roger Dean had fallen out with them, but when they were looking for a new album cover, Roger kindly suggested that perhaps we'd like to get involved. I told them, "Look, I don't want to do anything like Roger Dean," and Jon Anderson said, "But we love his landscapes with amazing kind of buildings and stuff like that." So I thought, "I'm stuck in this a little bit."

It so happened that earlier in the year, I had been with Paul McCartney in Los Angeles and I happened to go to Century City, which has got these amazing buildings. There's two skyscrapers there that are absolutely spectacular. I said to Storm, "Those buildings could look pretty amazing if we made a collage and had something going on within that." So I went and shot these buildings, came back, and we decided on a naked figure swimming up through them with all these trails. It was just graphic design, really; there's no hidden meaning to it at all. The most important thing is the shape of the buildings. When you put them together like that it's just impactful. 

If you see the cover opened out as a whole piece, he color jumps out at you. When I showed it to Jon, he just said, "You've interpreted Roger Dean photographically." I said, "That's what you asked for; that's what you've got." So they were very pleased with that. It gave them a modern image, because Roger's illustrations, as much as I love them, at that time started looking slightly retrospective, whereas our photographic images were moving forward. That's no reflection on Roger. He just wasn't doing appropriate work for Yes moving into a new phase of their career, but it all worked out very well.

 

Peter Gabriel, 'Peter Gabriel' (1978)

Peter Gabriel, 'Peter Gabriel' (1978)
A. Powell / P. Christopherson Graphics: Hipgnosis/ C. Elgie © Peter Gabriel Ltd

We loved Peter because he was such fun to work with, but he is a person who can't make up his mind about anything. He's a person who will pontificate and think about things for years if he possibly could. So working with him was always an interesting experience because you'd come up with an idea and he'd hem and haw about it for weeks and weeks until the album was virtually on the release date and then decide to do something. He used to have arguments with Storm, because they were two intellectuals and disagreed on just about everything, but they always came to a fantastic conclusion. 

Peter was always insistent with us with having a portrait on the front. We didn't like doing portraits but we said we'll only do it if we can do it differently. Storm came up with this idea of Peter creating this scratch with his hands but he's creating it for real on the picture of himself. Peter said, "Great, let's go with it." What I loved about him is he was so self-deprecating. He was never interested to play the pop star, ever. He had the chutzpah to allow you to do something interesting with his face. He wasn't interested in looking attractive, he just wanted to have an interesting idea surrounding it and "Scratch" was the title so scratch is what he got.

Peter Gabriel, 'Peter Gabriel' (1980)

Peter Gabriel, 'Peter Gabriel' (1980)
A. Powell/ P. Christopherson/ S. Thorgerson © Peter Gabriel Ltd

Peter always liked to have an image on the front cover, and he was happy for you to do something with it that would distort it or destroy it. "Melt" is a Polaroid image that makes him look like some deformed person. It was made by accident. This guy called Krims, who used to play with Polaroids, and we saw some work he'd done on landscapes where he pushed the undeveloped polaroid chemicals around. Polaroids take awhile to set, and in those days, Polaroid made the images on different layers, so you could push around each layer and create odd shapes. Storm experimented with this, and Peter said, "I love it. Let's take a thousand Polaroids in your studio and let's just all get together and have a go it and see what happens." That session was such fun, because it lasted all day with just about and everybody in the studio – about 15 people – all taking polaroids of Peter and pushing things around. Peter said, "OK. Let's all put them together, and we'll choose which one is the best," and it was a huge argument between Storm and Peter of which one he liked the best. Peter wanted to use all of them and Storm wanted to use one. Anyway, we had the best fun. It was like being back in art school all over again.

 

10cc, 'Look Hear?' (1980)

10cc, 'Look Hear?' (1980)
A. Powell Graphics: G. Hardie © 2017 Hipgnosis Ltd

Look Hear? is a Storm title. That cover was also called, "Are You Normal?" What Storm wanted to do was create a series of large, singular graphic letters that had all sorts of words and puns like those. I can't remember all the other ones. It was very much all about the graphics. 

If you look on the front of it, you'll see a little tiny picture which is a sheep on a sofa. I said to the guys, "I would prefer that the front cover was not the big letterings." We had a huge argument and they said, "Well, OK, what do you see about this sheep on the sofa?" I said, "Really, it's the 'Are you normal?' We're talking about madness here, because if you're not normal you're nuts, so maybe we should do something about psychiatry. So the sheep represents people going to psychiatrists to repair themselves. The sea in the background represents the mind. The psychiatrist couch is very Freudian, and I want to go and shoot it in Hawaii where the biggest waves are." It was the 1970s, and everybody was making lots of money because selling records was going out of fashion so he went, "Fine. We better go off and do it."

So I got to Hawaii and there were no sheep. I should've called ahead I suppose [laughs]. I found out that the University of Hawaii had one sheep. So I managed to commandeer the sheep, but there was no Freudian couches to be found. Psychiatry was not prevalent in Hawaii at that time, so I had one made and took it to Sunset Beach. We put the sheep on the couch but of course when those huge waves came rolling in the sheep kept jumping off the couch in fear and trying to swim out to sea. It was a nightmare. Again, never work with animals and children. 

I managed to persuade the vets from the university to give him a shot of Valium to calm him down and put him on the sofa. I took this picture. It was just absolutely a one-off picture. The great thing is, if you see that picture blown up that sheep is looking at me with the most devilish eyes you've ever seen. It was really, really unhappy. Anyway, we used that as all the posters and everything else and stuck to Storm's idea with the very large graphics all over it, with the pun, "Are You Normal? Look Hear!" But it was fun to shoot. 

Covers like this don't happen anymore. The golden age of album covers is gone. We had the best 15 years of it. The money was there. We were so privileged to be able to go and do a picture like that.

 

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Thank you for posting this.

The lack of the hand-held visual element (i.e., the record sleeve) is why I could never go fully non-medium digital in listening to/collecting music. Digital is convenient in terms of portability, but that's it.

One of my favorite scenes in "Almost Famous" really drives the point home:

 

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