I watched Anton Corbijn’s documentary Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis) this week, about the strange design studio that came to accidentally specialise in album covers and would produce one of history’s most famous: Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.
The doco tells the story of two ambitious English bohemians, blessed with contacts, infinite self-regard and some talent, whose chutzpah and experimentalism would soon appeal to the millionaire Gods of Rock of the 1970s. But their origins, in the late 1960s, resembles Withnail and I if those two had been photographers rather than unemployed actors.
The two founders of Hipgnosis – Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey “Po” Powell – were raffish buddies of the Pink Floyd boys before they were Pink Floyd, back when they were all dope-smoking dreamers and Syd Barrett was well. It was the Cambridge group that would help launch the studio’s career. Storm and Po’s first cover design was for Floyd’s second album, A Saucerful of Secrets. They’d end up designing the next nine too.
In time the two developed their own aura, not unlike their famous clients, and would come to serially provide art for Led Zeppelin, Peter Gabriel and 10CC, amongst many others.
There are charming descriptions of the effort and committed experimentations of the two – the making of collages, the hand-tinting of photos, the patient scouting of shoot locations. As there are countless peers testifying to the epic rudeness of Storm and the shady avarice of Po.
Storm died in 2013, and we see him only occasionally in archival footage. But the impression is of someone as insufferably arrogant as his once-mate Roger Waters, whose presence as a talking head must be suffered here by the viewer.
[An aside: my hatred of Pink Floyd was confirmed when, in 2007, I indulged a free ticket and saw Waters and his band (he couldn’t use the name “Pink Floyd”) play Dark Side of the Moon. The giant inflatable pig, which was emblazoned with misspelt invocations of habeas corpus and an appeal to free David Hicks from Gitmo, was mysteriously severed from its mooring, floated off into the evening sky, and found rest in a backyard swimming pool some 15 kilometres away. Now, the pig had nothing to do with the confirmation of my hatred: I just can’t stand most of their music.]
As it is, Hipgnosis’ best work – and personally, I consider them terribly overrated – was probably done for Floyd. Here’s four:
I’m fond of these two Peter Gabriel covers too:
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The alleged greatness of an album’s cover art is complicated, of course, by its association with the album itself. The cover of Dark Side of the Moon is widely considered one of the most iconic of all time – not coincidentally, it graces one of history’s greatest selling albums of all time. Had DSOTM sold 4500 copies rather than 45 million, the image would not be replicated on millions of t-shirts and tattoos. It’s the music that empowers or enlivens the cover art; not the other way around. A transference happens: if you’re enchanted with an album, it’s likely that you’ll love its art – or at least be fondly accepting of it. It’s a part of it; an exemplification. (Dear reader, I’m curious: do you have examples of albums you love but which bear covers you hate? Conversely, are there covers you love for albums you don’t listen to?)
And so if the album’s good enough, or the band sufficiently popular, you could just about do anything – as The Beatles did. The cover of their self-titled 1968 album is wholly white, but the blankness assumed a distinguished and enigmatic quality. First because of the music, and second because the band were inspiring a fanaticism so acute that otherwise banal or depthless elements of their lyrics and cover art were being hallucinated into significance by mad fans. Is there a better surface for hysterical projections than a blank cover?
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There’s the sickly-sweet scent of nostalgia here, a looking back to a time when “musicians were artists” (are they no longer?!) and when cover art was considered important, vital, a charmingly discrete part of the enjoyment of music. Interviews with Noel Gallagher are spliced throughout the film, in which he laments – again – the hollowness of today’s industry and fandom. For decades now, Gallagher’s been telling us how much better it all was in the ‘60s and ‘70s – when music was art and not a commodity. But it’s always been a commodity, and the documentary seems blithely unaware that, while its subjects might have been artists, they were also hustlers milking the giant teat of behemoth music publishers.
As such, the documentary is a testament to the awesome excess of the popular music industry of the 1970s. With Hipgnosis, after a time their own absurd excesses seemed no longer to be a function of uncompromising artistic vision but merely a decadent piss-take. They did it because they could. They did it for a laugh. They did it because the bands that commissioned them had more fucking money than God. Indulgence, and not an exquisite artistic instinct, seemed to prevail towards the end.
Some examples of logistical extravagance that yielded fuck all? Take 10CC’s 1980 Look Hear? For that album cover, a sheep was wrangled, with great difficulty, upon a psychiatrist’s lounge which had been placed in the shallow waters of the ocean. The couch was custom made, and the beach they chose was in Hawaii. And what became of the image? It was used only as a tiny insert.
Then there’s Wings’ greatest hits compilation of 1978. Linda McCartney had purchased a chryselephantine statue that year at auction, and husband Paul thought it should feature on the cover of Greatest – in snow. And so, rather than any number of cheaper and simpler alternatives, the statue along with photographers and crew, were helicoptered to the peak of a great Swiss mountain. The grandeur of what they saw up there is in no way reflected in the cover, something which, McCartney admits, could have been achieved by placing the art piece in a large mound of salt.
The ‘80s came, things changed, music videos emerged. Their two great patrons – Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin – were disintegrating, or, in the case of Led Zep, dissolved after their great drummer John Bonham drank himself to death in 1980.
The two tried pivoting to videos, but their film-making ended quickly and in piles of debt. Watching this doco, and then considering their art, there also seemed to be dramatically diminishing returns: a distinct kind of surrealism that felt rote, repetitive. It feels to me that they were running on empty before MTV came along, and that perhaps their talents were always inflated anyway by their association with Floyd and Zeppelin and McCartney.
But Squaring the Circle is enjoyable enough, if only as a very particular window through which to glimpse the peculiar beast of the 1970s music industry. And a glimpse of how even the designers of album covers could for a time think of themselves as global priests of the zeitgeist – possessed of mysterious genius while leaving their inscrutable thumbprints upon our culture. It’s a wonderful profile of ego, its excesses and personal disintegrations.
The cover of Pet Sounds isn't terrible, but it's a complete nothing of a cover, weirdly inappropriate for one of the greatest albums
i have a book of their stuff, from the time. MUST FIND IT. possibly stolen or dispatched