When art briefly triumphed over commerce in album cover design
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The writer Ian MacDonald described the Beatles song Revolution 9 as ‘the world’s most widely distributed avant-garde artefact.’ The collage of sound, influenced more by German experimental composer Karlheinz Stockhausen than by Chuck Berry, sneaked into many homes under the anonymous white cover of The Beatles’ White Album in 1968. Another piece of contemporary abstract art sneaked into countless homes in 1973 and has continued to do so ever since; the cover of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. It was designed by the company Hipgnosis, founded in the late 1960s by Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell. The image of light refracted through a prism has become one of the most recognisable designs of the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries, not least because the album has sold tens of millions of copies across the world. As Liam Gallagher points out in this film, this was a way of bringing art to the masses at a time when art in rock music was more important than commerce.
Hipgnosis is a play on the words ‘hip’ (meaning ‘cool’ in 60s hip parlance) and ‘gnosis’ meaning mystic knowledge. There is some disagreement amongst the contributors to this fascinating documentary as to who came up with the name, but it seems to have come from graffiti written by Pink Floyd’s early singer and guitarist, Syd Barrett. Thorgerson and Powell grew up in Cambridge with members of Pink Floyd, before moving to London and dropping some ‘tabs of acid’ which unlocked their creative juices in the new partnership. All three surviving members of Pink Floyd are interviewed in the film, as are Robert Plant and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, Paul McCartney, Peter Gabriel and Graham Gouldman of 10cc. This satisfyingly complete roster of rock royalty is joined by Powell himself who provides an insightful running commentary (Thorgerson died in 2013).
The film’s director Anton Corbijn, perhaps best known for his 2007 Joy Division biopic Control, films the interviews recorded for this documentary in stark black and white. This means that they match the extensive black and white photographic and movie archive footage of Hipgnosis at work which is one of the highlights of the film. The narrative is simple but effective, mostly consisting of an analysis of many of the covers that Hipgnosis designed. The covers themselves bring a particular joy, shown in glorious detail on the big screen. They were from the days before digital manipulation meant that almost any image could be created on a computer, and artificial intelligence could design limitless new ones. In the glory days of Hipgnosis, if you needed an image of a sheep sitting on a psychiatrist’s couch on a beach in Hawaii, you had to fly to Hawaii. And get the couch specially made. And borrow the only sheep in the area specially for the shoot. And sedate the sheep… All for a tiny image that was much smaller than the lettering on the cover of 10cc’s 1980 album Look Hear? Sometimes, it could be argued that all the effort wasn’t worth it, as in the case of Wings Greatest which does look as if it has been photoshopped rather than created half way up a mountain.
For the music fan, part of the fun of this film lies in the tiny details; being able to guess which classic cover is coming up next by listening closely to the music which introduces it. And although many of the stories will be well known to fans of the bands, there are small but exciting revelations; we hear that Syd Barrett went to the offices of Hipgnosis before he went to the studio to see Pink Floyd recording Wish You Here when – tragically – the other members of the band didn’t recognise him at first. Another enlightening detail is not just hearing the often-told story of the flying pig escaping its moorings during the photo shoot for Pink Floyd’s Animals, but seeing it happen on archive film.
Some of the work of Hipgnosis was critical of the music business, perhaps most famously illustrated in the photograph on the cover of Wish You Were Here of a man who is being ‘burned’ by the record company executive who is shaking hands with him. But Hipgnosis became part of the music industry and its excesses, charging tens of thousands of dollars for an album cover, travelling across the world on photo shoots, touring with bands and flying to America by Concorde. Ultimately however, whilst spending so much record company money, Powell and Thorgerson created a body of work that transcended commerce and became art. The last word of the film is left to Noel Gallagher. Having celebrated the work of Hipgnosis throughout the documentary, he is asked why he never used them to design one of his own album covers. He wryly admits that he couldn’t afford them.
Reference: Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties by Ian McDonald (Fourth Estate 1994)
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