Western Morning News (Saturday)
Floyd revisit beds shoot as album is relaunched
TO celebrate the release of the remixed and updated classic Pink Floyd album A Momentary Lapse of Reason, its iconic cover showing 500 hospital beds on a Devon beach has been updated with a picture from the original photoshoot.
Saunton beach in north Devon was the location in 1987 for legendary photographer Storm Thorgerson’s shoot for the album.
The original image features hundreds of wrought iron Victorian beds spread out over the sands.
It is based on a drawing by the band’s guitarist and singer, David Gilmour, which he asked Thorgerson to recreate.
As well as the beds – which refer to the line ‘a vision of empty beds’ in the song ‘Yet Another Movie’ – the image also references other songs on the album.
A microlight pictured hovering overhead refers to the classic track ‘Learning to Fly’, while a group of dogs sat by the ocean reference the track ‘Dogs’.
It had been hoped the original picture would be taken in America, but Thorgerson said he could not find the beds he wanted to use there. So it was decided to take it instead on Saunton beach.
It has been announced that a remixed and updated version of the album is to be released on October 29.
For the first time, it will be presented in 360 Reality Audio, a new format that closely mimics the multi-directional soundscape of live musical performance for listeners using Sony’s 360 Spatial Sound technologies.
Gilmour said: “Some years after we had recorded the album, we came to the conclusion that we should update it to make it more timeless, featuring more of the traditional instruments that we liked and that we were more used to playing.
“This was something we thought it would benefit from.
“We also looked for and found some previously unused keyboard parts of Rick’s (Rick Wright) which helped us to come up with a new vibe, a new feeling for the album”.
The image for the cover of the updated album is an alternative photo of the beds taken by Robert Dowling at the original shoot, which was directed by Thorgerson, who died in 2013.
Echoing the original sleeve, the new album artwork was designed and artdirected by Aubrey Powell/Hipgnosis and Peter Curzon/StormStudios.
Powell said: “I was looking to update the iconic 500 beds picture my partner in Hipgnosis, Storm Thorgerson, had designed.
“On looking through the archives, I discovered a version where the sea was encroaching on the set, just before Storm shut down the shot, worried he would lose all the beds.
“I also wanted to make something more of the microlight. There were no shots of the plane in close-up, so I hunted one down that was similar but white, and had Peter Curzon retouch the fuselage with the right colouring – red – then strip the microlight into the picture in an upfront position.
“David Gilmour and (drummer) Nick Mason gave their approval and, voila, a fresh approach to an original favourite.”
When the original photoshoot took place, dozens of volunteers helped shift the heavy hospital beds onto the beach, where they were placed into precise positions. Then it rained. In a previous interview, Thorgerson said: “This was English rain, which is more like a grey event.
“I had to cancel the shoot there and then, undo all the beds – all 500 of them – carry them back up the cliff and put them back in the lorries.
“We came back to do it two weeks later and it was fine.”
One of the people involved in the design of that album’s cover was Devon’s Drew Ellis, the Ashburton-based founder of the Like Minds business festival. Speaking in 2017 to Devon Live, Ellis said: “Nowadays, that type of thing would be done in Photoshop, but back then if you wanted something you had to make it happen, so we took all those beds into the beach for the photograph.”