Greatest album covers
Steve Fairclough discovers the inside story of creating a surreal album cover for a live Pink Floyd LP
Acombination of the surrealistic creative thinking of the late Storm Thorgerson and the adroit photographic skills of Andy Earl combined to produce the stunning cover for the live double album Delicate Sound of Thunder by Pink Floyd. Thorgerson was the maverick co-founder of design studio Hipgnosis, alongside his business partner Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell, and from the late 1960s onwards they were the ‘go to’ guys to guarantee a creative, off-the-wall album cover.
Andy Earl had worked with music guru Malcolm McLaren with the band Bow Wow Wow and with ‘New Romantic’ bands like Duran Duran, but getting the call to shoot a Pink Floyd LP cover was in a different stratosphere. Earl explains, ‘My pictures were sort of getting around and there were a couple of designers I was working for – one was a guy called Keith Breeden and he was
involved with Storm [Thorgerson] as well. When it came to doing the Delicate Sound of Thunder shoot, surrealism was all I was interested in – I was fascinated by Magritte and those sort of references. It was a big thing to be asked to do and I was very excited.’
Thorgerson shared a drawing of his vision for the shoot with Earl, who explains: ‘I said, “What’s it about?” and Storm said, “Well, Delicate Sound is birds, thunder and lightning… light bulbs.” It was to do with light and sound, that was his concept.’ Thorgerson’s explanation is on record as, ‘the quintessential light and sound are Mr Light meets Mr Sound. A Pink Floyd concert was where Mr Light and Mr Sound come together. Mr Light wears a suit of light bulbs après Dali and Mr Sound is surrounded by birds, birdsong’. The idea was inspired by Salvador Dali’s ‘Aphrodisiac Dinner Jacket’, that had 55 liqueur glasses hanging from it.
The shoot was set for October 1988 but with the weather in England being ‘rubbish’, according to Earl, the crew flew out to Spain to shoot in locations just north of Madrid. Earl recalls, ‘When we arrived we were going through customs and had boxes and boxes of light bulbs. The customs guy said, “no, no, no… in Spain we have a screw fitting, these are no good”, because they were bayonet fittings. Anyway, we got through customs and we explained it was for a Pink Floyd album sleeve, so it worked out fine.’
He continues, ‘We ended up shooting in this area which had a desert-type vibe, which Storm was after. Behind the rock six people, from a firm called Animal Actors in England, were with the birds – they were doves. This was pre-Photoshop so we had to get the shot in-camera. I’d go “one, two, three”, they’d toss
the birds in the air, they fluttered and came down and we eventually got a shot with them nicely circled around his head. My assistant was the guy wearing the jacket in the foreground; the Spanish location finder is in the background with the birds around him.’
Multiple locations
Ever the perfectionist, Thorgerson insisted the crew shoot in multiple locations. Earl recalls, ‘We shot ten locations. Storm wanted just flat landscapes, which we did shoot, but I thought it looked bland because both guys were at the same level. We had two days. So, we did a recce and we shot a few things on the first day. Then I was trying to shoot in the evening light and Storm wouldn’t have it – he wanted that midday sun but that [the one with the hills] was the one that we selected.’
Earl shot the image on a Mamiya 6x7 camera, with a 45mm lens on Kodak Ektachrome film. He reveals the lens was ‘the equivalent of around 35mm in 35mm format. You needed the wide [lens] for this, to get the drama of it. It was handheld. I very rarely use a tripod and it was probably about f/16. All we had was a few Polaroids to look at – there was no screen or anything to check how we were doing. We were looking at the Polaroids going, “well, I kinda like that, not sure about that”, so it was very much more [a case of] you had to get the shot. You couldn’t check it later, which I quite like.’
After the shot was in the can the chosen image was enlarged to a 10x8 transparency and some retouching was done in terms of colourisation but Thorgerson described it as ‘minimal’. Earl reveals, ‘We had to make sure the birds were sharp and it needed massive depth of field because the light bulbs needed to be sharp as well. That’s what I quite enjoyed about it. Normally, if I was shooting bands, it would be all about you get one shot then move on to the next, whereas this was focusing on working on this particular piece, which I really enjoyed.’
Delicate Sound of Thunder was far from the last involvement Earl had with Pink Floyd. He explains, ‘I did a picture for Pulse, the next Pink Floyd live album. I did some pictures for Q magazine, so I met them then. I think I did the last shot of them all together in Prague before [keyboardist] Rick Wright died, so there was sort of a relationship there, but it was a tenuous one.’
Looking back on the cover Earl says, ‘I think it stands up reasonably well today as a picture... it has lasted. When everybody was doing cross processing in the ’80s and ’90s, trying different things, that wasn’t really my bag. My thing was always about trying to get the image in the camera and trying to get the picture to work. Having this sort of thing in your portfolio made people say, “Oh, you’ve done Pink Floyd.” It was one of those pictures that everybody recognises as being a Pink Floyd sleeve. It was a very exciting thing to do.’