US AND THEM: THE AUTHORISED STORY OF HIPGNOSIS
Mark Blake NINE EIGHT BOOKS
The story behind the designs that launched a thousand covers.
Rifle through any reasonable-sized album collection the chances are you’ll find at least one cover created by Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell, and later in their story, Peter Christopherson. They were collectively known as Hipgnosis, and noted Floyd authority Mark Blake takes a largely chronological approach in telling the story of
THERE’S A WEALTH OF INSIDER CANDOUR ELICITED HERE.
how a couple of posh boys seeking to emulate the risqué habits of Kerouac’s Beat Generation came to stamp their brand on the minds of the record-buying public and in doing so aid and abet the late 60s/early 70s proliferation of album covers as bona fide works of art.
Hipgnosis were inspired by a hefty draught of drugs, photography, polemics, Letraset, literature, filmmaking, surrealism, and comic books; Blake neatly distils the volatile chemistry of their relationship to its essence, the smooth
(Po) with the rough (Storm): “Storm’s maddening, brilliant artistry was enabled by Po’s practical nous and Olympic gold medal-standard hustling. Had you removed one or the other, the whole thing would have collapsed.”
Blake makes clear that a mix of being in the right place at the right time coupled with a monolithic slab of selfentitlement running along the lines of ‘don’t you know who we think we are,’ took them beyond the orbit of their Pink Floyd mates and onto wider vistas.
How else does one explain their ability to persuade Charisma Records when pitching the cover to Elegy by The Nice to fund a trek to the Sahara desert to photograph 120 bright orange beach balls perched upon the dunes just before sunset? That audacity and boldness of vision combined with a practical capacity to get an idea from the head and into print was the making of them.
With a near-constant procession of big rock names appearing essentially in supporting cameo roles, the Hipgnosis story is nothing if not lively and eventful. Though some stories are familiar there’s a wealth of material that hasn’t been covered with anything like the insider candour that Blake elicits here. Hipgnosis’ move into video making in the 1980s while not without its successes – the chapter on their work with Barry Gibb is especially laugh-out-loud funny – also finds them at their most hubristic. What had once been an aesthetic now looked like mere imitation, reversing their earlier ethos of “the art comes first, the money later.” A hugely enjoyable read about a time before creativity came down to a mouse click.