From Pink Floyd’s pig to Led Zep’s naked family, how a maverick duo redesigned British music
US AND THEM by Mark Blake
400pp, Nine Eight, £19.99 (0844 T 871 1514), RRP£22, ebook £16.99 ★★★★☆
On December 3 1976, a 40ft inflatable pig broke its mooring above Battersea Power Station and took off across the London skies. Warnings were issued on television and radio, flights from Heathrow were halted and the police sent a helicopter up to chase it. Down below, members of Pink Floyd leapt into their cars and fled the scene, a photo shoot for their album Animals, arguably more celebrated now for its flying pig record cover than it is for itss music.
It was a decade in which record sleeves were considered so significant that fans would carry LPs under their arm to advertise their tastes. Progressive rock brought sleeve design to a new level of overblown grandeur, with gatefolds featuring abstruse concepts and impossible scenes.
At the heart of this were two arty misfit friends of Pink Floyd from their Cambridge schooldays: fiery intellectual Storm Thorgerson and urbane wide boy Aubrey “Po” Powell. They were barely out of their teens when they created the dazzling psychedelic cover for Floyd’s A Saucerful of Secrets in 1968. Calling themselves Hipgnosis, they rapidly became the most influential album design company in the world, creating art for many of the most celebrated musicians of the era.
Music journalist Mark Blake’s
Us and Them is a fairly conventional rock biography that shifts attention from the stars to the creative talents behind them. In those heady days of excess, Hipgnosis would travel the world to realise outrageous concepts that could cost upwards of £50,000 (which would be close to half a million today). They went to Hawaii to photograph a sheep on a beach for 10cc, only to discover there were no sheep in Hawaii. Never mind: they imported one, then drugged it to make it stay still.
Less glamorous was a week spent in wintry Northern Ireland, photographing a naked family, sprayed silver and gold,
clambering over the Giant’s Causeway for Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy. They set a stuntman on fire for Floyd’s Wish You Were Here and almost drowned a member of the rock band Argent while shooting the underwater cover of In Deep. While congratulating the musician’s selfless endeavours on behalf of the group’s promotion, Thorgerson pronounced himself “amazed that he had failed to tell us he couldn’t swim a stroke”.
Thorgerson became notorious for treating clients with contempt. Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page was appalled by the suggestion their latest masterpiece should display a tennis racquet on the cover. Asked to elaborate, Thorgerson replied: “It’s a racket, get it? A racket!”
In contrast to the elegance of their designs, the team’s London studio was an unhygienic mess. Visiting dignitaries were warned not to use the lavatory, but to urinate in the sink instead. “The double act was amazing,” according to Zeppelin’s Robert Plant. “The charming, amiable bonhomie of Aubrey and the belligerent ‘Do I have to deal with these scum musicians?’ approach from Storm. It was everything we deserved at the time.”
Thorny, argumentative, but undeniably brilliant, “Storm was a man who never took ‘yes’ for an answer,” as Pink Floyd’s drummer Nick Mason drily notes. Thorgerson, who died in 2013, is at the centre of Blake’s entertaining if overcrowded narrative, which focuses more on sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll than artistic design principles.
Looking at Hipgnosis sleeves now, their imaginative flair can be undermined by pretentious visual puns and a sleazy fascination with breasts and buttocks. Yet the execution is unfailingly immaculate, and truly extraordinary when you contemplate the tools at their disposal. Before the advent of digital art, Hipgnosis were the men who could make pigs fly.
By the 1980s, their glory days were over, their extravagant designs out of touch with postpunk aesthetics and further eroded by the advent of the CD. But the writing may have already been on the wall in 1978, when Powell risked his life jumping from a helicopter over the Swiss Alps while grappling with a statue of an Assyrian goddess, to photograph a cover for Wings’ greatest-hits album. “Very good, Po,” said Paul McCartney later. “But you could have just done this in a studio with a backdrop of a mountain.”