Unlike a book, you can judge an outstanding album such as Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon by its cover.
As the multi-million-selling LP turns 50 today, one of its artwork designers has revealed the prism and rainbow light cover idea came from a kids’ physics book.
Band guitarist Dave Gilmour, now 76, remembers having a run-through of the final album and knowing it would be their biggest hit to date.
He said: “We all turned round and went, ‘F*** me, that’s brilliant.’ And the album cover tied it all together.”
Gilmour was right. With 45 million sales, it is one of the best-selling albums ever. It spent 971 weeks on the US Billboard 200 chart.
The artwork was created by the art design group Hipgnosis – duo Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey “Po” Powell, 76. In a new book, Po said to add mystery to the art they invented many stories about the design.
Storm, who died at 69 in 2013, said Pink Floyd’s on-stage light show inspired it and Po claimed it had been a prism on top of sheet music.
Po now admits the iconic imagery was in a 1963 physics textbook, The How and Why Wonder Book of Light and Color, which was in Storm’s flat.
Floyd’s Roger Waters, now 79, told the book there had been no argument about the design to save them from listening to Storm “banging on for an hour” about his other ideas.
Waters also believed Storm suggested going to Egypt to photograph the Great Pyramid of Cheops because he fancied a free trip.
Hipgnosis was paid just £5,000 for the work, and Storm later started to think they had been “underpaid”.
Storm believed he was owed even more due to Dark Side of the Moon’s huge success. Waters said Storm asked for 15% of the gross receipts for the album, around £1million, but the band refused to pay.
But Po said they had been paid for the job asked of them and he did not expect any more money.
Gilmour and Waters are said to have argued over the final mix of the album. The band had many more hit albums but Gilmour and Waters have been at loggerheads for years.
Last month Gilmour shared his wife Polly Samson’s tweet accusing Waters of being an anti-Semite and a Vladimir Putin apologist.
In response, a statement on Waters’ Twitter page said he was “aware of the incendiary and wildly inaccurate comments made about him on Twitter by Polly Samson which he refutes entirely”.
It added: “He is currently taking advice as to his position.”
Us and Them: The Authorised Story of Hipgnosis by Mark Blake is published by Nine Eight Books.
