Photographer and film-maker Anton Corbijn is the very best person to direct this very enjoyable documentary about design outfit Hipgnosis and its dynamic co-founders Aubrey “Po” Powell and Storm Thorgerson, the creative powerhouse who virtually invented the concept of the album cover as a vital artform; they worked for Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Paul McCartney and Wings, 10cc and others, when the vinyl rock industry was in its 70s pomp. They devised extraordinary images which were enigmatic, monolithic, audacious, funny, surreal, hip and gnomic and conceived albums as an unacknowledged multi-media experience: you gazed at the cover while the LP was on the turntable. Hipgnosis’s staggering location work in deserts and wildernesses and with flying pigs over London landmarks virtually made them pioneers of land art, the medium which grew up at about the same countercultural time.
Hipgnosis had its roots in 1960s Cambridge where long-haired, dreamy-eyed idealists all hung out creatively, smoking dope, and Powell and Thorgerson went on to have a lifelong association dating from that time with Pink Floyd, whose music probably inspired their brilliant shapeshifting ideas most directly. To my shame, I realise now that I never knew that the “burning man” in the dreamlike picture that went on the Wish You Were Here cover really was burning: a stunt man doing the most dangerous work of his career.
