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.
The uncompromisingly high-art approach was very potent in Hipgnosis’ work for Led Zeppelin, although their fascinating image of the golden naked children climbing Giant’s Causeway on the front of Houses of the Holy is another of those things that perhaps might not be allowed today. Hipgnosis also had an inspired narrative knack of developing and extending the cover art inside the gatefold and there is tremendous humour in their work for 10cc’s How Dare You! (We also get to see their inspired alternative cover design for Pink Floyd’s Animals: a small child, imagined with JM Barrie sentimentality, opening their parents’ bedroom door to see them having sex.)
Noel Gallagher, interviewed here, has shrewd things to say about the album collection as the affordable art collection of the working class. When did you look, really look, at an artwork the way we once all looked at album covers? The other photographs we saw were our own amateur snaps, or dull monochrome photos in newspapers, or maybe something more luxurious in the glossy magazines; now we have endless images on smartphones and tablets. But album covers were stunningly audacious and artistically conceived and respectfully received as such. Hipgnosis played a huge part in persuading us that albums were what an educated consumer prefers, and not silly jangly singles. The writing was on the wall when things went over to audiocassettes, CDs and then streaming; Hipgnosis are still big, it’s the retail music business that got small.
• Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis) is released on 14 July in UK cinemas and on digital platforms.
