impossible to think “Velvet Underground and Nico”It’s impossible to separate The Velvet Underground’s debut album and the music it contains without thinking of a huge banana hanging on a white background. ‘Nevermind’, from Nirvana, the image of a naked baby underwater; to mention monastery Road it always brings to mind four people crossing the crosswalk in single file. The most memorable albums in rock history owe much of their identity to their cover designs and the most surprising and enigmatic ones in history. created by hypgnosis. Created in the mid-1960s by designers Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell, the British record label redefined what fits the contours of a cover long before Photoshop even existed, thus making an important contribution to the projection of artists and bands like Pink Floyd. , Led Zeppelin, T. Rex, Wishbone Ash, Electric Light Orchestra, Yes, Rory Gallagher, Genesis, Peter Gabriel, The Police and Scorpions.
The artistic trajectory of Hipgnosis is now the subject of the documentary ‘The Story of Hipgnosis’ presented at the Sundance Festival; directed by Anton CorbijnHe became known as the chief photographer of British band Joy Division – his later directorial debut ‘Control’ (2007), a biography of the band’s leader Ian Curtis – and was responsible for the formations footage during his time. Like U2 and Depeche Mode. The film, which is told from Powell’s point of view and includes interviews with various rock demigods, as well as archival footage of Thorgerson, who died of cancer in 2013, points to its main characters as symbols of an era in which the music industry hosted the most ambitious and ambitious names. crazy and economically expensive ideas ended with the austerity of the ’80s. By 1982, HPignosis designed 190 caps. These are some of the most important.
‘Atom mother heart’
Pink Floyd, 1970
As soon as Hipgnosis was tasked with painting the cover art for the London band’s fifth studio album, Thorgerson said, “Let’s make a cover that doesn’t make any sense,” and the idea to photograph a cow was born. Powell recalls that the cow that appears on the front of the record at the end of the movie is “the first cow I’ve ever seen; her name is Lulubelle III.” “We jumped over the fence, took pictures, and came back home. Working with children and animals is said to be the hardest job in the world, but that cow just stood there looking at us like she was posing for the camera.” When the record label executive was shown the cover, he was enraged and reportedly asked, “Are you crazy?”
Neither the name of the band nor the name of the album appear on the cover of ‘Atom heart mother’. And this lack of information contributed tremendously to the album’s sales. “Everybody wanted to know what was behind this image,” says David Gilmour, vocalist and guitarist of Pink Floyd in the documentary. Hipgnosis had succeeded in giving the image of a lazy cow the mysterious depth of Magritte’s great works.
‘To choose’
Beautiful, 1971
When presenting their ideas for the cover, Thorgerson and Powell told Keith Emerson, frontman of the progressive rock band. “We want to take 60 red soccer balls into the desert and photograph them. It will cost a lot of money.” What desert asked the keyboard player, and they answered the question by naming the only desert they knew: “Sahara”. They had to deflate the cannons to be able to carry them on the plane that took them to Marrakech. When they arrived in southern Morocco, they realized they would need about half an hour to inflate each ball with their bicycle air pumps. Instead, they went to a truck stop in the nearest city, Zagora, and the manager of the place agreed to find a group of people to do the work for them. The next morning they returned there and saw about twenty youths, completely exhausted; They managed to inflate 40 balloons. They charged $20 for the job.
‘Dark side of the Moon’
Pink Floyd, 1973
Where did the image of the triangular prism refracting light in the colors of the rainbow come from, which continues to appear on posters, t-shirts, stickers and tattoos fifty years later? When hired by the group to design the cover, the Hipgnosis components received only one instruction: this time, they didn’t want the image to be a photograph. “One day I was flipping through an old French Physics book and came across a photograph of a glass paperweight that caught the sunlight filtering through the window and turned it into a rainbow.” This inspired them to draw an embryonic version of the image that accompanies these lines, and they showed it to the group along with various other ideas. “We put all the sketches down and they immediately said, ‘This is exactly what we want, this is Pink Floyd,’ pointing to the prism, and the discussion took two minutes,” recalls Powell in “Squaring the Circle.” It seems that Thorgerson was enraged by his general disinterest in other designs.
‘Holy houses’
Led Zeppelin, 1973
True to their creative methods, Thorgerson and Powell arrived at their first meeting with the British quartet with nothing more than just a sketch drawn on a paper napkin; Inspired by science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke’s novel “Childhood’s End,” the plot climaxes when all the children of the world are lifted into space from a gigantic golden pillar of fire. The band’s lead singer, Robert Plant, suggested that the cover art contains some “interesting rocks,” as he recalls in the movie. It was decided that the photos would be taken in the geological formation known as the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland. “We moved there with a family, three adults and two children, and it rained for five days, it was very depressing,” says Powell. “After taking a series of black and white photographs, I decided to cut out all the silhouettes of the children and make a montage of 11 beautiful children walking around the octagonal stones with them, and then hand-colored them using intense colors like bright orange, gold, and red”.
‘I wish you were here’
Pink Floyd, 1975
Yes, the man on the right of the image is really burning himself; The idea arose after a conversation with the group members on Hipgnosis, during which someone was upset about how the industry and business had scorched the individual. “I found an expert named Ronnie Rondell and he let us set it on fire,” recalls Powell. “We were lucky the first 14 tries, but when we set Ronnie on fire for the 15th time, a gust of wind blew the flame in his face. The crew immediately jumped on him and emptied a fire extinguisher on him; they saved him. So he stood up and said, ‘Don’t trust me to do this again. We didn’t have it because we already had the photo.”
‘presence’
Led Zeppelin, 1976
The cover art is a montage of the other three images. A boat exhibit in the background; a family around a table in the front; the center is inspired by a black object made of cardboard and lined with black velvet and the solitaire that appears in ‘2001: a space odyssey’ (1968). According to Powell, the object “represents the battery, a source of energy and power that we all need to live. Led Zeppelin was just that.”
“Animals”
Pink Floyd, 1977
The band’s bassist and co-founder Roger Waters told the Hipgnosis members, “Did you know they made us a huge plastic pig so we could use it at our concerts?” This is how this cover was born, as reported in ‘Squaring the Circle’. It was decided to fill the giant pig with helium and fly between the chimneys of a factory. No sooner said than done. Problem? The only wire holding the fake animal to the ground snapped, and it only took a few seconds for its round silhouette to disappear from the heights. As a result, Heathrow airport had to suspend air traffic, and because the plastic could not be detected by radar, warplanes were sent to search for the escaped pig. Days later, the group received a phone call. “Are you the ones looking for a pink plastic pig? Because it’s on my land and it’s terrorizing my cows.” The cover became a ‘collage’ rather than a photo.
‘Wings are the best’
Wings, 1978
Paul McCartney called Powell one day and discussed with Wings his ideas for the cover of his next album. “I saw a statue. [la casa de subastas británica] Christie’s and I really want to put it in a special place.” Powell asked, “Where to?” and then the old Beatle exclaimed, “Everest!” It’s there to achieve, in a tiny space, a three-kilometer drop. And I hate heights,” recalls Powell.
“Peter Gabriel 2”
peter gabriel, 1978
Thorjerson and Powell worked with Genesis on the gorgeous cover design for their duo album ‘The lamb lie down on Broadway’ (1974), and after leaving the band, Peter Gabriel relied on them for his solo albums as well. None of the first three works he published had an official title; this, the latter, was christened “Scratch” by fans and the press for obvious reasons – “scratch” in Spanish translates as “scratch”. Peter Christopherson, then a ‘de facto’ member of Hipgnosis and later co-founder of bands such as Throbbing Gristle and Coil, took a photo of Gabriel looking as if the musician was scratching himself, and then strips of paper were placed over it. … white to make it look like he’s trying to remove himself from the photo. With today’s technology the process would take 10 minutes, but then it required hours of labor and expert use of scissors, tape measure, glue and Tipp-ex.
“Look, did you hear?”
10cc, 1980
If you look closely, you’ll see that the cover contains a tiny photograph of a sheep lying on a sun lounger by the ocean; apparently the animal represents all the people going to the psychologist and the sea symbolizes the human mind. “I wanted to take the picture in Hawaii because that’s where the biggest waves are,” Powell explains at one point in the documentary. Arriving in the archipelago, he noticed that the sheep there were conspicuous by their absence; He discovered he had one at the University of Hawaii and was able to get them to loan him out. Instead, they couldn’t find a sofa so they had to make one for him. “The session was a nightmare, because the waves scared the sheep jumping off the couch multiple times.” Finally, they gave the animal a Valium to calm it down. After dedicating so much effort and exorbitant amounts of money to the image, Powell saw how his partner reduced it to the size of a stamp when it was time to include it on the cover.