HIPGNOSIS’S SLEEVE ART FOR DARK SIDE REMAINS THE MOST ICONIC OF ALL, A MASTERPIECE BY THE COMPANY’S ODD-COUPLE DUUMVIRATE: DISARMING AUBREY POWELL AND THE LATE, PUGNACIOUS STORM THORGERSON. IN THIS EXTRACT FROM MARK BLAKE’S NEW BOOK, WE INTERRUPT THEIR JOURNEY FROM Z CARS TO LED ZEP, CAMBRIDGE TO CAIRO AND BEYOND, AND ZOOM IN ON A “BLATANT STOREFRONT MANOEUVRE” CHARGED WITH MYSTICAL POWER.

PHOTOGRAPH BY JILL FURMANOVSKY.

Through the clouds: (from left) David Gilmour, Aubrey Powell, Storm Thorgerson and Richard Wright, during Pink Floyd’s winter 1974 UK tour.

Jill Furmanovsky

STORM THORGERSON NEVER LIKED calling Hipgnosis a “design company”. He thought it sounded dull. Instead he described the partnership behind world-famous sleeves for Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Paul McCartney as an “art house”. Thorgerson and his foil in Hipgnosis, Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell, also had impeccable connections, having grown up in Cambridge with Floyd’s Syd Barrett, Roger Waters and David Gilmour.

In 1966, Thorgerson moved to London to attend the Royal College Of Art, while Powell was a set designer for the BBC’s Z Cars and Dr Finlay’s Casebook. They shared a flat in South Kensington, where, inspired by the artwork for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Thorgerson hustled David Gilmour into commissioning them to design the sleeve for Floyd’s second album, A Saucerful Of Secrets.

Thorgerson and Powell co-opted the RCA’s dark room to develop the LP’s cosmic collage: “And suddenly we were in business,” says Po. Soon, the newly-

formed Hipgnosis were creating artwork for T.Rex, Pretty Things, Humble Pie and Syd Barrett, and renting a studio above an antique bookshop at 6 Denmark Street in London’s West End.

In October of 1972, Hipgnosis shot their most daring and striking sleeve to date. In a tableau for Led Zeppelin’s upcoming Houses Of The Holy – directed by Powell – two angelically blond child models clambered across the basalt columns of Northern Ireland’s Giant’s Causeway. But not everybody was a fan. When a burglar broke into the studio, and failed to find the expensive Hasselblads, he ripped a print of country-rockers Cochise’s barebreasted album sleeve off the wall, tore the picture into tiny pieces, and then defecated on the floor. Meanwhile, Hipgnosis’s creative reputation had yet to translate into the big bucks. “We still staggered along week to week,” says former studio assistant Bruce Atkins, “and there never seemed to be any money.”

Yet a sleeve design for their longest-standing client was about to change all that.

HIPGNOSIS’S OFFERING FOR PINK FLOYD’S 1972 soundtrack album, Obscured By Clouds, had been a happy accident. Art house film director Barbet Schroeder’s latest movie, La Vallée, was about a French diplomat’s wife discovering her sexual self in the jungles of Papua New Guinea. Thorgerson and Powell worked through a pile of 35mm slides taken from the film. One was an outtake of its male lead, Mark Frechette, standing in a tree. When the projector’s lens jammed, the image was thrown out of focus.

The tree’s blurred foliage reminded them of the oil slide projections at the UFO club on Tottenham Court Road, where Pink Floyd had once been the house band. But the hours the young Thorgerson had spent studying art books at home in Cambridge hadn’t been forgotten. Hipgnosis later compared the picture to French painter Georges Seurat’s pointillist art, where patterns of tiny dots created an image.