Downloaded from YTS.MX
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
[footsteps]
[♪ "Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Parts I-V" by Pink Floyd]
[Aubrey Powell] Hipgnosis is what it says.
Hip, cool and groovy. Gnostic, meaning wise.
[Noel Gallagher] What I love about vinyl is the artwork.
Great photography,
and graphic design, and great imagination.
[man] Incredible songs. Incredible albums.
But synonymous with so many of those records
is the artwork of Hipgnosis.
[Peter Saville] It was the people who the work was for.
The megastars of the late '60s, early '70s, Hipgnosis,
they were, in a way, a kind of a lens of fascinating excess.
[Aubrey Powell] I'd been kicked out of school
and both my mother and father lived abroad.
So I found myself footloose in Cambridge
and I went to live in a house in Clarendon Street.
And I kept seeing these very cool-looking people
going in and out of this one house.
And I thought, "Now they're people I should get to know."
[jazz playing]
I went across the street,
went upstairs and went into this extraordinary room.
I'd never seen anything like it.
It was Bohemian, to say the least.
It was full of graffiti.
You know, Nietzsche, "God is dead".
A pair of army boots drawn by Syd Barrett.
I didn't even know who Syd Barrett was then.
Everybody was smoking dope,
sitting around, listening to music.
John Coltrane, something like that.
And I was introduced to this guy with long hair
who was very brash.
"Hello, man." That was Storm.
Storm was, like, the leader of this pack
of very nice boys and girls.
Um, but Storm just wouldn't stop talking.
He had been freely educated,
and so he was very loud and very free.
He was also very bright. Very chirpy.
And he played rugby very well.
We played in the same rugby 15.
After the pub, we used to go back to Storm's mother's house.
We used to pile in, about eight or nine or ten of us.
Sometimes drunk, sometimes not.
Storm's mother, Vanji, was very liberal
and didn't seem to mind what we all got up to.
So, Pink Floyd were there,
but they weren't called Pink Floyd.
And, well, we were all there getting a bit drunk,
I don't know, or very stoned.
So, I sat around, and we smoked some joints.
And the conversation was full of laughter.
I felt at home there somehow.
I was kind of a loner, bit lost, in a way. I was only 16.
Anyway, couple of hours in...
[loud knocking]
...big bang at the front door, and it's the police.
Everybody ran out of the room,
shovelling pills, grass, hash in their pockets.
Out the back door.
I stayed put.
Anyway, the police got in the house and found nothing.
And we got a scolding.
And Storm sat there and he said to me,
"Why didn't you leave with the others?"
And I said, "I don't believe in dumping a sinking ship."
"I believe in fighting it out till the end."
And from that moment on,
we were in each other's company, and never left.
And became like brothers.
[♪ "Interstellar Overdrive" by Pink Floyd]
Storm and Po worked for the greatest artists in the world.
Whether that was Pink Floyd, whether it was Led Zeppelin
whether it was Paul McCartney.
People that could have worked
with whomever they wanted to work with.
And Storm was a really difficult guy.
[Storm] I'm described by some as difficult to work with,
by others as a ponce, by some as a narcissist
with an ego the size a small planet,
by some as really awkward, argumentative,
by others yet as grumpy.
Very few as handsome and sexy, which is the way I see myself.
Somehow there was a bonding between us.
And because he was bright and so intellectually sharp,
I immediately gravitated to that.
I thought this man...
I can learn something from this man.
None of us were aware at the time
that Pink Floyd would come out of it,
or so much creative talent
would suddenly arrive from that scene.
But there was definitely the undercurrent
that we were part of the hipsters.
[♪ "Let There Be More Light" by Pink Floyd]
[Po] Pink Floyd were getting a lot of attention.
And suddenly everyone was moving to London.
Storm would go into the Royal College of Art.
And I thought, "Oh no, I'm gonna be left behind."
And he said, "Well, just come with me
in the autumn term and enrol,
like you're one of the students in the photographic school."
I said, "I don't know anything about photography."
He said, "Well, come on. I'll teach you."
I said, "Well, what do I do?"
He said, "You point, shoot, reload and repeat."
"Point, shoot, reload and repeat."
And Storm was aggressive like that. I thought, "OK."
Went down to the darkroom.
And I stood next to him and watched the picture
I'd taken some half an hour earlier
come through on this white piece of paper
of this beautiful photograph of a car.
And I got goosebumps all over me.
I absolutely went, "Oh, my God, this is alchemy."
And I knew instantly that's what I had to do.
I need to be a photographer. I wanna be a photographer.
I don't care what it takes, that's what I have to do.
This is magic.
So, for six months, I attended the Royal College as a student.
So already we're starting to see the ducking and diving
that was to characterise Storm and Po's
very successful artistic business relationship.
[♪ "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun" by Pink Floyd]
OK, Po. How did Hipgnosis first get involved
in sleeve design?
Er, through the back door, really. Um...
[chuckles]
We knew the Pink Floyd in Cambridge. Um...
And when we came to London,
Floyd were starting to do some things then.
Well, they were starting, flat, and they came along,
and I suppose because we'd been friends,
it was sort of the natural thing to say, "You're in visuals,
why don't you have a go at the album sleeve?"
And that was the first thing we did.
[David] Storm asked me. He said... We're old friends,
even then, when I was 22 and he was 24,
if I could persuade the others to let them do the album cover.
And they were young, and I guess you'd say vital.
And that's what I thought we needed.
Something a bit more unusual and wilder, I guess.
[Po] We wanted to create an image
for Pink Floyd at that time
that was based on what they called space rock.
[Storm] We tried to simulate on the picture
a kind of swirling cosmos of images
that were supposed to represent
a kind of kaleidoscopic feeling of a simulated drug experience.
[Po] Storm had the idea. He said,
"Let's take a picture out of this alchemical book,
let's take a picture out of a Marvel comic of Doctor Strange."
"Let's do this, let's do that. OK."
I got the Pentax,
and I shot these things all in black and white.
Processed the film in the darkroom,
and started to create, through the enlarger
by shielding off different parts of the paper,
and then changing the negative
and then doing it again, and then this montage of pictures.
There were dozens of different versions.
But then there was one that just zinged out.
So then I knew how to hand tint and hand colour.
But there was pressure from the record company
to actually have a picture of the band somewhere.
We then went to Hampstead Pond,
where we photographed the band in infrared film.
And we placed a little picture of the band
in infrared in there from that session.
And that was the very, very first album cover,
really, that we did.
[David] There was some genius in there,
but there were times when they weren't that professional.
But they were learning as they went along,
and they had to work everything out from the beginning.
It was such a simplistic artwork, but it worked for them.
And it started Storm's and my career.
They represent the golden age of the music business
where people believed that music was art
and it could change the world.
Whereas now, music is a commodity
and it changes the share price
of whatever company it's attached to.
Whereas back in the '60s, rock stars were artists
and graphic designers were artists.
All that work has stood the test of time.
[♪ "Baby Lemonade" by Syd Barrett]
[Po] The name "Hipgnosis" came from Syd Barrett.
He was living in our flat at the time,
and one day, Storm and I came up in the elevator.
And we had this beautiful white painted door,
and somebody had written in biro "hipgnosis".
Exactly the same spelling.
"Oh, somebody's written... We gotta paint the door now."
Walked in, and there's Syd.
And Storm said, "Did you write that?"
And Syd shuffled and looked very sheepish, and sort of nodded
and sort of walked away as he normally did at that time.
It wasn't Syd, who did all sorts
of extraordinary, wonderful things.
Dave Henderson came up with the idea of Hipgnosis.
A friend called Adrian Haggard, he wrote on the wall
the word "hipgnosis" with a "G" in it.
And if anyone says anything else,
it was Adrian Haggard that came up with the name.
We admired this pun on gnostic knowledge
and being hip,
and Storm seized it.
[Po] Storm went, "Hip, cool, gnostic, wise."
"Let's call ourselves Hipgnosis." That was it.
[♪ "Interstellar Overdrive" by Pink Floyd]
[Storm] We lived in a flat that became fairly notorious
called Egerton Court,
which was in an area of London called South Kensington.
And this is the height of psychedelia,
height of the so-called hippie revolution.
[flies buzz]
[Roger Dean] Now, Egerton Court had its own history.
Roman Polanski had just made Repulsion in it.
And I remember one day Storm had all these...
theatrical lights in his room.
And he said, "They were abandoned on the stairs."
[laughs] Which was the beginning of Hipgnosis's lighting
and camera equipment.
[David Gale] We started to hear about this drug called LSD.
And we started to take it.
At this point, things accelerated considerably.
[♪ "Hope for Happiness" by The Soft Machine]
[Po] When I first took LSD at Egerton Court,
I thought, "Well, I've gotta try this."
So one night, I'm with Storm and a couple of other people.
You know, we dropped a tab.
[Jenny] Taking LSD completely changed my life.
I could sort of see that nothing was actually solid,
that the table was just all colour, all sort of atoms.
I didn't experience any fear at that time. Later I did.
And I just remember laughing.
Laughing and laughing and laughing.
Everything was so funny, so intense.
It was kind of magical.
[overlapping laughter]
At Egerton Court, we were taking quite a lot of LSD.
And I began to notice there was a change in the atmosphere
with the people in the apartment.
[David Gale] In the Cambridge group,
it occasioned a great split,
LSD being the dangerously powerful substance that it is.
[Po] First of all, Syd Barrett came and joined us.
He'd been booted out of Pink Floyd by that time
because he was just too difficult.
He was frightening. His eyes were black.
LSD had done him in.
And he lived in the room opposite me.
And... there was a fear that emanated from him.
And when you've taken quite a lot of LSD,
you feel your senses in overdrive.
So, I began to pick up on that.
It was horrible. And then other people began to pick up on it.
And then we started to get paranoid.
You couldn't look somebody in the eye.
I began to have hallucinations where I didn't want them.
I couldn't smoke dope any more.
It began to affect my brain and set me back into an LSD mode,
which I didn't want.
You know, I was working. I didn't have time for this.
Storm also had some upsetting experiences.
And we both finished up going to psychiatrists.
And it worked. I talked through a lot of shit.
And I realised that, in one way,
LSD had given me lateral thinking.
I could think out of the box. It was really easy.
And I think that was part of the success of Hipgnosis,
that both Storm and I could easily adapt
to moving away from the norm.
[Storm] Once I'm trying to do a design,
I don't mind where the inspiration comes from.
So I will plunder any artist I can possibly find.
I don't really care.
I don't feel thieving is what I do, it's borrowing.
So, in that sense, you plunder
the art world willy-nilly, as it were.
[Po] After the success of Saucerful of Secrets,
Pink Floyd went on tour, and they wanted some posters.
I took a photograph of a cosmic scene
of stars and stuff like that.
And then I took a photograph of a clock.
And then I took a photograph of Storm's ear.
And then Storm started to mix and match
and suddenly we had this poster.
These three posters, they were impressive.
I was so knocked out with them.
It was an important stepping stone because, again,
it was a second commission from Pink Floyd.
And then other work started to come in.
[♪ "Pow R. Toc H." by Pink Floyd]
Storm and I then decided to make a go of it.
We'd started a business. We hadn't intended to.
If you'd said to me, "Were you going to go into album covers?"
Absolutely no way at all. I never even thought about it.
But we had.
We don't have particular roles. I mean, they vary.
I would say that Po is better at photography.
But I probably have a few more ideas.
I tend to be much more sentimental, romantic,
slightly old-fashioned. [chuckles]
Storm and I worked so well together, we really did.
We sort of had a synergy.
[♪ "Atom Heart Mother (suite)" by Pink Floyd]
Storm said, "Let's just do a cover
that's completely meaningless, has no meaning whatsoever."
"What's the most meaningless thing we can do?"
"We'll just get a picture of a cow
and we'll stick it on there."
[Storm] All I did was I drove out of London.
This is the first cow I saw.
We jumped over a fence, took a picture of a cow,
got in the car and came home.
Lulubelle III, she was called.
And we photographed that,
showed the band, and Roger went, "That's it."
"That's it." And Storm said, "There's one proviso:
No name on the cover and no title."
He went, "Perfect."
I was probably one of a great chorus of voices that went,
"Oh, how fucking cool is that?"
"Putting a cow on a record cover. That's weird."
[Storm] When I showed it to the managing director
of the record company, he went apoplectic.
The veins in his neck stood out.
And he kept scratching his head
and getting redder and crosser, and saying to me,
"What has a cow got to do with Pink Floyd?"
"Are you fucking mad?"
So I said, "It's not my fault. It's their fault. Blame them."
So this is another example of getting away with blue murder,
getting away with a hell of a lot
because what has a cow got to do with Pink Floyd?
They're one of the few bands who, at the time,
could get away with this kind of rubbish.
They were so overwhelmed by it...
[laughs]
...that, I mean, they were absolutely surprised.
They said, um, you know, "Great."
"We've gotta have multi-million- dollar spending on this."
And they promoted it with large inflatable pink cow udders
that went out to all the dealers,
the record shops, I mean, in thousands.
And I always remember going to LA
and walking down Sunset Strip, and there was the cow.
And I remember people saying,
"Have you seen that picture of the cow on the Strip?"
Of course, it's a failure
because the cow itself becomes iconic.
And it's not a nothing cover in the end.
It seems like it has some sort of special meaning or something.
It was very nice sometimes
just to make sure there was something there that just said,
you know, this isn't really a hundred percent full-on serious.
It's very difficult to tell whether you're,
you know, doing art,
like, whether the picture is what you want
or whether it's something that's proscribed by something else,
ie, a client that's come along and said,
"Can I have picture for this jacket, for this record?"
The vitriolic quality of reaction has,
to me, been a testament of how effective it is.
- OK, Po. - OK, Dave.
[Po] Being provocative got us noticed.
We were keen to have a career.
We wanted to make it. We were ambitious.
We started looking for premises.
And what came up was Denmark Street.
6 Denmark Street.
[woman] Oh, it was appalling. It was terrible.
They didn't have a toilet. I think they just had a sink.
You'd think, how did such polished work
come out of such a dump?
It was a mess. Always was.
Disgusting place, quite honestly.
I remember The Shadows came there once
and said, "Do you have a toilet?"
We said, "No, we pee in the sink."
So they said, "OK, if you pee in the sink,
we'll pee in the sink."
The studio was a shithole. [laughs]
It was a dance studio.
And there was a guy there living with a woman.
And they got a big grand piano in the middle of the room.
And he said, "I need to get out of here, now."
And he said, "Give me some money, and we'll be gone."
And he said, "And I don't want the piano."
So, literally, within two weeks, Storm and I had a studio.
I didn't know what to do with this piano.
So I walked up the road to Heal's,
to their piano department, and said,
"Are you interested in this?"
They said, "This is a very valuable piano."
And they gave us enough money for it
to buy all our first camera equipment,
all our first lighting equipment,
and to build a darkroom, and all the darkroom equipment.
It was a gift from God.
And the biggest mistake we made
was we still used a bath,
a proper bath, to wash the prints in.
And, of course, that was a disaster, because...
not long after we'd been there, the prints clogged up the bath,
it overflowed over a long weekend,
and flooded the antique Greek bookshop underneath us,
causing tens of thousands of pounds' worth of damage.
[laughs]
Luckily we were insured.
They were rascals. Yes, definitely.
Well, a little bit... little bit shady.
Po did all sorts of things untoward. [Laughs]
He sold a car that fell to bits.
London was lawless. It really was in the late '60s.
And one was just part of that whole lawlessness.
I remember throwing a sofa off a roof
because it wouldn't fit in the apartment,
and it landed on a taxi. Nothing ever happened.
He did all sorts of things. No, he's a crook.
[Po] I could hotwire a car.
I could hotwire a Mini and steal it for somebody,
then sell it.
It was just extra money and it was fun.
I'm sure Po wouldn't mind me saying
that he would sell his grandmother for the right price.
And he had lots of laundered money! [Laughs]
[Po] When the '60s exploded,
people were getting rich suddenly.
Everything was game.
[man] Storm wasn't motivated by money at all,
which must have been a massive irritation to Po.
[Po] I just wanted to make money and be successful
and do the things I loved to do, which were creative things.
And Storm was the same, really.
We would get the number 50 bus into town
to buy these records when they came out
by The Smiths or The Jam.
And we'd sit and stare...
at the artwork all the way home,
and read it all before you got home and even played it.
Where was it recorded, who played on what,
what the sleeve notes were.
The lyrics to the album if they happened to be on there.
And there's a great quote from someone.
"Vinyl is like the poor man's art collection."
You get these posh people who've got art on the wall.
Working-class people have got art on the floor,
stacked against the wall.
And I thought that was a great quote.
It's so good, it must have been mine, but I don't think it was.
The first time that we really got publicity
about what we were doing was when we did The Nice Elegy.
[♪ "Hang on to a Dream" by The Nice]
[Storm] Elegy came directly from the music.
I'd been playing the music just prior to going to bed.
In my mind I saw this desert populated with red footballs.
And when I told Po, he said, "That's absolutely insane."
"What's it got to do with anything?"
I said, "It's something that felt like the music."
And somehow we managed to persuade Keith Emerson
that it was a great idea.
I then went to the record company who were Charisma,
and it was run by a guy called Tony Stratton-Smith
who was a real character. And he looked at us.
He was highly educated,
and he said, "This is an amazing image."
"It's a piece of landscape art."
"But where are you gonna do this?"
"Saunton Sands or something?"
So we both said, "Sahara," being the only desert we knew.
And that's what we did.
[Po] Storm and I had to get 60-ish footballs, deflated.
It was the only way to ship them by plane.
And I tried to pump up one of these balls.
It took 20 minutes. And we had 60 of them.
But it made a stir.
And suddenly people realised
you could do anything on an album cover
if it was interesting.
And to me, it's the tipping point of Hipgnosis
whereby we realised we could do a piece of land art
and sell it as an album cover.
And we learned from this
not only that we could do something outlandish
but also that if the musician liked it,
this was an absolutely pivotal, crucial point.
[Po] Once you got into Rolling Stone,
which everybody read at that time,
it was the biggest-selling rock paper there was,
people began to sit up and take notice.
[♪ "Band on the Run" by Paul McCartney and Wings]
1973 was the tipping point because during that year,
we worked for many big bands.
And suddenly we were the go-to studio.
♪ Well, the rain exploded with a mighty crash
♪ As we fell into the sun
[Po] I have to say, when you get a call from a Beatle,
it was a bit like a call from God.
♪ Band on the run
Admiring their work that I'd seen with Pink Floyd,
I just rang 'em up,
and just said, "I've got an album coming up,
and I've got a rough idea for it."
"Are you interested in working with me?"
"I like the idea of, um, a group of escapees
escaping out of the prison. What would you stage it like?"
I'm trying to think of those things, those tableaus
they used to have of ancient Greece, you know.
Anyway, this was, like, staged, it was a prison escape.
[indistinct chatter]
[Po] He gave us a list of people that he wanted
to be part of the prison break.
Hollywood celebrities and stuff like that.
This is it. This is the cover.
Forget the prison outfits, this is it.
[Paul McCartney] He did also say,
"I'd like the people in the photo
to be people you knew
but just people you could pick out
and, "Ah, yeah, that's that boxer, John Conteh."
Or, "Oh, that's that that guy, you know..."
Which way are we trying to escape?
We're all going thataway.
The light is coming from the top of that lamp.
Some of you will be looking up there.
Some will be more concerned about getting away.
But you will be caught in a position...
[Po] The whole thing had a great sense of camaraderie
and fun about it.
Storm took on the role of kind of maître d'
and bossing people about, which he was good at.
Linda, can you go down? Denny, can you go down?
Crouching. Like we're crouching to get away.
Are we all up against the wall?
OK, we're reloaded now.
If you can all adopt the same positions again.
You really must stay very still for that one second, please.
[Paul] It was the idea I'd had,
but brought to life by Hipgnosis.
So, yeah, I was very happy with what they'd done.
[Po] It was a very, very good beginning of a relationship.
[Storm] We like to do pictures we get off on, primarily.
So that's what I was saying earlier about relationships
between the music and the image
is that the relationships may be private because they're ours.
And if people are gonna hire us, or employ us,
or they like what we do, it's because they also get off
on our private relationships between the music and a picture.
The difference between us
is that you can put out a wider variety of styles.
I mean, basically, if a band comes to me,
they have to like what I do.
I thought they made a good team. I mean,
in a way, Storm would go in and set off a bomb
and Po would come along and pick up the pieces.
That's how I thought that relationship worked.
They came as a double act, you know.
Between themselves, they were like
kind of cussed brothers, I think.
[♪ "The Ocean" by Led Zeppelin]
I don't know whether we met them on the street.
There was a drug deal.
Maybe they actually threw money at us.
I have not the slightest clue how we came upon them.
Personally, I'd seen something of Wishbone Ash
which was quite minimalist, but it was like a Viking.
The challenge for anybody to come forward
with any kind of artistic nuance was to actually brave a meeting.
[Po] So a meeting was set up. We went at the appointed time,
climbed up these old rickety stairs
and walked into quite a scuzzy office, you know.
Considering this was the biggest band in the world,
I was quite surprised.
And in the corner, barely lit, was this enormous man.
This is G. Peter Grant to you.
It was quite intimidating to meet him
because his reputation went before him.
Don't fucking talk to me. It's my bloody act.
I'll leave you any time.
You couldn't even get on the starting line.
You don't know your fucking concession here.
Your mate's selling the T-shirt.
[Po] He was the gatekeeper of Led Zeppelin.
You never approached Led Zeppelin
without going through him.
I think it was Robert Plant kicked it off.
Said, "So, what have you got?"
Right? So I had a book by Arthur C Clarke
called Childhood's End.
And at the end of the story,
all the children of the Earth go up to heaven
in this massive, fiery sort of explosion.
They said, "Where are you thinking about doing this?"
And I said "Well, I thought about Giant's Causeway
because it's a very interesting place to be."
And Robert Plant said, "Why not the Isle of Staffa?"
"It's the other end."
So it seems like by some cosmic means or another,
we both hit on this great idea.
So, we bat and balled it for a few hours.
And there was lots of chat and laughter
and it was all very good.
But nothing from Peter Grant. Not a single word.
And then suddenly this stentorian voice said,
"All right, that's enough. Don't fuck up." That was it.
And that's how my relationship with Peter Grant
and Led Zeppelin started.
We cast for models and we chose
Stefan and Samantha Gates, brother and sister,
and their mother who would chaperone them there.
We had to get these kids up early in the morning.
And the idea was to spray them with this hairspray.
Different colours. So we'd have the cars all getting warmed up
because they'd have to lie on the beds and be sprayed
and then we'd have to wait for the paint to dry,
and then wrap them in blankets when it was dry,
and put them in a warm car and drive them to the Causeway.
I wanted them covered in gold and silver.
Really to have a feeling of alien, an alien race.
[Alex] And I think the original idea was to shoot it in colour.
But that was never gonna happen.
It was just pouring with rain. It was just miserable.
[Po] The weather was appalling.
And on the north coast of Ireland, it rains, it pours,
it howls with wind.
And after about three or four days, we'd run out of paint.
I realised, in a flash, that I was never, ever going to get
the picture that I'd originally envisaged.
Now, we were in desperate straits,
I had to get this picture.
[♪ "No Quarter" by Led Zeppelin]
So, all the rocks were octagonal.
And I realised that if I took a photograph
of an individual on each rock
I could actually cut round the shape of the rock
and create my own collage
of what I believed it would look like.
And I did it literally in half an hour.
Bang, and we were done.
It was an epiphany that I had about it.
And I thought, we're gonna hand tint this,
and try and do something with it.
We then went to Dunluce Castle,
which was further down the coast.
And I had this image,
you know, giving-to-the-gods kind of posture.
And I never sort of felt in any way
this was a sacrificial image,
but it looked so bloody good, you know.
So I just thought, I'm gonna hand tint that too.
So we made the collage, stuck it all together.
And then I sent it off to a guy called Phil Crennell.
He was an expert colourist
who could do Victorian postcard kind of colouring.
But he lived on an old motor torpedo boat
way down the Thames which he was restoring.
And this valuable artwork
I could see there being retouched
amongst oil cans and dirty old cloths
where he was fixing the engine.
So then I got a phone call from Peter,
you know, "Where's the artwork?"
He said, "Look, the band's doing a tour of England."
"Pick us up at St Pancras Station
and drive us to Victoria, and we'll look at the artwork."
I had a Mini. Peter Grant getting in a Mini,
a man who was sort of six foot five and weighed 130 kilos.
He was an enormous man.
The car just barely moved along. And Jimmy squeezed in the back.
And Jimmy was still in his stage clothes.
We got to Victoria Station. I opened the trunk of the car.
And I was completely freaking out at this point.
You know, were Led Zeppelin going to like
something that I actually hadn't sold them on?
[Jimmy Page] Po had the artwork in the boot of a car.
And we saw it and I thought it's absolutely magnificent.
The whole concept of what that cover was,
relative to the music that was inside it, was incredible.
By this time, there was about 20 or 30 people round the car
and they all gave me a round of applause,
which I thought was very sweet.
They just made the grade. They became a part of us.
[♪ "The Ocean" by Led Zeppelin]
It was a very clever combination.
They obviously worked really, really well together.
But they were like chalk and cheese.
You were either, sort of, drawn to one or the other.
♪ Singing in the sunshine
♪ Laughing in the rain
♪ Rocking the moonshine
♪ Rolling in the grain
[Po] Peter Grant was a very imposing man.
I always called him "the gatekeeper"
because you never met any of his artists
without going through him.
Did he take Po under his wing? I would think so.
And I should imagine that Po was under there like a rocket.
[Po] I worked for a lot of his artists.
They were all signed to Led Zeppelin's Swan Song label.
We designed the label.
It was taken from an idea from a pre-Raphaelite painting
of Icarus flying too close to the sun.
In hindsight, pretty appropriate.
[♪ "Money" by Pink Floyd]
[Storm] In some ways, it's flattering
because people often ask me about Dark Side of the Moon.
And it was very much down
to the keyboard player, Rick Wright,
who had said to me one day,
"Storm, can we not have one of your pictures?"
I said, "That's what I do." He said, "We've had those."
"Can't we have something else?"
"Can we have something cool and graphic? Neat and tidy?"
And he actually said, "I'd really like it to look like
a Black Magic box of chocolates."
[man] Black Magic...
because she is.
[Po] This album was going to be a big one for them.
They'd all realised that they'd made something very special.
♪ Money
♪ It's a gas
[Po] Storm and I were actually depressed about it
because it really wasn't our style.
One day, I was looking through
this physics magazine about light
and about refraction of light. And Storm was hovering over me.
He looked at me and he said, "I've got it, Po."
And he went like that. He made a sign like that.
I said, "What? What is it?"
And he said, "It's a prism."
♪ Get back
[Storm] We submitted it to the band
along with six other roughs.
They stood around and went, "No, no, no, no, yes."
"No, no, no, yes." And it took about two minutes.
It was unanimous and instantaneous
and unequivocal and direct.
It just shone out above anything else.
I think Storm wanted to show us more things
but we just saw that one. "That's the one. Do it."
Perfect. It has everything and it's a great iconic image.
And that was it.
So they said, "Go away. That's it."
"We're fine. We love it. Take it away."
And Storm got the hump. He said, "What do you mean?"
"We've got these other ideas to show you."
And they all went, "No, we don't wanna see those."
[♪ "Breathe by Pink Floyd]
The reason it looks like that is that...
I've got to get it from
a school exercise book.
Although there are plenty of really quite good photographs
of prisms with rainbows in them,
that don't have that iconic look.
[David Gilmour] When we saw what we were being offered,
we knew that that was the right thing.
It just was beautiful and iconic.
[Po] It was Roger's idea
to turn the light beam into a heartbeat.
The individual is able
to project their own reading.
It can mean
what you want it to mean.
There's a kind of enigmatic sci-fi kind of charm
to both of those images.
They're scientific data.
As such, it doesn't date.
[Po] When I was going through the archive,
I came across this letter from our friends in India,
years before Dark Side of the Moon.
And halfway down, there was a picture of a triangle,
and underneath, it said something like,
"Remember this?"
♪ Breathe
♪ Breathe in the air
♪ Don't be afraid to care
♪ Leave, but don't leave me
[Storm] I remember being on a train thinking,
"This is not enough. Well, it's not enough for me."
So I suggested to the band that we did a poster.
A picture of the pyramids.
I think Dark Side was one of those lucky things
that is hard to actually explain
because the band also have never understood
why it was so successful.
We, of course, know it was the cover, right?
If Dark Side of the Moon was on a band's cover
that, say, sold 10,000 copies,
no one would know that cover today.
Pink Floyd and Hipgnosis made that a cultural landmark.
Pink Floyd selling 65 million
probably helped it become the symbol that it is.
Dark Side of the Moon, I think it's important
because it points very, very directly
and poignantly at the predicament
that the human race found itself in in 1973,
and still finds itself in now.
[Po] It's come to be used politically.
It's come to be used as a symbol for enjoyment.
You find it in all sorts of unsuspecting places.
I often see it tattooed on people's arms.
Dark Side of the Moon without any question
changed the course of history for us.
Our career went stratospheric.
Suddenly we started to earn real money
and that made a difference,
and a confusing difference, too,
because it pushed a wedge in Pink Floyd.
Things were never the same for them.
And the same thing sort of happened to me and Storm.
We were courted by advertising agencies.
The money was enormous.
Storm loathed and detested anything to do with advertising.
He loved the money,
but he didn't want to know about the rest of it.
My daughter, she was staying at my house for the weekend.
And I was late getting home from work.
And I said, "Sorry I'm late, but I've been in a...
I got caught at a meeting at the office."
And she's like, "Oh, right."
And I said, "Yeah, I've been in a, you know,
meeting about the artwork for my album."
She's like, "Artwork? What's that?"
And I was like, "You know, the artwork. The artwork."
And she's like, "I don't know what you're talking about."
Because she's grown up with the phone, right.
And I was saying, "Well, the cover of the record."
And she's like, "A cover? What?"
And the only way I could explain it to her, I said to her,
"You know the little tiny little picture on iTunes?"
She said, "Yeah." And I said,
"Right. Well, I've been in a meeting for that."
And she went, "They have meetings for that?"
As I pulled out the cover, and I said,
"Yes, and it fucking costs a hundred grand."
♪ You gave me the answer to love eternally
♪ I love you and you, you seem to like me
Shall we dance?
This is fun.
[Po] I got another call from Paul and he said,
"I've got an idea. I want you to do it."
"Can you come to LA this week?"
We were very, very excited, I have to say. Again...
it was working for a Beatle, twice round. Amazing.
♪ It's my carnival
♪ It's a lovely day
[Po] So Storm and I jumped on a plane to LA.
We went to a studio to see where he was recording.
The atmosphere was incredibly jolly.
Lots of spliffs being passed around, a few drinks.
It was really upbeat.
And then we got on to talking about the album cover.
[Paul] Me and Linda had this idea
that we'd use a couple of billiard balls.
A red and a yellow, as Venus and Mars.
And, um, that would kind of be the cover.
So it would be a really good graphic image.
All right, you win. I'm in love with you, yeah.
So Storm said,
"I'm not interested in this, Paul."
"I'm not interested in your idea."
"So I'm going to leave LA and Po can do it."
[chuckles] There was a slight stunned silence.
And then Paul said, "OK, man."
"That's fine. You go home, Po can deal with it."
"He's the photographer anyway, right?"
And when we got back to the hotel, I said to Storm,
"Was that really the right sort of approach we should have?"
And Storm said,
"If I can't do Hipgnosis ideas, I don't wanna do it."
[Paul] I seem to remember at the time
we had the slogan "It's all balls".
I think, in fact, I know we had T-shirts made.
"It's all balls."
[♪ "Letting Go" by Wings]
He was the rudest person I've ever met.
He's very bolshie.
- He was very blunt. - He was irritating.
I mean, he really did set out
to make life very difficult for people.
He was ever so rude.
[sighs] He was just so annoying.
- Strutted. He was a strutter. - Pain in the arse.
- Exceptionally awkward. - Cantankerous.
- Difficult. - He was pure, purely rude.
He could be really crabby, old Storm.
"No, I don't think that's any good."
Well, we're having it, Storm. So shut up.
He's rude to everybody.
Every single human being, he's rude to.
Storm Thorgerson was a man who wouldn't take yes for an answer.
Well, he was very lovable in spite of all of that.
- Highly intelligent. - Full of ideas.
- One in a million. - Total genius.
[Po] Work was just pouring in,
you know, from all different quarters.
And the studio, after '73, expanded.
We took another floor upstairs in Denmark Street.
We needed other people to work with us.
We were growing and expanding.
Graphics. We needed style.
So George Hardie delivered that.
Jill Furmanovsky joined.
And her first assignment was to photograph Pink Floyd live.
Peter Christopherson joined Hipgnosis
because he was brilliant at lighting.
And eventually, he became a full partner
because he was just so damn good.
Then a tall young man came into our studio one day
wearing a white linen suit.
And he spoke with a kind of effete, very polite accent.
I went round various record companies and said I could draw.
And I've never seen anyone
look so uninterested.
And then I went to Hipgnosis
and showed them my drawings.
And, you know, they were, there was a sort of...
mild mutters of approval,
which was quite a lot better than what I'd had,
you know, earlier in the day.
[Po] He was the bass player with Kilburn and the High Roads.
But he'd also been trained by Peter Blake at art school.
[♪ "I'm Not In Love" by 10cc]
So when it came to Original Soundtrack,
at the time, 10cc were very much what I'd call a pop band.
Storm and I wanted to do something that was...
based on the movies.
[Humphrey] We went down into an editing suite in Soho.
And I said, "This is fine, you know."
"Just leave me here for about three weeks, or whatever."
And they said, "No, sunshine, this costs £1,000 an hour."
[Po] I photographed a whole load
of interesting bits of cinema equipment.
Film cans, editing machines,
splicers, all sorts of stuff, in an attempt
to sort of create an almost impossible editing suite.
And I just went home and did these pencil drawings,
funnily enough I learned...
That's one of the things I did learn at art school.
[Po] The result was magnificent.
It was absolutely beautiful.
It mixed the ancient and modern.
He'd sort of got the atmosphere
of what I call old-time Hollywood there.
And at the same time, it gave it a very different look
from something coming out of the Hipgnosis stable.
[Humphrey] The only thing I'd had difficulty on...
real difficulty,
was the glove hanging down.
The, you know, the editor's glove.
It just looked like a blancmange.
Completely formless. I...
Anyway, I managed to draw it in.
I opened the drawing up and everyone said,
"Wow, that's wonderful."
You know. So I thought, ah, yeah...
And Storm just came over and said,
"Yeah, shame about the glove."
[Po] I had no thoughts of the work lasting,
or having any longevity beyond the following the day.
There was not a spare minute in the day to think about
what was gonna happen tomorrow.
It was just, "Let's get the next job done."
And it was so exciting.
Suddenly Peter Gabriel would turn up and wanna have a chat.
Or suddenly Wishbone Ash would potter in
because they were buying a new guitar downstairs.
It became a hub, a meeting point for people.
They were busy all the time. There was shouting going on
and people wanting things. Cow Gum.
It wasn't the days of Photoshop.
Everything was stuck down with Cow Gum
and then put on a copy camera and then retouched.
It was a crazy place, actually.
It was chaos.
But out of that chaos came the most extraordinary work.
[♪ "Down the Dolce Vita" by Peter Gabriel]
At first, I didn't want to be on the sleeve. So I thought,
"OK, if I'm gonna be on it,
it's gonna be in an interesting and unusual way."
[Po] He said, "I want to be on the cover,
but I don't want to be on the cover."
So Storm came into the studio, and he'd been in a taxi.
And it had been pouring with rain.
And he'd observed the car next to him
having rain droplets on a highly wax-polished surface.
And he said to me, "You know what?"
"Supposing we put Peter in a car
and yet we made more of the surface
of the body of the car than Peter?"
I took the photographs of him sitting there. And then,
Storm suggested that we paint it fluorescent blue,
and that we should scratch every single water droplet
to enhance the reflection.
These little tiny kind of crescent-shaped reflections.
And then we decided to take some more pictures
around the car.
And I moved round to the side to take a picture of Peter
through the side window, and he opened his eyes.
[dramatic orchestral music]
He'd got silver contact lenses and they bounced out like that.
It was really uncomfortable to wear them,
because it was sort of...
they were hard contact lenses and mirrored on the inside.
But I used to put them on sometimes on aeroplanes
and that would freak people out. So that would make me smile.
♪ Hey, Mac, sit down without Dolce Vita
[Po] The work was the most important thing of all.
To get the work out, get it done, get it looking good
and to the very best of our abilities,
and to go to the ends of the Earth to get it.
I would not give up until I had a picture.
I simply wouldn't. I was relentless about that.
That's how we were. Aggressive, relentless, difficult,
and obsessed, I suppose.
[Jill] When Storm was trying to do a piece of artwork,
there was just nothing that would stop him.
He just went until it was done.
And people were collapsing like flies all around him,
including himself.
[Storm] I remember one year we worked so hard,
we were doing a cover every fortnight. Crazy.
We were very preoccupied with the work.
So especially preoccupied that,
according to my then wife, it broke the marriage.
So she ran off with a neighbour.
He was devastated when Libby left him.
He found that very difficult.
[Po] His wife left him
and left him with a very young child.
Storm got custody, so he took care of Bill, his son
and didn't go away.
So all the wonderful ideas that we had going forwards,
shooting all round the world, doing different pictures.
I always went away and did them
very much to his brief, but to my composition and my style.
Come back, we'd review them,
and then the arguments would start.
"I prefer this picture to that. The sky is better here."
"The composition is better there."
To Storm, it was all about the idea.
[Noel] No one's interested in the covers any more.
There's no thought behind what the album means,
or the story of... any of the songs,
which is why the stuff for Hipgnosis is so important,
particularly the one for Wish You Were Here,
which has got a great story behind it
about people being burnt in the music business.
[♪ "Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Parts I-V" by Pink Floyd]
[Po] I was in Hipgnosis's studio one afternoon
and there was a knock at the door.
And Richard Evans, who worked there, opened the door,
and there stood this dumpy, fat man with a shaved head,
which obviously had been shaved by himself.
It was all kind of raggedy and all over the shop.
He said, "Oh, is Storm here?"
And I said, "No, he's not."
"He's up at Abbey Road with Floyd."
And I called Po, and Po came through
and looked at him and said, "Syd, is that you?"
I said, "What can I do for you? Come in."
He said, "No, are band here?" I said, "No, they're not."
I said, "Do you want to come in, a cup of tea?"
He said, "No, no," and disappeared down the stairs.
And of course then he showed up at Abbey Road Studios
and nobody recognised who he was.
Dave looked at me and grinned, and went,
"You haven't got it yet, have you?"
And in that moment, I went, "Fuck me, it's Syd."
"That fat bald bloke with a brown paper bag."
And of course it was.
The last time I'd seen him, he was this...
you know, dark-haired...
springy, springy guy.
And then, suddenly, there's this large morose bloke.
People were tearful, it was such a sad sight.
And he was obviously extremely discombobulated
and didn't really know what was going on.
But it was...
What was magical for Pink Floyd, there was...
they were actually recording Wish You Were Here
at the time he arrived, and so that was pretty weird.
[Jenny] Taking LSD is very dangerous.
Some people certainly fell by the wayside
because there were casualties, for sure.
[Roger] Wish You Were Here very, very well demonstrates
the schism in, in Pink Floyd,
coming as it did after Dark Side of the Moon,
when it was over.
And this was Roger's sort of take
on us being together as a pop group
who were not really communicating with each other,
and the absence of Syd,
and a much more general theme of absence.
[Po] There's certainly a connection
when you don't have a father figure.
Storm and I were both single children.
Roger Waters lost his father in the war.
David Gilmour's parents decamped to America.
And Syd Barrett's father died when he was 15.
So, it gave us a kind of camaraderie
and an understanding.
And Storm and I certainly, as individual souls,
were joined at the hip like brothers.
You know, I loved him like a brother.
We also understood that there was a lot of anger,
especially in Roger, about the record business.
So, we were talking about absence of sincerity,
about people being ripped off.
And I think it was George Hardie who actually said,
"People get burned in this business all the time."
And Storm said, "Why don't we set a man on fire?"
"He's being burned."
[♪ "Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Parts I-V" by Pink Floyd]
[Storm] And this is in the days before computers.
So, there was no fakery here.
The only way to set a man on fire,
and make it look for real, was to set him on fire.
We went to a place called Stunts Unlimited.
"Who wants to be on a record cover
when we could be in Towering Inferno?", they said.
Like we were a couple of hippies who, like...
[scoffs] "Who? Pink Floyd? What?"
But there was one guy, Ronnie Rondell.
And he said to me, "I understand exactly what you wanna do
and what you wanna do is probably one of the most
dangerous fire stunts you can do
because you're standing still and fire moves."
He did it about 15 times in all.
And I was begging him to keep going because I need,
you know, you never stop.
You push, you push, you push to get the better,
best, best, best shot.
And then the last time,
a breeze blew up as he caught fire,
and the wind whipped round his head like that,
enveloped him in ames, and bang!
He was thrown to the ground.
They sprayed the fire extinguishers, put him out.
He got up and said, "That's it. I'm not doing any more of that."
"That is it." He was all singed down the side of his face.
The interesting thing about Ronnie Rondell,
he said, "I've done so many fire stunts in movies
and nobody remembers me for that,
but everybody remembers me for Wish You Were Here."
[Storm] It was also just an amazing thought
of a man on fire shaking the hand of another man
not being perturbed that he was on fire.
So, therefore, the fire must be metaphorical.
However, the fire wasn't metaphorical, it was real.
So, there was always an inner contradiction to this picture.
[Po] The guy who is upright in Mono Lake,
he's really there. He held his breath for three minutes.
And he went up and it was the most perfect shot.
I even have goosebumps now thinking about it.
It was the most perfect shot imaginable.
Bang, and we had it.
It's one of the shots of my life.
The album cover, the story, the narrative is inside.
So we suggested to Pink Floyd
that perhaps we should put a black shrink wrap round it.
You can imagine being a record company having to deal with that
and having to negotiate that,
"All right, yes, there'd be a small sticker on it
with the name Pink Floyd on it."
It's hardly going to sell a lot records on that.
In fact, what's inside is some of his best work.
[David Gilmour] He's always off the wall.
Always different. I mean, always doing the unexpected.
And, um, I think that was very good for us.
[Roger] I think that's sort of the peak of the work
that Storm and Po did with Pink Floyd is that package.
It's really beautiful, I think.
There are people I hear who have never torn the shrink wrap off.
They've simply slit it down the edge
so they can get the album out to play it.
Therefore haven't seen the cover in 37 years.
And to my mind, that's a real success,
in terms of trying to represent absence.
"Thirty-seven years, you've never seen the cover?"
I don't think Storm was ahead of his time,
I just think he was a totally original man.
[♪ "Honeymoon With B Troop" by 10cc]
[Po] Storm and 10cc
really got on like a house on fire.
They had the same kind of...
cynical, silly, adventurous humour.
♪ Oh, it's so fine
♪ And you know what's mine is mine
[man] When they were coming up with ideas,
they'd have the album playing over and over again
in the studio.
So they were kind of getting steeped in the...
in the lyrics in particular of the album.
[man] One of my jobs was transcribing lyrics.
So we'd get a C60 cassette
and I'd sit on the floor of the studio
with the headphones jammed in
and handwrite out these lyrics.
And trying to work out what they were saying, it was really hard.
They would pick up on things that we didn't pick up on.
[Po] On the way to the recording studio,
there was a sign saying "deceptive bends".
And I remember we actually drew up a rough.
But then we thought of bends being about the diving bends.
And that was the whole point, really.
Just like 10cc's lyrics, what's the story in there?
♪ Too many broken hearts have fallen in the river
♪ Too many lonely souls have drifted out to sea
♪ You lay your bets and then you pay the price
♪ The things we do for love
And I don't really like it. And the reason being because...
graphics were put all around the outside
in a kind of porthole shape.
And this was very typical of the arguments
that would happen between me and Storm.
Because I liked the picture plain.
He always threw the kitchen sink at everything, Storm.
I think it was his insecurity about his ideas.
His ideas were so good, but he was never certain about them.
He still had a vision, or he'd keep adding to it, you know.
"Yeah, like that, but we could just do a bit more."
Without that sort of desire for perfection
and without that sort of battle of egos, in a way,
we wouldn't have got to the picture we had at the end.
[♪ "Nobody's Fault but Mine" by Led Zeppelin]
I received a call again from Peter Grant.
"There's a new album. There's no title."
"Just come up with an interesting idea."
[cheering]
And we started to talk about the power of Led Zeppelin.
They were powerful.
[♪ "Black Dog" by Led Zeppelin]
♪ Oh, yeah, oh, yeah
[Jimmy Page] Led Zeppelin definitely had a presence
that was just channelling out of, out of nowhere.
[Po] We started talking about power of persuasion.
The psychology of how you could draw people in.
That led on to a conversation about what people need.
People need Led Zeppelin.
♪ Oh, yeah
Storm said, "Well, what about the image from
the end of Arthur C Clarke's book 2001
that Kubrick had in turn interpreted
as this black solid object in space?"
"And supposing one took something like that
and made it as a battery that everybody needed?"
"Without this object, you couldn't live."
"You had to have it."
George went and hunted around Charing Cross Road,
in the libraries there
for stills that were out of the '50s
that we could place the object in
in sort of a normal setting.
The situations were a catalogue of important things in life.
[♪ "Also Sprach Zarathustra" by Richard Strauss]
We were trying to displace it in time.
We were looking at a time past
in which this black object was important.
[Po] I put the object on the table
in the middle of the room.
Jimmy walked in and he took one look at the object.
He said, "Is that it?" I said, "That's it."
And he went, "That's it. Great."
He felt the power of that black object.
[Jimmy Page] But when I saw the object, I said,
"This is great, but can we put a twist in it?"
And then they did it and they came back.
And it was like, "Well, this is it. This is great."
[Robert Plant] The whole idea of the object:
Creative, imaginative, and very unusual.
The way it actually moved through its phases
to become what it is was just fantastic.
No two sides alike, nothing parallel, nothing...
You know, it was just a unique piece of work.
It was the right decision.
Crikey, it got emulated on a building in Dubai.
[Po] Peter instructed me. He said, "Make eight."
"I'm gonna give four to the guys, one to you and Storm,
one to George Hardie," and one for himself.
[Jimmy] There were a myriad of different scenarios
which they were placing the object in.
It was a really fantastic way of establishing this object
as being an accepted part of normal life,
as was our music.
[Po] On the front cover
was a family sitting around a table at the London Boat Show.
I went to the boat show, shot the background,
shot the rest of it in Hipgnosis's studio.
And this is one of the original eight that was made.
And, as you can see, it's very pure in its shape,
and it's very beautiful.
This is the twist that Jimmy suggested.
And this is the sort of...
it's got this matte feeling to it.
And funnily enough, if anybody ever sees it
in the studio or something like that
people often say, "Can I touch it?"
Particularly fans,
because they feel that somehow it gives off some...
you know, something.
[♪ "The Blue Danube" by Johann Strauss II]
[Merck] I've actually got three of these.
They've all come from different collectors over the years.
Um, I'm not sure if all three of them are real.
But I like having three of them.
I'll like to have seven of them
just as much as I like to have three of them
or ten if I can find them.
I do think I've still got one of those somewhere.
It's a doorstop, I think.
But I must find it.
I'm sure Po's got a few in his garage.
[Po] By the mid '70s,
money was really rolling into rock stars' pockets.
The albums were selling in millions.
The money was gushing in.
You know, whether it was Paul McCartney
or Led Zeppelin, or...
or Pink Floyd, or Peter Gabriel,
they wanted their image to look right on the album cover.
This album cover was a very important asset to them.
And so our fortunes changed too.
Fees accelerated.
You were looking at $50,000 spent on an album cover.
I felt a bit like the fifth wheel on the car.
You had the four members of the band
and then there was this guy who was attached to the car
that went with them everywhere they went.
Peter Grant would say, "Well, you better get Concorde."
"Better get there tomorrow morning."
Suddenly I was becoming this kind of transatlantic merchant.
I was living the life of Riley. It was wonderful.
This was the heyday. This was the salad days of album covers.
I have put graphic designers...
weeping out of meetings
because that tiny little thing there
is not in the right place.
And I've let go...
while I was high, covers...
like the most famous record I've ever made,
(What's the Story) Morning Glory?
Has literally the shittest cover of all time
because I glanced at it.
"Yeah. That'll do."
And then it came out.
And then, a few years later,
you're going, "Who the fuck OKed that?"
It's like, "Well, you did." And, um...
So I take a lot more interest in it now.
If there was any bad feeling in the studio,
it was between Storm and me.
He would always turn up late,
dressed in tennis shorts and a smelly T-shirt.
I would have done a photographic print, beautiful,
and he'd come in and he'd say, "Bit too light there."
He'd take his thumb,
and he'd rub on it until there was a big mark on it.
"Oh, dear, you can't use that. I think you better do it again."
And I'd be, "Storm."
I threw a Hasselblad at him a couple of times
across the studio because he pissed me off so much.
So, Po and the red mist.
Yeah, I mean, we called it the red mist
because he would get seriously angry.
When it came to arguing about the work,
it was with the intention from both of us
to get the best out of it.
A lot of that was because of the...
banging of heads between him and Storm.
You know, this constant running over budget.
Storm didn't care about money.
He wanted the design, the photograph, whatever it was,
to be absolutely as he saw it in his head.
[♪ "Exposure" by Peter Gabriel]
[Peter Gabriel] Scratch, that record, came out of
Storm's second-hand box.
And this is a famous box. But it was basically the reject box.
All the ideas that he liked but no one else wanted.
I've got a great story about Robert Plant,
when I went to see him with some ideas for Led Zeppelin.
He turned over an idea he was looking at,
and on the back it said "Judas Priest" crossed out.
It said "Wishbone Ash" crossed out.
It said "Nazareth" crossed out.
He said, "Have you shown this idea to all these people?"
And I said, "Yeah."
I said, "A good idea's a good idea."
He said, "You and Storm are just a couple of chancers."
I mean, they're hucksters.
Everybody's trying to float an idea. It's great.
[clicks tongue]
If Pink Floyd didn't take them,
three weeks later, they'd appear on someone else's record.
Yeah, there's a picture of a lobster
being walked along the pavement,
and I think Paul McCartney used that one.
It's one of mine? Hmm!
What Paul McCartney didn't want, who was gonna have that?
10cc, perhaps.
Well, now... [chuckles]
I think I'll have to talk to someone about that.
Wait a minute. Lobster, yeah. OK. It's coming back now.
You never quite knew when he brought in the box
whether you were gonna get all these second-hand leftover ideas
or something fresh.
He was a master at passing off the rejects as originals.
He'd done a piece of promotion for Lumiere & Son.
But it had torn paper. And I just...
I thought, "This is so powerful."
I took a photograph of Peter like this,
with his hands like he's clawing at himself.
And then we got strips of paper, white paper,
stuck them down over the top of the print
so it looked as though he was tearing himself
out of the picture.
He was then mixing and recording in New York.
And he wanted Peter Christopherson
to come and take the pictures of him.
He and Peter get on really well.
And then Peter photographed Peter Gabriel
walking around New York
making these strange gestures with his hands.
You know, very dark.
You don't know what's happening in the narrative,
but it's definitely something uncomfortable and weird.
And only Peter Christopherson could get that intimate with him
doing those kind of shots.
[Po] I didn't really know Peter when he joined at all.
I got to know him some months later
when I was travelling in a car with him
through the deserts of America.
And I happened to be talking about his portfolio
and how impressed I was
with the images of the people he had there.
He said, "Oh, I was working in a mortuary at the time,
and I twisted the bodies around till I liked the shapes of them
and then I lit them and photographed them."
I was absolutely horrified.
I said, "Well, how did you do that?"
He said, "I only worked in the mortuary late at night,
so I could do what I wanted."
[♪ "Hamburger Lady" by Throbbing Gristle]
I realised there was an extremely dark side to Peter.
And this dark side went on further
when he joined Throbbing Gristle
and then went on to form his own band,
Coil and Psychic TV.
He was highly regarded and he's still a cult figure.
[Peter Gabriel] I know he has this very dark reputation,
but he didn't come across to me as a particularly dark person.
He was more like a sort of professor,
or academic in a way, I think.
What he'd brought to Hipgnosis was this element of darkness.
And we kind of needed that.
In a flippant world, and a fickle world of rock 'n' roll,
to have somebody who had this undercurrent
of presenting things that were very real, very raw.
Denmark Street had a rehearsal studio right behind Hipgnosis.
[Glen Matlock] When we first moved in here,
there was a guy out the window there...
kind of peering all the time,
and it was a bit off-putting and a bit weird.
Didn't really know
what went on there originally.
And it became very disconcerting.
So in the end,
we got some net curtains to put up here,
which was not very Sex Pistols and more little old lady,
to stop the guy peering in at us.
But it turns out it was a guy called Peter Christopherson
who ended up in Throbbing Gristle.
He was like the young guy of Hipgnosis.
And he wondered what we were all about.
And he befriended us.
And he even did some photo sessions with us.
He put John in a straitjacket, Steve in handcuffs.
He did Paul with all bullet wounds.
And he took me down the YMCA into the locker room.
So I didn't quite know what to make of that.
But it was kinda cool. But the other guys were also
the enemy in a way, I suppose. They did all the covers
for... what we saw as a dinosaur rock band.
One day, I walked into Hipgnosis's front door
and there coming towards me down the corridor
was John wearing an "I hate Pink Floyd" T-shirt.
And I said, "Oi, what's that?"
And he said, "They're all cunts, Pink Floyd."
"That's what they are." He walked out the door.
♪ I am an antichrist
♪ I am an anarchist
♪ Don't know what I want but I know how to get it
♪ I wanna destroy the passer-by
♪ Cos I
♪ I wanna be
♪ Anarchy
[Peter Saville] The megastars of the late '60s, early '70s,
they were living lifestyles...
that were entirely irrelevant to young people.
They didn't really talk to us about stuff that kinda concerned
where we were at.
[Peter] It's about something that connects to your reality.
That's the marked difference
between the kind of pre-punk and post-punk moment.
[yelling]
By the time you're oating huge inflatable pigs
over Battersea Power Station,
you really are not talking to, sort of, 15-year-olds any more.
♪ You got to be crazy
♪ Gotta have a real need
♪ Gotta sleep on your toes
♪ And when you're on the street
[Po] Storm came up with an idea of a small child
standing in a doorway watching his parents fucking in the bed.
Animals. It was... they laughed, but...
Thank you, no. Next. [Chuckles]
So I got a phone call from Roger. [Clears throat]
He said, "You know that I'm having a big plastic pig made
to go on our live shows?" And I said, "No, I didn't."
He said, "Well, come over to my house
and have a look at a maquette of it."
And looking out the window, he said,
"There's Battersea Power Station."
[Roger] I looked at the power station, and then I went,
"I know what I'll do."
"I'll finish the pig and we'll fill it with helium
and fly it over the thing and take photographs of it,
and that will be the album cover."
Storm was kind of grumpy about it.
And he and Roger were having
a little bit of a contretemps at this time.
Considering they used to play squash together,
tennis together, good friends,
there was definitely something in the air.
[Nick] I can't remember ever thinking,
"No, this is too big, too elaborate, or whatever."
We were in full prog-rock mode.
Our egos were all in pretty good shape.
[Po] I got permission. There was no health and safety.
No demands for anything else.
Yeah, you turn up, you... park your trucks and fly it.
[woman] It's almost a mystery to me that I went at all
'cause I remember it was a very cold morning.
But I was friends with some of the band, and...
I grabbed my camera at the very last moment
thinking I was gonna go out, just sort of see it,
and come back to bed.
And I have to say, I'm really glad I didn't.
♪ Big man, pig man
[Po] So on the day, everybody's in position.
Amazing clouds that day.
It looks like a Turner painting.
Absolutely something out of this world.
The gas cylinders went wrong
and couldn't inflate the pig.
"OK. Everybody home. Back again tomorrow."
So, we came back the next day. We inflated the pig.
It goes up between the chimneys.
It looks amazing.
[David Gilmour] There was only one actual cable
connecting us to it.
And at one point the ring went ping!
There was a loud bang like that. A crack.
And bits of it fell down onto the ground.
"Oh, my God! Oh, look, it's broken away." [gasps]
And the pig sailed up between the chimneys.
And then, vroom, it was gone. It was gone within seconds.
And as it went up, I saw a 747 jet fly across.
And I thought, "Oh, my God,
that's going straight into the air lanes of Heathrow Airport."
I'm sure there was a lot of rueful grinning going on.
"Did you get it?" "Er, no."
"Oh, fuck me." [laughs]
[Po] We had organised for day one
to have a police marksman there.
Where was the police marksman?
I heard that there had been a marksman the day before
and he hadn't been paid. So, he wasn't there that day.
It was the only thing that was asked of us.
In case the pig flew away, it would be shot out of the sky.
The police arrived.
They closed all the air lanes into Heathrow Airport.
Fighter jets were sent up to look for it. It was plastic.
It wouldn't appear on radar.
Police helicopter pilot who was sent to chase it,
he said there was no way they could catch it.
It was climbing faster than the helicopter could go.
[Po] Nine in the evening, our phone rings and...
this voice, in a very country accent, says to me,
"Are you the people looking for a pig?"
And I said, "Yes." He said, "Well, it's in my field,
and it's frightening my cows."
So in the end it was a collage.
It wasn't the real picture of the event.
But nobody was to know that until later.
The relationship with Storm and Roger was already tense.
When Roger learnt that Storm
was claiming design for the cover,
which was a very foolish thing to do,
Roger cut him out of his life. Bang.
I remember being royally pissed off
at the time, because they didn't ask me.
I thought, "Why are you doing that?"
♪ Dragged down by the stone
[Roger] Anybody who knew Storm will tell you
he was insufferable.
But among being one of the most annoying people in the world,
he was also one of the most lovable people in the world.
And one of the bravest people in the world.
I loved Storm.
I still love Storm.
[Po] Pink Floyd themselves were going through huge upheavals.
Rick Wright got fired from the band.
David and Roger didn't get along any more.
There were huge rows about this, that and the other.
And we were just part of that whole process, you know.
[Peter] Those '60s characters,
they just became kind of victims and casualties
of their own success, you know, and excess.
[♪ "The Blue Danube" by Johann Strauss II]
And of course Hipgnosis are intrinsically linked
to that period of rock excess,
which we kind of laugh about now.
[Po] Paul McCartney had called me up and he said,
"Listen, man, I've seen this statue
that I want to buy at Christie's."
"Do you think you could get it?"
"I want to put it somewhere really special."
And I said, "Where?" He said, "On Everest."
I suppose we must have had a meeting and said,
"Oh, wow, it should be at the top of a Swiss mountain."
You know, there was a lot of that in those days.
[Po] So, we took a helicopter up,
which could only land on the edge like this.
We had to jump off, take this 70-pound statue,
and there I am, stuck on an area
about the size of an average person's sitting room
with a 10,000-foot drop all round me.
And I hate heights.
I completely have a phobia about heights.
And I was stuck up there for about six hours.
We loved it. It looked great.
But then someone said, "You could've just gone in a studio,
in London, just got a big pile of salt
and just stuck the statue on top of it." [laughs]
But, you know, that's just too easy.
Well, I know Hipgnosis were expensive. [Laughs]
[Po] We had this idea to recreate a complete juke joint.
So I did this tour of the Caribbean,
taking photographs as a recce
finishing up at New Orleans. I went to the Old Absinthe bar.
And this is the one. I mean, it hasn't been washed in 60 years.
There's old ties, there's...
All kinds of artefacts everywhere. It's just amazing.
And we built an exact copy of it in a studio in West London
because this was an expensive operation.
The sort of set was better than the album. [Laughs]
[Po] Then Storm said to me,
"If we put six characters in a bar,
why don't we have the point of view
of each of the six characters?"
"We make six different album covers."
Then, as money was no object for the inner bag,
we thought we'd do something fun.
On it, it doesn't say anywhere that there's any trick at all.
But, when you put water on it,
it changes colour.
Peter Grant said to me,
"The only problem with your Hipgnosis covers
is you're so bloody expensive."
He said, "I could sell Led Zeppelin
in a brown paper bag."
And I said, "Well, why don't you then?" He said, "Let's do it!"
So the whole thing came out in a brown paper bag.
[Jimmy] It was probably the most expensive album cover
that we did because it was so complex.
Po would come down, throw the Yellow Pages at me, and say,
"Drew, I need a sheep, er, I need a psychiatrist couch,
I'll probably need a vet,
and I'm shooting it in Hawaii,
so can you book me a flight to Hawaii on Friday?"
I'm thinking, "It's Monday,
and all I've got is a dial-up telephone
with a curly wire and the Yellow Pages."
[phone rings]
[♪ "The Blue Danube" by Johann Strauss II]
[Po] I got to Hawaii. Well,
there were no psychiatrist couches.
And even worse still, there were no sheep.
I discovered one sheep at the university farm.
And I managed to persuade them to let me take it to the sea
and put it on the psychiatrist couch I had to have made.
Then trying to persuade
a sheep to lie on the couch while these waves rolled in
proved to be difficult.
The veterinary advisor gave a shot of Valium to the sheep,
which calmed it down.
[sheep baas]
It was a whole fiasco. It took two days to do.
[Andrew] When Po came back with the photos,
we were all just in awe of this incredible scene.
And then Storm said, "We're not going to use it full cover."
"We're going to print it 35 millimetres in size,
and then I just want big typography
that says 'Are You Normal'."
Because that's not a normal thing to do, is it?
To spend all that money, go to Hawaii and do this big shoot,
then just print the picture really tiny.
The record company, who happened to be Welsh,
asked us why we didn't do it in Wales. OK?
He said, "Listen. We've just spent £2,000
sending you off to Hawaii, you creeps."
"Why didn't you do it in Wales?"
The irony of it is,
that it finished up that size on the front of the cover.
[both laugh]
[Graham] I'm still not quite sure what's going on
or what it means. But then, do I need to?
I just know that there's something great happening there.
[Storm] Although you may not think it,
and also maybe the rest of the world doesn't think it either,
it's supposed to be a little bit funny.
It's supposed to have slightly humorous,
or what we call dry humour.
That font layout came back to me
when Katharine Hamnett, a fashion designer,
rang up and asked me to design some T-shirts for her.
And she said she wanted them big and bold.
And so I did a whole range of these T-shirts for her,
which then got picked up by George Michael.
And it became a viral hit.
[Po] I think Are You Normal probably represented
one of the last really collaborative efforts
with Hipgnosis and a band where the budget was unlimited.
I think that from 1968 to 1980,
Hipgnosis are so ubiquitous
with the most important artwork in the world for music
that it had to change.
Pop culture moved on. Ss it does.
It's a young-people thing.
[♪ "Just Can't Get Enough" by Depeche Mode]
1980 comes in in its bright colours and padded shoulders.
♪ When I'm with you, baby, I go out of my head
♪ And I just can't get enough
This was probably the moment
when things started to, sort of, disappear for us.
♪ We slip and slide as we fall in love
♪ And I just can't seem to get enough
[Po] There was this progression
to dumping lavish and expensive album covers.
♪ We walk together, we're walking down the street
♪ And I just can't get enough
[Po] Bonzo, Led Zeppelin's drummer, died.
And after that, Peter Grant went to pieces.
He almost had a breakdown.
And the mighty Led Zeppelin just fell apart.
[interviewer] Last question. What are your projects?
- Our future projects? - We're gonna get married.
- Yes. - We're going to get married.
- We're gonna start a double act. - Yes.
[Po] Storm turned up at my house one day
with Peter Christopherson, with a bunch of flowers.
This had never happened before,
and I was immediately suspicious.
We sat down. He said,
"I wanna have a serious talk about Hipgnosis."
"I don't think we should do album covers any more."
"We should knock it on the head."
"It's old-fashioned. It's out of date. We need to move on."
I think Storm and Peter saw that the MTV generation was coming.
And Storm was a film grad from the RCA
so I think he'd always fancied being a film director.
So he saw this as his opportunity
to fulfil that ambition.
Well, I was very loath to get rid of Hipgnosis in that sense.
I thought we were really at the peak of our careers.
And I wasn't very forward looking, I have to say.
Peter was younger than Storm and me,
and he was saying to me, "Listen, Po, the time has come."
"You need to let it go." So we did.
[Storm] And we decided that we ought to branch out
and become movie makers. Do something else. Do videos.
[Po] It started off great.
But Storm began to take over as master of the universe
as a director, believing that he could have what he wanted
regardless of what Peter and I said.
With too much money involved, allocated amount of time,
Storm ran so over budget that I couldn't control him any more.
Because Storm was so extreme.
He didn't care two hoots for money.
He just did what he needed to do.
This film company collapsed after about two years
due to very poor management on behalf of all of us.
[Po] We were financially deeply in debt.
We each had to put in money.
And they wanted the money the next morning at ten o'clock.
This is the bank. And I said, "Here's a suitcase."
"My cash is in there. Where's yours, Storm?"
"I don't have it."
"I might have to borrow it from David Gilmour."
I said, "Peter, where's yours?"
He said, "Well, I'll have to remortgage my house."
"I'm not quite sure."
They hadn't dealt with the reality of it.
"Tomorrow morning at ten o'clock,
the bank is calling the tune and we're out of business."
"If you don't have your money by ten tomorrow morning,
I resign from the company."
Ten o'clock tomorrow morning came,
they didn't have the money organised,
I resigned from the company,
and Storm and I stopped speaking.
And I didn't speak to him for 12 years.
It was a tragedy.
From all the good things we'd done for 15, 17 years,
we're fucked.
Absolutely fucked.
[♪ "Wish You Were Here" by Pink Floyd]
♪ How I wish, how I wish you were here
♪ We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl
♪ Year after year
♪ Running over the same old ground
♪ What have we found?
♪ The same old fears
♪ Wish you were here
They created some of the best covers ever.
And they were highly original.
And they took the art seriously.
It wasn't a piece of merchandise.
To be able to come up with so many ideas,
not just for Led Zeppelin, but for all of the artists they did
right across the music industry,
keep coming up with these wonderful ideas,
time after time after time,
that takes a very special person,
or people, to be able to do that.
[interviewer] With such a great reputation,
why didn't you use Hipgnosis for your album covers?
I couldn't afford them. [Laughs]
[♪ "Art For Art's Sake" by 10cc]
♪ Gimme your body
♪ Gimme your mind
♪ Open your heart
♪ Pull down your blind
♪ Gimme your love
♪ Gimme it all
♪ Gimme in the kitchen
♪ Gimme in the hall
♪ Art for art's sake
♪ Money for God's sake
♪ Art for art's sake
♪ Money for God's sake
♪ Gimme the readies
♪ Gimme the cash
♪ Gimme a bullet
♪ Gimme a smash
♪ Gimme a silver
♪ Gimme a gold
♪ Make it a million for when I get old
♪ Art for art's sake
♪ Money for God's sake
♪ Art for art's sake
♪ Money for God's sake
♪ Money talks so listen to it
♪ Money talks to me
♪ Anyone can understand it
♪ Money can't be beat
♪ Oh, no