{"id":22387,"date":"2022-02-02T05:30:36","date_gmt":"2022-02-02T10:30:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=22387"},"modified":"2022-02-03T07:56:23","modified_gmt":"2022-02-03T12:56:23","slug":"the-gem-of-the-idea-hipgnosis-aubrey-powell-looks-back-at-his-iconic-album-designs-part-two","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2022\/02\/02\/the-gem-of-the-idea-hipgnosis-aubrey-powell-looks-back-at-his-iconic-album-designs-part-two\/","title":{"rendered":"The Gem of the Idea: Hipgnosis\u2019 Aubrey Powell Looks Back at His Iconic Album Designs (Part Two)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part One<\/a>…<\/i><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Powell and his creative partner (and their team of photographers, artists and designers) were afforded extraordinary creative latitude. \u201cVery rarely did any band we worked for give us a specific brief,\u201d he says. \u201cMost of the time we had carte blanche.\u201d Recording artists like Led Zeppelin and 10cc would ring up Hipgnosis, ask them to take on a project, and leave them to come up with their own ideas. \u201cThey\u2019d say, \u2018We\u2019ve seen something you\u2019ve done. We want to work with you,\u2019\u201d Powell says.<\/p>\n

In some cases, there wasn\u2019t so much as a kernel of an idea from the musicians to get Powell and Thorgerson started. \u201cWith Led Zeppelin,\u201d Powell says, \u201cthere was no music to listen to, no lyrics to read. Jimmy Page would say, \u2018Come up with something that\u2019s going to really turn us on, and we\u2019ll talk about it.\u2019\u201d He says that when it came to 1973\u2019s Houses of the Holy<\/i> album project, \u201cwe didn\u2019t even know the name of the album!\u201d<\/p>\n

Thorgerson and Powell would then develop ideas making the most of that creative freedom. Houses of the Holy<\/i>\u2019s package features a distinctive photo of naked children crawling on Ireland\u2019s most famous natural landmark. And Powell notes that today\u2019s post-production trickery using tools like Photoshop wasn\u2019t an option in those days. \u201cI had to go to Giant\u2019s Causeway and do all that as a real picture,\u201d he emphasizes. And they really did set a man on fire for the photo that adorns the cover of Pink Floyd\u2019s Wish You Were Here<\/i> (1975).<\/p>\n

\u201cEverything in the 1970s was done by hand,\u201d Powell says. \u201cTaking a photograph, of course, was a process of loading film into a camera and having to choose your F-stop and focus and everything. There was no automation at all. Then, afterwards, there was all the processing of the film on negatives, there were contact sheets to be made, darkroom work to be done.\u201d After all that, dozens of photographic prints would have to be made in hope of finding just the right one. Powell says that an album cover project routinely took six weeks\u2019 time.<\/p>\n

Some clients did have specific ideas; they looked to Hipgnosis to bring those ideas to fruition. \u201cPaul McCartney was one of those,\u201d Powell says. \u201cPeter Gabriel was another.\u201d He recalls Hipgnosis\u2019 work on the ex-Genesis artist\u2019s first three solo albums, all titled Peter Gabriel <\/i>but known among fans by nicknames (Car<\/i>, Melt<\/i> and Scratch<\/i>) that relate to their Hipgnosis cover art.<\/p>\n

Powell recalls Gabriel\u2019s instructions. \u201cFor each of those, he said, \u2018I want to be on the cover. I want a portrait, but I want it to be very very different from anything that’s been seen before. I don’t just want a pop record cover. I want a Hipgnosis<\/i> record cover!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>And an enduring characteristic of Hipgnosis album covers is that they remain open to interpretation. They\u2019re playfully arty in a way that\u2019s never pretentious, but often enigmatic. A prime example is the packaging for Led Zeppelin\u2019s 1976 LP Presence<\/i>, featuring a collection of surreal photographs that have absolutely nothing to do with each other, much less the music contained therein. The unifying element appearing in all ten photos is a black sculpture dubbed \u201cThe Object.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some 45 years after its completion, Powell remains amused by the project. He muses on how patently absurd it would be \u201cif you said you were going to give Led Zeppelin \u2013 probably the most successful heavy rock band in the world \u2013 a cover of a family sitting around a table at a boat show with a black object!\u201d He gives great credit to guitarist Jimmy Page for having faith in Hipgnosis and their sometimes quirky, idiosyncratic ideas. \u201cI take my hat off to Jimmy Page for having the foresight to think that a surrealist picture would be far more interesting than the traditional fare for heavy rock album covers,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

While Powell is justifiably proud of the work he did with Hipgnosis, he doesn\u2019t make outsize claims as to its importance. \u201cI think that many of the artists that we worked with were simply drawn to us because the work was good,\u201d he says. \u201cI don’t mean to blow my trumpet by saying that, but I think we delivered some interesting concepts.\u201d<\/p>\n

And he\u2019s the first to admit that not every Hipgnosis album cover was a classic. Though he demurs when asked to cite a specific example, he allows that \u201cnot everything was great. It was no question that Storm and I did what we used to call \u2018turkeys.\u2019 There were some ideas that you think, \u2018It’s going to work out well,\u2019 and actually looked terrible at the end.\u201d And in some of those cases, it was too late to turn back. \u201cSometimes,\u201d Powell chuckles, \u201cpeople were very polite and used them anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n

Powell and Thorgerson would sometimes come up with a good album cover concept even before they had a specific use for it. He relates a story of one such design. \u201cWhen Robert Plant made his first solo album, I presented a load of ideas to him, because we used to have them all sketched on little 12-inch pieces of paper and stuff like that. I remember he picked up this card, and he turned it over on the back.\u201d There he saw the names of several other bands, each with a line through it.<\/p>\n

Plant was aghast. He said, \u2018Have you been showing this idea to other people<\/i>?\u2019\u201d Powell admitted that he had. \u201cAnd Robert said, \u2018What a bunch of chancers! I thought it was designed especially for me!\u2019\u201d In the end, Plant didn\u2019t go with that design, either. But Powell remained philosophical about the whole affair, reminding himself of a kind of Hipgnosis mantra: \u201cLook, a good idea is a good idea. If you don’t want it, we’ll sell it to somebody else.\u201d<\/p>\n

Click here to continue<\/a>\u2026<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part One… Powell and his creative partner (and their team of photographers, artists and designers) were afforded extraordinary creative latitude. \u201cVery rarely did any band we worked for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22400,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,62],"tags":[4762,4764,4763],"class_list":["post-22387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interview","category-rawk","tag-aubrey-powell","tag-hipgnosis","tag-storm-thorgerson","cat-41-id","cat-62-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22387"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22387\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22424,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22387\/revisions\/22424"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}