Film by and with thanks to Nate Pommer

By Dan Nadel

For me, For the Love of Vinyl began with two other books. The first is Walk Away Rene: The Work of Hipgnosis. Published in 1978 and long out of print, this first compilation is a statement of how Hipgnosis saw itself at that time. And the cover, adapted from the interior package of Pink Floyd’s 1975 record, Wish You Were Here, was a perfect beginning to the book: Diving into one’s own reflection: what could be a better metaphor for the process of compiling one’s own monograph? Inside, the book was organized alphabetically by theme, with the various covers slotted in under headings like “Pastiche” and “Fiasco”. The cover itself and the pages underneath it represent the most compelling part of Hipgnosis’s legacy: The impossibly prolific creation of iconic images.

The other book, 1977’s Hands Across the Water, represents a different facet of the group. It’s a quirky tome, wherein Po went off to follow Paul McCartney’s merry band of Wings as they toured America in 1976. The twist (because there’s always a twist with Hipgnosis) is that the photos are all of the life around the tour—the land, the roads, the venues, the people—and avoids all the usual rock trappings: performance, excess, “fun”. As ever with Po, the pictures are concise, well composed, and compelling, but not “arty” or self-conscious. These snapshots are accompanied by rather ingenious graphics by George Hardie that open each section and tell the time of day in each location. Each spread is composed of pictures all occurring at the same time of day in a variety of locations across America, as indicated by George’s clock. Hands Across the Water combines many of the crucial aspects for Hipgnosis: collaboration, strong photography and graphics, a unique concept, and an individual vision of how rock ‘n’ roll can be visualized.

But those are books (like For the Love of Vinyl) and Hipgnosis designed records (lots of them) beginning in 1968, just as the album cover was coming into its own as a medium. In the late 1960s music packaging began to shift from photo and illustration-based advertisements for rock bands. This evolution reached an early peak of ambition with Peter Blake’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band cover. At the turn of the decade hard rock was the thing and psychedelia was replaced by surrealism and photo collage. The record business also grew exponentially, allowing larger budgets for all facets of a band’s output. There were numerous new jobs in the business, and among them was a new vocation: freelance record cover designer. There was work to be done and money to be made, and there were plenty of photographers (Bob Seidemann, Henry Diltz, Norman Seeff), designers (Keef, John Van Hamersveld, Milton Glaser, John Berg) and illustrators (Mick Haggerty, Roger Dean, Barney Bubbles, David Willardson) doing remarkable work in the field. A few things separated Hipgnosis from a very talented pack: They refused any easy gimmicks or slick solutions; their craftsmanship was unparalleled—no one had ever spent so much time and resources on record jackets; and further, the resultant quality was unparalleled—the collages were seamless, the dye transfers beautifully saturated, giving the images a cinematic lushness and perfection. But over and above the craft, Hipgnosis was able to create work that defined not only the image of the band, but themselves. That is, when they finished with an image it wasn’t only a Pink Floyd cover or simply another advertising illustration of a band; it was a Hipgnosis cover. And that’s a category of its own.

Hipgnosis, of course, grew out of Storm and Po’s initial work for Pink Floyd, which they parlayed into a decade-and-a-half long partnership. Storm and Po are a funny combination, and their differences are perhaps best left for the reader to tease out of their individual texts. But, as Po recently noted in conversation, “We needed each other. Opposites attract.” Bound by a shared sense of humor and what must have been a good deal of confidence, they operated with the same level (well, sometimes quite a bit higher, really) of skill and vision as the bands they covered. And like many of those bands they took common components that could go bad in the wrong hands (blues progressions/surrealism; songs about girls/photos of girls. Etc.) and made something great out of them, much like a pop song: discreet units of popular media that were mass-distributed and meaningful to a wide population. Many of the bands covered within the present volume have been forgotten. And in the absence of any presence of the band itself, the cover lives on, but tells us nothing about the band. It only tells us about Hipgnosis. Toe Fat, for example, is now simply the title of an unremittingly creepy image of four humanoids. Body distortion is an old trope, and this kind of collage was trafficked in by Max Ernst and Salvador Dali, not to mention countless imitators, but Hipgnosis made it unique and unforgettable. It wasn’t just the toes-for-heads. It’s the beach. It’s the two figures in the background. And it’s one of them, barebreasted. Whatever else, the boys pushed it further—made it a convincingly chilling vision. And all that from an inane band name.




UNO is similar: a vibrant photo of man in costume in front of a mysterious British landmark. If Toe Fat simply beguiles, UNO implies a narrative and asks viewers to participate. And it’s never just a single layer: there’s the figure, the subtly vibrant hues, and the obvious nod toward the particularly British love of opaque mysticism. And this cover, like so many others, has endured not as a link to music, but as an image unto itself. And when the band lived on, as in the case of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and others, the images become a part of the larger myth of the band. The images become half Hipgnosis and half-the band.






And not surprisingly, given the commitment evident in the work, in conversation with Storm and Po it’s not so much that they’re reminiscing about the bands and all the great music they saw (in fact both have professed a relative indifference to 1970s rock)– what they talk about is the process—the doing. What interested Hipgnosis was… Hipgnosis. Design, illustration, the rock scene and the like were less important than the work. That attitude not only kept them (relatively) sane, but also garnered the respect of the similarly self-obsessed and creative bands they worked with. Hipgnosis professed no interest in graphic design as such (and George Hardie has said he didn’t consider what they did to even be graphic design proper) and even functioned more like a band than a graphic design studio: Hugely ambitious and guided by a hard-won collective vision (their somewhat infamous weekly idea meetings being a case in point) with the ability to accept collaborators outside the group and critique each other within it. And as with great rock songs, there’s a reason we’re still talking and writing about this work. The format, ambition and scale of the work have now all but disappeared, leaving the Hipgnosis ouvre as a lone giant on the historical horizon. These days we take the visual presence of bands for granted. The image of a band often precedes the music itself, and is precisely that: an image of the band, as opposed to an independent Hipgnosis image that accompanied a band. And videos and digital images are fleeting. Large format still images (otherwise known as records) are permanent, stable things that allow both public viewing and private contemplation. Further, stepping into a Hipgnosis visual world is an active process—it’s not passive consumption. As you handle the record each component, from cover to sleeve, reveals another part of the concept, adding up to an entire visual world that envelops bands and the viewer/listener in a single concept. When you played Houses of the Holy you also, intentionally or not, began to climb that mountain alongside the children. First encounters with these covers, with their vague allusions to mysterious or sinister doings forever alter our relationship to a band. And, more broadly, these encounters are also our first experience of complex visual art. All of this occurs within a broad space created by rock ‘n’ roll. And the space, both in musical and visual terms, allows the public to participate in something larger than themselves. It forms a community of participants, a community linked by the visual depth of Hipgnosis.