Director: Anton Corbijn (UK). Year of Release: 2022
A bald man walks through some woods. A large rectangular object, nearly as large as he is, is tied to his back with a rope. On the object we can vaguely discern the word “HIPGNOSIS”. The man walks through a graveyard into a house. Welcome to Aubrey “Po” Powell, one of the two people who founded Hipgnosis. For about a decade, Hipgnosis produced pretty much every single album cover which remains in your memory.
Powell grew up in a residential area of Cambridge. He often walked past a nearby house where people seemed to be having more fun than he was. When he was 16, he walked in and found the inhabitants, including some people who were to form Pink Floyd, sitting around taking drugs. That night, there was a police raid. (Nearly) everyone left, taking all their drugs with them. This meant that when the police confronted Po, there was nothing to charge him with.
The other remaining party-goer was art student Storm Thorgerson. When Storm asked Po why he’d not left with the others, he said he didn’t believe in abandoning things. They became good friends, and Storm invited Po to join him at the Royal College of Art in London. When Po said he’d dropped out of school and lacked the necessary qualifications, Storm told him to just come into the classes anyway. This was the first step towards Po becoming a photographer.
The two formed the company Hipgnosis – “hip” meaning with it, and “gnosis” meaning something which sounded a bit clever and spiritual. They funded their early efforts through immense good fortune – a piano which had been left in their office turned out to be extremely valuable. Then Roman Polanski decided to film Repulsion in the building. After filming finished, the lighting equipment was left behind and utilised for Hipgnosis’s new makeshift offices.
Most of the film switches between Po recalling the company’s history (we learn that Storm died in 2013), and talking heads. But these aren’t just any old talking heads. We hear your Paul McCartney, your Peter Gabriel and various members of Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. Hipgnosis’s first job was the cover of Floyd’s Saucerful of Secrets, the result of connections made at that party back in Cambridge. For the next decade, they were the go-to designers for the stars.
Most of the images are memorable, although they do not all look like typical album covers. After a few early artistic successes, the cover of Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother was a picture of a cow – the least artistic concept they could think of. Dark Side of the Moon was a prism reflecting light. Looking at dozens of album covers, I often see images which I never gave much more than a brief glance, but they’ve lodged in my memory and are immediately recognisable.
Another of the talking heads is Noel Gallagher. Surely I can’t be the only person who believes that Noel is a witty and entertaining interviewee? Doubters should watch this film, as he is on great form. He explains how Hipgnosis extended the possibility of art for the working classes. In contrast, he admits that his best selling album What’s the Story (Morning Glory) had the worst design ever, as he just nodded it through when he was off his face. He couldn’t afford Hipgnosis anyway.
Anecdotes fly past, like the photoshoot for Pink Floyd’s Animals album (floating pig above Battersea Power Station) which resulted in air traffic control shutting down Heathrow airport, or Paul McCartney having a statue hauled up Everest, and the 10CC album cover which needed them to sedate a sheep before forcing it to lie down on a psychiatrist’s couch on a Hawaiian beach. Po concedes that it would have been easier to fake the photos but where’s the fun in that?
You find yourself regretting that there’s not more online footage of the great contrarian Thorgerson, who Floyd drummer Nick Mason says “wouldn’t take ‘yes’ for an answer”. But two collages of talking head interviews are shown next to each other. In one of them, every single famous interviewee explains why Storm was impossible to work with. In the second, the same people say just what a lovely person he was.
So, where did it all go wrong? How did a company which was so artistically – and, let’s face it, commercially – successful as Hipgnosis end up filing for bankruptcy? There are several theories, each of which contains a little truth. One blames the death of the LP. An LP cover is 12 inch squared, plenty of space for artistic interpretation. A CD cover is much smaller, and streamed music often lacks even the possibility of providing an album’s worth of music.
Noel Gallagher remembers coming home after a meeting discussing cover art. His daughter just cannot get what he’s talking about. He finally realises that the closest analogy which she can understand is the tiny thumbnail at the top of an online stream. Whereas album covers were once what Gallagher earlier describes as “the poor man’s art collection”, adorning every living room, the space which was available to the people of Hipgnosis barely exists now.
This is a plausible theory, until you realise that the CD didn’t really rise until the mid-1980s and Hipgnosis only really existed between 1968 and 1980. This also does for another theory that it was music television who dunnit. While it is certainly plausible that videos accelerated the demise of album art, in this case at least Hipgnosis had ceased to exist long before Sting and Dire Straits assaulted our eardrums and eyeballs by telling us that they loved their MTV.
The film’s main argument is that Hipgnosis was unable to survive punk and the New Romantics. Although Glen Matlock is brought on as a talking head who had vaguely something to do with Hipgnosis alumnus Peter Christopherson, Hipgnosis designs belonged more to the hippies who punk was railing against. As designer Peter Savile says “By the time you’re floating giant inflatable pigs over Battersea Power Station, you’re not talking to 15 year olds anymore.”
The New Romantics are largely represented in the film by Depeche Mode, many of whose album covers were designed by Anton Corbijn, director of Squaring the Circle. There is also self-reference in an earlier scene which clumsily compares the covers of Dark Side of the Moon and Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures. Both use scientific imagery you see. It’s hard to understand the point of this until you realise that Joy Division’s singer Ian Curtis was the subject of an earlier Corbijn film Control.
I’m not sure how much my personal reaction to Squaring the Circle can be generalised. Watching the dozens of album covers displayed to us, 2 things occurred to me: (1) I own well over 90% of them, and (2) I have not listened to any of them in years. I bought them all as LPs, when I was trying to understand the music which preceded the sounds I grew up with. Don’t get me wrong, much of it is great, but this is the soundtrack to the generation which preceded mine.
The closing line in the credits says that no cows, pigs or sheep were hurt during the making of the documentary. This is typical of the film’s offhand humour. As a film, it doesn’t break many formal barriers, but – at least for someone who grew up with this sort of shit – the story is gripping and the interviewees are fascinating. I’m not sure Noel Gallagher’s daughter will agree, but this is one which will stay with me.
CinePhil 