I- Hipgnosis: surrealism and mystification

Some of the most beautiful album covers of progressive rock were conceived by a firm of designers known as Hipgnosis. Founded in 1968 by Aubrey Powell and Storm Thorgerson (who met PINK FLOYD founder Roger Waters at Cambridge), Hipgnosis created the majority of album covers for PINK FLOYD, beginning with ‘A Saucerful Of Secrets,’ as well as album covers for many other groups, such as LED ZEPPELIN, Syd Barrett and Peter Gabriel.

Hipgnosis’ images are often photographs of landscapes strewn with strange objects arranged in order to create surrealist environments, always connected in one way or another to the music of the group or its lyrical texts. The example presented here is the cover of the LP ‘Elegy’ by Keith Emerson’s group, The NICE, published in 1971 on the Charisma label. The photo was taken in the Moroccan desert after the team laid out the red balloons at the top of a dune and then carefully erased all traces of their footsteps. At the same time both clear and simple yet devious, it challenges the discoverer and invites further discovery.

Two of the most famous Hipgnosis album covers - both selected by Rolling Stone Magazine in its list of The Top 50 Album Covers of the Century - are PINK FLOYD’s ‘Dark Side Of The Moon,’ with its prism diffracting the light against a black background, and LED ZEPPELIN’s ‘Houses Of The Holy’ (inspired by a famous novel of Arthur C. Clarke, ‘Children of Icare’), a photographic collage showing naked, innocent, fairy-like children climbing rocks towards the light and the end of the world. Hipgnosis was dissolved in 1983, but Storm Thorgerson continued to work under its name to create extraordinary album covers, among which are PINK FLOYD’s ‘The Division Bell’ (1994) and The CRANBERRIES’ ‘Bury The Hatchet’ (1999).