If the future of music lies in downloads, one man will suffer more than most.
After 39 years as Britain’s foremost designer of album covers, during which
his canvas has already shrunk from 12 inches of vinyl to 5 inches of CD,
Storm Thorgerson will be out of a job.
Storm who? Though more joints have been rolled on his artwork than George
Michael could smoke in ten lifetimes, few know Thorgerson by name. That’s
about to change with the publication of Taken by Storm, an
extraordinary collection of his works, profusely annotated with barmy yarns
about their genesis.
The Dark Side of the Moon prism? That was his. The burning businessman
on the sleeve of Wish You Were Here? His too. The naked children
scaling the Giants Causeway on Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy;
the tearful housewife on 10cc’s How Dare You; even, moving on
to the present day, the four men playing cards in the desert on Muse’s Black
Holes and Revelations. All his.
Before we meet in a café in Belsize Park, North London, I get the tour of
Thorgerson’s next-door flat-cum-studio which he has owned since the 1970s.
It’s as random as the man: bits of paper pinned up on the wall, with
sketches of ideas and works-in-progress. Here are two gunfighters, one
flinging fruit, the other with a coat made of balls — tennis balls, billiard
balls, all kinds of balls. Turns out it’s for a project with Bob Dylan. It’s
Thorgerson’s young colleague, Dan Abbott, who shows me around. Abbott is the
draughtsman who fleshes out Thorgerson’s ideas, before a photographer shoots
them. Similarly, many of the most striking covers of the early 1970s owe a
considerable debt to the graphic designer George Hardie, among other
contributors. Thorgerson himself mainly provides the concepts, and the drive
to see them realised.
“That’s why I prefer to describe these shoots as ‘performances’,” Thorgerson
explains airily, squeezing himself into the café bench and parking his
walking stick. “I’m more like a choreographer; and the choreographer needs
the f***ing dancer, doesn’t he?” He fell into designing sleeves quite by
accident. Pink Floyd, whom he knew anyway from school, asked Thorgerson’s
flatmate to do a record cover. When he declined, Thorgerson stuck up his
hand. “I had no idea what I was doing! But we did make the most of it. Me
and Po [Aubrey Powell, with whom he founded the design company Hipgnosis]
worked bloody hard.”
He had previously intended to be a film director, inspired by seeing Fellini’s 8½
and Antonioni’s L’Avventura, and he studied cinema at the
Royal College of Art. But if there is a director he most resembles, it’s
Werner Herzog, pulling a real steamboat over a real mountain in the Peruvian
jungle for his famously gruelling and epically insane film Fitzcarraldo.
Thorgerson insists on doing almost all his shoots for real, long after
digital trickery should have made most of [[ his surreal, dream-like images
simple to create.
It’s an admirable folly that may or may not produce better results, as he
claims, but which certainly makes for an entertaining anecdote. One cover
concept called for a row of 20ft telegraph poles stretching into the
distance, each topped with a seated hermit. The ground was muddy and the
huge poles kept slipping; Thorgerson had to climb up one himself to show his
volunteers they would be safe. The cover for Pink Floyd’s A
Momentary Lapse of Reason showed 700 heavy iron hospital beds arrayed on
the beach, something that took four tractors and 30 helpers six hours to
accomplish. England being England, it rained, so they had to take them all
away again . . . and repeat this lapse of reason in its entirety two weeks
later.
Still another sleeve called for an all-seeing, giant eye blazing over a naked
man crouching in the desert. “I wanted red earth, and a wide-open space, so
we settled on Monument Valley, in an Indian reservation. Near Monument is
Flagstaff, and it’s very high up, and when we got there it started snowing;
next morning there were icicles hanging outside our window. I thought oh
f***, what am I going to say to the band?
“Still, we carried on and drove down into the valley from Flagstaff and the
snow all disappeared, fantastic, like a miracle, we couldn’t believe our
luck; this great open landscape, no trees, no people, no nothing for miles.
We started shooting . . . and out of nowhere, nobody saw it, this truck
arrived and screeched to a halt. This red Indian jumped out, he had a face
like a granite slab, black hair down to his waist, and he put his hand on my
shoulder and said, ‘I confiscate your camera.’
“I thought oh no! But he’s right — here we are on sacred ground, what’s a
white man doing with his trousers down, and a big eye hanging in the sky?
Bad juju, I thought. So he said, ‘I confiscate your cameras . . .’ and then
he burst into laughter and said. ‘Just kidding you.’ He got out his mobile
and swapped e-mail addresses with Rupert the photographer.
“Now that was a performance. You could say, why bother with all
that? Why not just do it in a computer? But somehow some things are just not
captured in the computer.”
Thorgerson’s upbringing, you won’t be surprised to hear, was unconventional.
If you think his name is unusual (it comes from his uncle, and is not
uncommon in Norway), consider that his mother called him Geraldine for his
first nine months — in what he calls, unable to resist verbal as well as
visual puns, the “dark side of the womb”.
He was packed off to boarding school at just 4½ — “If you want to know why I’m
mad, there you are” — and because of its progressive views about not forcing
education, he didn’t learn to read until he was 9. It was at grammar school
in Cambridge that he met Roger Waters and Syd Barrett, who later would form
Pink Floyd. “I was friends with Roger indirectly because our mothers were
friends, and still are, at 88 and 94 respectively.
“It was a very interesting place, Cambridge; student towns can be great fun,
even if you’re not studying there. There’s a lot of culture . . . and a lot
of girls. Most of whom actually seemed to end up with Syd. I still know all
these guys; I would have known Syd still, too, till he died, if he hadn’t
gone off the rails.” But didn’t he once say that he had not spoken to Waters
in 30 years? “Twenty-five,” Thorgerson corrects. “But he’s friendly now.
Roger had a particular way of dealing with things, which requires him to be
more definite than he needs. He was very rigid about who was what in the
Pink Floyd hierarchy, and I got put into a box, and he’s only opened the lid
recently.”
In fact, during our meeting, he receives a cryptic message by mobile: “Roger
has no objection.” This turns out to concern Thorgerson and Abbott’s
suggestion of a 40th anniversary rerelease of The Piper at the Gates of
Dawn,and the publication of a book of Syd Barrett's sketches, in tribute
to that crazy diamond.
And is Barrett still missed? Did Thorgerson see him again before he died? He
shakes his head. “His death was more or less so sad there’s nothing one can
think to say. The band have always felt very strongly about Syd, so tabs
were kept, as it were, money was paid; as best they could, they looked after
him.”
It’s a rare moment of vulnerability from a self-confessed egomaniac, a man
with the chutzpah to persuade a doubtful record company to release Wish
You Were Here wrapped in black plastic (to symbolise absence,
professor), or to release Led Zeppelin’s In Through the Out Doorwith
six alternative sleeve designs — and then cover it in a brown paper bag.
“Pictures of a band, like the Beatles, or Take That, what do they tell you?
They tell you what they look like, but nothing about what’s in their hearts,
or in their music. If you were trying to present an emotion, or a feeling,
or an idea, or a theme, or an obsession, or a perversion, or a
preoccupation, when would it have four guys in it? In the huge world of
things to choose to represent it, why choose four guys?”
Particularly when, as with Thorgerson’s early run of covers for Pink Floyd,
you can have a cow, then an ear under water, then a prism, then a man on
fire, then a giant inflatable pig (Roger Waters’s idea) which infamously
escaped from its moorings, floated to 18,000 ft and nearly gave the jet
pilot who radioed in the sighting a heart attack. Music downloads may be the
future, but they will never be this much fun.
Taken By Storm is published by Omnibus (£24.95). The Australian Pink Floyd
tribute band are touring Britain (www.
aussiefloyd.com); Syd Barrett Madcap’s Last Laugh, Barbican, EC2 (www.barbican.org.uk
0845 120 7550), May 10; Roger Waters performs The Dark Side of the Moon live
at Earls Court (www.eco.co.uk
0870 9039033), May 11-12
