Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis)
When record jackets were art
When I was 8 years old, I received as a gift, Pink Floyd’s A Saucerful of Secrets with a jacket design by Hipgnosis from the record producer for Seiji Ozawa. For me, The Beatles was the music of an earlier generation. I grew up with the rock music for which Hipgnosis did jacket designs. Even now, Genesis’s The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, 10cc’s The Original Soundtrack, and Syd Barrett’s The Madcap Laughs are the most influential albums in my life, and I play some of these songs in my own concerts.
As for the jacket design, I like Genesis, Peter Gabriel, and Led Zeppelin’s jackets the most. In those days, record jackets and rock were art. As Noel Gallagher of Oasis says in the film that “The elite have money to buy expensive art, but for us poor people, the record jacket was the art. Rock later became commercialized, but at this time it was still art.”
Starting in the late 1960s, Tadanori Yokoo, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Kishin Shinoyama, Shuji Terayama, and others often came to visit our family apartment in NYC because they knew my mother. They too often bought records with cover art that intrigued them, and this kind of art and music influenced their art as well. When Hipgnosis wrote the book 100 Best Album Covers, Yokoo Tadanori’s jacket was also included.
The film’s director, Anton Corbijn, is also the director of Control, a biopic of Joy Division vocalist Ian Curtis. He began his career as a photographer and has created many record covers. I first heard of him when I visited Peter Hammill’s studio in England in 1986 and saw the brilliant cover photo of Hammill’s As Close As This. He had done jackets for artists such as U2, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Depeche Mode, and he saw Hipgnosis as pioneers in jacket designs. Corbijn is also an experienced filmmaker. The film is very fast-paced and well edited. There are interviews with members of Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Paul McCartney, and Peter Gabriel, and there is a lot in 100 minutes. The story is interesting and more like watching a dramatic film rather than a documentary. There is also vintage footage of Hipgnosis shooting the Band on the Run jacket for McCartney. The story behind the Pink Floyd jacket is particularly interesting.
