Today’s world is a cacophony of binary data. The world we navigate on an hourly basis is an assault of arbitrary images and information. Even music – humankind’s most spiritual claim to artistry – is being clipped and transmogrified into byte-sized bits swept along the cyber slipstream like so much brightly fading detritus.
Album covers (that already near-extinct artform) seem for the most part mere gaudily generic after-thoughts: One interchangeable with the next. Bleep-bleep. Click.
It was the mid-’60s. Rock music, infused with reckless, new-born electricity, was booming into unchartered territories of sound and meaning. The customary album cover – consisting of artist name and album title, accompanied by still photo of said artist – was no longer sufficiently representative of the sonic energy contained in said album.
Replacing the standard ‘just sit down with your instrument and we’ll take a photo’ approach, visual artists were now commissioned to creatively represent the music: to snap-shot the art rather than the artist.
Though millions remain unaware of him, the work of Storm Thorgerson is inextricable from the music of ’60s and ’70s legends like Yes, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. His album covers for Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon are consummately entwined with their sonic scapes.
Decades later, Thorgerson’s work for the likes of Muse, Audioslave and the Mars Volta were similarly intimate and arresting – leaping free from the global genericism of contemporary album covers. Over the course of four decades, numerous visual contributions to popular music crowned him the undisputed king of album cover design.
Below is an archival interview with Storm Thorgerson, a visual giant of 20th century music who died at age 69 in 2013.
MICK RAUBENHEIMER: How did it all begin? What triggered the interstice of your visual work and music and bands?
STORM THORGERSON: A circumstance involving a friend who declined to do [Pink Floyd’s 1968 album] Saucerful [of Secrets], so I offered my services. The band said: “What do you know about album covers?” “Not a lot …,” said I. “Okay,” said they. ”
[Following Saucerful of Secrets, Pink Floyd called on Thorgerson and the Hipgnosis design firm for around a dozen of their legendary covers, including Wish You Were Here, Atom Heart Mother, The Division Bell, Pulse and others.]
MICK RAUBENHEIMER: Both David Gilmour and Roger Waters attended art school, and the band seems to have always been visually literate –
STORM THORGERSON: They have?
MICK RAUBENHEIMER: To what extent, if at all, did members of Pink Floyd interact with your ideas and ultimate designs for their albums?
STORM THORGERSON: All four interacted via refinement and criticism but did not design – except for Animals, which was dreamt up by Waters – and Momentary Lapse of Reason, which came about in part from an idea of Gilmour’s.
MICK RAUBENHEIMER: What is the relationship between your cover art and a given album’s musical content?
STORM THORGERSON: As close as we can make it. We [Thorgerson’s subsequent design group Storm Studios] always listen to the music – often many, many times. We unravel the undercurrents and preoccupations which inform the music, and use them to inform the cover.
MICK RAUBENHEIMER: How did your designing of South African outfit Machineri’s debut album come about, and what was your vision behind it?
STORM THORGERSON: I met the band in Cape Town through a friend. I went to a gig, we got on and I offered to design their cover if they’d like me to [unintelligible, due to Mick’s coughing]. My design reflects the mixed gender of the band in the rocks and in the body painting.”
MICK RAUBENHEIMER: Any albums you would’ve loved to do the cover art for but didn’t?
STORM THORGERSON: About 100. They’re all in a book cleverly entitled 100 Best Album Covers [published by Dorland Kindersley].
Check out Storm Studios Design for more of the humble legend’s visual audacity. Oh, and that 100 was an exaggeration – several of the selected covers are his own.
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