As part of the design company Hipgnosis his visual style defined rock aesthetics from the late-60s until today. I won’t go into a long laundry list of the great artwork that he generated – if you want or need such a thing, go to Wikipedia.
Rock design has become incredibly stunted and
self-referential. The literal real estate of rock visuals has been reduced down
to the size of (at most) a 200 x 200 jpg. Album artwork means less and less to
the current generation whose rock music no longer has the mystery of coded
semiotics that it once had.
Take for instance, the cover of the recent album by Yeah
Yeah Yeahs, Mosquito. The cover is not just superficially ugly (in rendering as
well as subject), but lacking in any sense of purpose or meaning on its own. It
is simply a literal visual take on the album title and given a moronic, Garbage
Pail Kids interpretation. Now, I’m not particularly a fan of this group, but this is
cover, to me, is a poor representation of the music contained. It looks cheap and fake. It repulses in all the wrong ways. The YYYs have
had mostly poor album art (It’s Blitz being the exception). Unfortunately, this
has become the norm for groups nowadays.
This wasn’t always the case. In fact, there was a time
when really mediocre groups had phenomenal artwork for their very pedestrian
records (Wishbone Ash, cough cough, Uriah Heep). Storm and his associates
(including Aubrey Powell and Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, of TG and Coil
fame) produced great artwork no matter how good the band was. Often the art was
worth more than the music.
I can remember a friend being excited about a poster he
saw for a new album by a band he had never heard of, The Mans Villa. The poster
featured the Thorgerson-designed album artwork for their new album, Frances the
Mute. He was disappointed to learn that the band was, in fact, The Mars Volta,
the typeface having obscured the truth of the band’s identity. I don’t know if
he was more disappointed that such a great cover belonged to a band that didn’t
interest him, or if the cover drew him in to reconsider a band that he had
previously dismissed. Either way, it is a great cover, one that arguably has
outlasted the music.
Hipgnosis’ photos and design were generally simple in
terms of concept, but grand in the scope of their execution and imagination. They
were unafraid to take the long way around to get striking images that today
people would use computers to generate, traveling to exotic locations or going
to great lengths of labor to stage one photo. For example, consider Thorgerson’s
cover for Pink Floyd’s A Momentary Lapse of Reason. Those beds on the beach
were real. Someone took the time to set all of them up and then tear them all
down once the (more-than-likely) half-hour photo session was over. The result
has a reality that computers can’t duplicate. The shear lunacy of the idea is
what makes its production so amazing.
Thorgerson’s images gave the music a mystery and a
dimension missing from most rock today. His album covers could be scary,
sexual, humorous, cheeky, beautiful, elegant, trashy, earthy, otherworldly, spiritual,
or stately – sometimes all at once. This was multidimensional artwork which
could be taken any number of different ways. This sometimes made them
controversial – targets of the easily-offended. The punning cover of UFO’s
Force It could easily be accused of being sexist in a ridiculous Spinal Tap
fashion, but when you learn that the man and the woman on the cover are none
other than Throbbing Gristle’s Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti, it
somehow takes the sails out of the accusation while simultaneously ratcheting
up the perversity factor.
