Eclipses, prisms and rock 'n' roll: Hipgnosis and the Golden Age of album art

In the 1970s, album cover artwork was almost as important as the music on the LP.

And design group Hipgnosis were the go-to team for hip artists of the era who started to insist the covers of their albums reflected the music within.

Hipgnosis was founded by Aubrey 'Po' Powell and Storm Thorgerson in Cambridge in the 1960s.

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Hipgnosis were the creators of some of the most famous imagery in 20th-century rock music - from the prism of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon to the all-star prison breakout on the front of Wings' Band on the Run.

They created hundreds of record sleeves for artists like Led Zeppelin, 10cc, Wings, ELO, Emerson Lake and Palmer, and above all, Pink Floyd.

Album covers became a "cultural symbol for the state of play for people's personality", Powell told RNZ.

"I think Noel Gallagher from Oasis summed it up best when he said, album covers are a poor man's art. And I think that's absolutely right.

"A lot of students, people who didn't have so much cash to buy big posters or interesting art or a Picasso, they viewed album covers as a work of art.

"And they did use to put them on their walls or you'd have a whole shelf with all your albums on and the album you were playing on the record player, you'd display the cover in front of the albums, as a sort of symbol of where you were at with music and where you were at socially."

And when Hipgnosis came on the scene, budgets were lavish, he said.

"In 1973, the same year as Dark Side of the Moon, I was doing Houses of the Holy for Led Zeppelin for their album cover, and at the same time there was a huge total eclipse, it lasted eight minutes in the middle of the Sahara Desert in Mauritania, and I said to Jimmy Page, how would you feel if I went down and photographed that, set something up around that, and he said great.

"So, the next day I found myself on a plane sitting in the middle of the Sahara, sweating it out in 44 degrees, and setting up a scene with the total eclipse.

"It was a magical adventure, but of course, you know, in the '60s and '70s you could create these kind of events and film them, and there was never any question of budget, it was just go do it.

"You've got to remember there was a period of time when albums sold in tens of millions, and so the business was awash with money, and that allowed me to indulge myself in interesting visual projects as much as I like."

Perhaps the most famous cover by Hipgnosis is Dark Side of the Moon, but at the time it was an aesthetic departure from the design studio's previous work, Powell said.

"We'd done Atom Heart Mother for Pink Floyd, which was just a picture of a cow. Richard Wright [Pink Floyd keyboardist] did not want that. He said to us, 'I don't really want one of your surrealist photographs anymore.

I'd prefer something like a chocolate box cover, something that's very plain and simple, like Black Magic.' which was a black cover with a white symbol on it."

He and Storm were initially downcast but eventually came upon an image that sparked the idea for Dark Side of the Moon, he said.

"I was looking through a book which was about the physics of light. Storm was leaning over my shoulder, and there was a picture… a prism that was being broken by a beam of light. And he said to me, 'I've got it, that would make a fantastic front cover against black'.

"So, I hastily sketched it up, just with crayons and stuff like that, that's how we did things in those days. I took it up to Abbey Road, and they all went, that's it, that's the one, that's what we want."

The stark cover fitted Pink Floyd's enigmatic public image, he said.

"It kind of summed up how they were, unique, they were enigmatic, they were obscure. They rarely did interviews, they didn't encourage any photography of them or backstage or anything like that.

"And I think what it was about the cover, they just thought, that feels like the us at this time."