From 1967 to 1982, you could not be a rock fan without coming across the work of Hipgnosis. This design team, founded by Aubrey “Po” Powell and the late Storm Thorgerson, created some of the most famous album covers ever made.  In the age of the Rock Star, Po and Storm were rock stars of the graphic design world. The prism on the cover of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon?  Their work. The naked children climbing up the Irish rock formation known as Giant’s Causeway on the cover of Led Zeppelin’s Houses Of The Holy? Also Hipgnosis...  Although there’s a bit of a back story to that one. 

Turns out, there’s a bit of a story behind many of those now-iconic album covers.  And Aubrey Powell is just the man to share them. His new book, Hipgnosis Portraits, goes behind the making of album art done for Peter Gabriel, Paul McCartney, AC/DC, the Alan Parsons Project, 10CC, Elton John, and dozens of others.

In an extended conversation with Soundcheck host John Schaefer, Powell recalls the golden age of the album cover, talks about the moment when he realized his niche in the musical world was coming to an end; and responds to our Soundcheck audience’s answers to the question: What's your favorite album cover?

Aubrey Powell, Hipgnosis: We went to have a meeting with the band and all of them said, “Oh no not one of your old surreal ideas again.” Richard Wright, the keyboard player said, “Why can’t we have something very simple for a change. Something a bit like a chocolate box, like black magic.” It wasn't our style at all. Storm sketched it out on the back of a serviette and I said that looks fantastic. It had the lights of the light show, plus it had this single triangular image and it has become iconic. Sometimes simple is best.

AP: When Pink Floyd approached us, we heard the music and listened to the lyrics and it’s all about the dishonesty of the music business basically. We needed to come up with a symbol to go with that. Our idea was -- in business one man's dishonest, one man is honest. One man is getting burned, so okay, let’s set him on fire.

AP: At that time, the Pink Floyd’s said we don’t want our picture on the front we basically want something in terms of thinking about what’s going on right now. Well everything was going on, Marvel Comics were happening, alchemy was happening, people were dropping acid, people were doing all sorts of stuff. So we decided to create a montage, a collage of all that sort of atmosphere and it was all done in a darkroom.

But of course the band said maybe we should have a little picture somewhere.  So we took a picture of the band in infrared, and put that on the front. If you look there’s a  tiny little picture of them amongst that melange of images. But it was all the sort of time when people were reading the I Ching and it was a very cosmic period. So that album cover reflects that cosmic time.

AP: Nothing’s new, everything is plagiarized but it's how you plagiarize and how you use it. We actually got that image from a cocoa can from the 1850’s which was called Droste Cocoa which was a Dutch company. On that image there’s a woman holding a tray with a woman holding a tray…it goes into infinity.

So we decided to try to recreate that just as an image on the wall. If you look at that cover there’s all sorts of things in there. There’s a Gigi cover on the floor. We changed the band round in the order and as soon as we had done that everybody said, “What does this mean?” To be frank, the Gigi album was there to hold space. We rearranged the band because they were all slightly jealous of each being better lo...