Looking back at pop culture we had in common
Photographer-turned-filmmaker Anton Corbijn pays tribute to the tactile, visual aspect of pop-music culture in Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis). It is partly a history of the British graphic-design company that from 1967 to 1982 produced 190 rock-album covers for some of the most popular musicians of the period. Corbijn tracks the personalities of founders Aubrey Powell and Storm Thorgerson, honoring their ingenuity, but the film is also a lament.
Corbijn reports the rise and fall of Hipgnosis, starting with Powell’s explanation of the very ’60s-era name (“‘Hip’ meaning cool, ‘gnosis’ meaning wise’”) and the partnership’s eventual break. Thorgerson died in 2013, but the rift happened earlier. As Powell explains, “We started to earn real money, and that made a difference and a confusing difference.”
But Squaring the Circle remains fascinating mostly for Corbijn’s account of the cultural difference that an outfit like Hipgnosis represents. The square-peg/round-hole image implied by Corbijn’s title no longer pertains to the millennium’s music industry. Noel Gallagher, of the ’90s band Oasis, observes, “People thought music was art and could change the world, now it’s a commodity.”
Hipgnosis epitomized how the packaging of music on long-playing vinyl discs created a new expressive form. “Vinyl was the poor man’s art collection,” one musician recalls. The once-popular idea of album “artwork” has faded away (existing only as connoisseurship for collectors). Gallagher relays his Gen Z daughter’s complaint: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He realizes, “Because she’d grown up with the phone, right?”
Streaming platforms and digital technology have eliminated the aesthetic dimensions of physical media. Corbijn hints at this devolution in the opening shot of 76-year-old Powell carrying a Hipgnosis poster on his back. The black-and-white image is like the Depeche Mode music video Personal Jesus that Corbijn directed in the ’90s, but it also recalls the Olde English painting of the load-bearing farmer on the cover of Led Zeppelin IV by one of the most notable Hipgnosis clients.
Nostalgia is a strong element of Corbijn expressing fondness for his own professional interests. Squaring the Circle, like so many recent docs, doesn’t pursue facts and information so much as convey attitude and perspective. That’s a downfall for the current glut of social-justice docs. Thankfully, Corbijn avoids that pretense and finds significance in the Hipgnosis process itself. Powell describes their method as “young and vital — wilder, I guess.” This includes art-making that replicated drug-culture experience — from kaleidoscopic imagery to the psychological displacement of LSD. Hipgnosis operated out of a flat rented in London’s Egerton Court where Roman Polanski and Catherine Deneuve had filmed the psychological thriller Repulsion, a Hipgnosis inspiration. “Being provocative got us noticed,” Powell remembers.
The quirkiest Hipgnosis album covers have typical art-school backstories, the testy Thorgerson being “a man who wouldn’t take ‘yes’ for an answer.” But the most famous cover — the one that made the company sought-after — was Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (1973). The band’s Roger Waters found the design concept of the prism and light spectrum “instantaneous, unequivocal, and direct.” It has sold 65 million copies, and Factory Records designer Peter Saville, who paid homage to it with Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures cover, salutes its significance: “The individual is able to project his own image. It could mean whatever you want it to mean. There’s an enigmatic, sci-fi charm to both of those images. They’re scientific data. As such, it doesn’t date.”
The Hipgnosis catalogue isn’t necessarily the greatest album jackets (Paul McCartney and Wings’ Band on the Run was ubiquitous rather than ingenious, and in the era of rock-star excess, the company’s dry humor hit a low point with McCartney’s Getting Closer, which showed him walking a lobster on a leash) and the Kubrick theme of Led Zeppelin’s Presence is so oblique that it’s unfathomable. Yet the Hipgnosis influence on unique, expressive visual statement is undeniable. Thorgerson defined it simply: “our private relationship between music and the pictures.” That now-lost art is testament to cultural coherence.
Saint Etienne’s 2012 music video I’ve Got Your Music, where fans pose with squared-circle mementos that carry personal meaning for them is the most affectionate testament to the art form we once held in common — objects so large that we literally held them with both hands. Squaring the Circle helps us appreciate that bygone pop renaissance.