Hipgnosis – Page 5 – { feuilleton }

René Magritte album covers

Beck-Ola (1969) by The Jeff Beck Group. Painting: The Listening Room (second version, 1958).

An inevitable post considering the shape of the week, and also a continuation of an occasional series about paintings used as album cover art. Given Magritte’s continuing popularity I’m sure these can’t be the only examples, especially when his work had such an effect on the cover designs of the 1970s. In addition to the Magritte-like covers created by Hipgnosis for Pink Floyd and others you can find the artist’s influence in the cover by Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse for The Grand Illusion (1977) by Styx, a hugely successful album whose painting is derived from Magritte’s The Blank Cheque (1965). There are many more examples.

Magritte died in 1967 so he missed out on this explosion of interest which also spread into the advertising world. When it comes to influence, Magritte has probably had more of an effect on the general culture than any of the other Surrealists, Dalí included.

See (1969) by The Rascals. Painting: The Big Family (1963).

Pipedream (1973) by Alan Hull. Painting: Philosopher’s Lamp (1936).

Vienne La Pluie (1975) by Daniel Balavoine. Painting: Hegel’s Holiday (1958).

Continue reading “René Magritte album covers”

Monsieur René Magritte, a film by Adrian Maben

Until the end of his life, [Magritte] preferred to take the tram.

Now there’s an attitude I approve of. George Melly in his BBC film about Surrealism mentions visiting Magritte at his home in Brussels, and we see Magritte’s house at the beginning of Adrian Maben’s 50-minute film about the artist’s life and work. Maben’s film was made in 1978 as an Franco-German TV production but the narration, by Maben himself, is in English. Surrealism seemed to be back in vogue in 1978: as mentioned yesterday, the Hayward Gallery in London staged an exhibition of Surrealist art that year, the BBC commissioned George Melly’s film as a result of this, while over on rival network ITV there was the marvellous documentary about Surrealist patron Edward James who modelled for one of Magritte’s most famous paintings, La reproduction interdite (1937).

Adrian Maben’s name will be familiar to Pink Floyd obsessives as the director of Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii (1972), and if you’re familiar with that film you can recognise the same shooting style in his Magritte film which deploys similar slow zooms, tracking shots and images sliding in and out of the frame. The music is credited to a surprising combination of Béla Bartók (mostly piano) and Roger Waters, although some of the pieces from the latter are actually by Pink Floyd, there’s even some of the opening of Obscured By Clouds. In style and content the film is as good as anything the BBC were producing at the time, with extracts from a TV interview with the artist, and also some of Magritte’s high-spirited home movies made with his wife and friends.

Magritte and Pink Floyd are a fitting match, some of the Floyd’s album covers could be Magritte paintings rendered photographically: two men shaking hands, one of whom is on fire; a giant pig adrift over a power station. Storm Thorgerson always acknowledged the debt that Hipgnosis owed Magritte’s example, it’s there in the title of the first Hipgnosis book, Walk Away René, and in this short Tate interview from 2011 where he mentions the Wish You Were Here album as being a very conscious Magritte homage.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• George Melly’s Memoirs of a Self-Confessed Surrealist
• The Secret Life of Edward James
• René Magritte by David Wheatley

The Triangular Lodge again

Artwork & photography by Abbie Stephens, Zoë Maxwell. Design by Thomas Caslin.

Passing through a record shop the day after looking at photos of the Winchester Mystery House I couldn’t help but notice this sleeve for the debut album by British band Temples. Yesterday I described Sarah Winchester’s house as a folly, which it is, but it was also her home. The ideal folly is an ostensibly purposeless structure, although many of the ones scattered around the UK do serve some kind of decorative function, often as fake ruins intended to be seen from a distance.

Thomas Tresham’s mysterious Triangular Lodge near Rushton, Northants, has always been a favourite, a small triangular building constructed in the 16th century, and encoded all over with references to the number 3. Tresham was a Catholic at a time when the faith was persecuted in England so the lodge is an expression of his devotion to the Holy Trinity. Given the unusual appearance of the building you’d think it might have appeared on an album cover before now. Temples are from Kettering in Northants so they can claim some local attachment to the place. The cover picture has something of a Hipgnosis look to it, which is no bad thing, and there’s also some Hipgnosis-style collaging at work; those trees in the background have been copied then flipped over. One benefit of the current vinyl resurgence is that sleeve designs like this aren’t spoiled by being only seen at CD size. Some of Temples’ songs can be heard on their SoundCloud page, while Pinterest has more views of the Triangular Lodge.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Triangular Lodge

The Art of Tripping, a documentary by Storm Thorgerson

How does this sound? 100 minutes of solidly informative documentary about the use of drugs by artists from the early 19th century on; a production that calls upon a remarkable cast of contributors (see below), with music by David Gilmour, and the whole thing “devised and directed” by Storm Thorgerson, better known as one third of the great Hipgnosis design team.

The Art of Tripping was broadcast in two parts in 1993 during the Without Walls arts strand on Channel 4 (UK). David Gale was the writer, with actor Bernard Hill playing the part of the narrator and guide. The programme managed to deal with a contentious subject without indulging in hysteria or insulting the intelligence of the audience, a rare thing today. Twenty years ago it was still possible to make a documentary about a popular subject without having any low-grade celebrity-du-jour offering their wretched opinion. The contributors here who aren’t medical people are almost all writers of one kind or another; Thorgerson and Gale punctuate the proceedings with a few actors who impersonate various historical figures.

Without Walls was a very good series on the whole but this for me was a real highlight (no pun intended). In addition to it being a rare example of Storm Thorgerson working in television, the direction showed how it was possible to match the theme without recourse to cliché or flashy visuals. There isn’t a single moment of archive footage either. Thorgerson’s history of “socially unacceptable” drugs is structured as a journey through the levels of a multi-storey building, from ground floor to roof; being familiar with the director’s free-associative working methods I can imagine this being a result of thinking about getting high. Bernard Hill encounters the various commentators in successive rooms, each of which is furnished and lit to suggestively imply the drug in question. The use of lighting as a key motif is a smart one, and another metaphor, of course, for literal and symbolic (or spiritual) illumination. Editing effects are also deployed to thematically correspond to the different substances.

This would be very successful even without a wide range of contributors but Thorgerson and company assembled a stunning array of different writers, many of whom I’d never seen on TV before, and many of whom didn’t turn up again. Some of them fill dual roles, so JG Ballard is on hand to enthuse about Naked Lunch, and appears later talking about his bad LSD trip. Similarly, Brian Aldiss talks about Anna Kavan, and also about Philip K Dick. Below there’s a rough list of the drugs covered and the people involved. In the two decades since this was made many of the people involved have since died, the director included, so the film now has the feel of a historical artefact. The Art of Tripping can be see in full at YouTube. This is how good British television used to be.

Opium
Dr Virginia Berridge (author), Grevel Lindop (author), Marek Kohn (author), Dr EMR Critchley (author), Phil Daniels (as Thomas De Quincey), Dr Tony Dickenson (neuropharmacologist), Dr Ian Walker (author), Thom Booker (as Edgar Allan Poe), Dr Peggy Reynolds (author)
Hashish
Prof John Hemmings (author), Ronald Hayman (author), Patrick Barlow (as Theophile Gautier), John McEnery (as Charles Baudelaire), Jon Finch (as Gérard de Nerval), Bernard Howells (lecturer, King’s College, London), June Rose (author), John Richardson (author), Margaret Crosland (author), Danny Webb (as Jean Cocteau), Robin Buss (translator), David Gascoyne (poet), George Melly (collector, Surrealist art)
Mescaline
Prof Eric Mottram (University of London), Francis Huxley (nephew of Aldous Huxley), Jay Stevens (author), Laura Huxley (widow of Aldous Huxley),
Psilocybin
Brian Cory (as Robert Graves), Paul O’Prey (author)
Marijuana / Nitrous Oxide
Harry Shapiro (author), Carolyn Cassady (author), Prof Ann Charters (author), Allen Ginsberg (poet)
Kief
Paul Bowles (author)
Heroin
JG Ballard (author), Prof Avital Ronell (author), Hubert Selby Jr (author), Brian Aldiss (author)
LSD
Dr Oscar Janiger (experimental psychiatrist), Diana Quick (as Anaïs Nin), Prof Malcolm Lader (psychopharmacologist), Dr Timothy Leary (author), Todd Boyco (as Andy Warhol)
Amphetamine
Lawrence Sutin (author)
Cocaine
Robert Stone (author), Prof. Annette Dolphin (neuropharmacologist)
MDMA

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Storm Thorgerson, 1944–2013
• Hipgnosis turkeys
• Enter the Void
• Opium fiends
• La Morphine by Victorien du Saussay
• In the Land of Retinal Delights
• Haschisch Hallucinations by HE Gowers
• Storm Thorgerson: Right But Wrong
• Demon rum leads to heroin
• The art of LSD
• Hep cats
• German opium smokers, 1900

Design as virus 16: Prisms

The Dark Side Of The Moon (1973) by Pink Floyd. Design by Hipgnosis.

Dark Side of the Moon is one of seven or eight suggestions we submitted to Pink Floyd. It relates to the Floyd’s concerts and their use of light shows. Specifically it was sparked off by Rick Wright who wanted something very simple, clinical and precise. It’s not a particularly original design but I do feel it is very appropriate and highly effective.

Storm Thorgerson in An ABC of the Work of Hipgnosis: Walk Away René (1978)

Continuing an occasional series. Album cover designer Storm Thorgerson died in April, a month after the 40th anniversary of the release of The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd. Thorgerson may have downplayed the originality of the cover design but it remains the most well-known of the many covers produced by Hipgnosis, a combination of the enormous commercial success of the album and the success of the design itself.

The variations below are post-Hipgnosis productions by Thorgerson and his various assistants for reissues of the album. I did have the idea of collecting a few of the better unofficial variants and pastiches but a quick image search turns up a daunting quantity of homages, parodies, imitations and other derivations. This is partly down to the way the internet stimulates an accelerated recycling of cultural signifiers, but it still shows how this simple design continues to affect people beyond its original application.

The 2011 Immersion Box Set featured further variations, some of which have been used to promote the 40th album anniversary. There’s a poster available with even more variations. If you’re still not sated after that lot then deviantART is the place to go for endless collisions between the Floydian prism and all the hottest emblems of pop culture. Just keep scrolling…

30th Anniversary reissue. Design by Storm Thorgerson & Peter Curzon.

The Dark Side Of The Moon: The Making of Pink Floyd’s Masterpiece (2005) by John Harris. Designed pseudonymously by Storm Thorgerson.

Immersion Box Set (2011). Design by Storm Thorgerson & StormStudios.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Design as virus 15: David Pelham’s Clockwork Orange
• Design as virus 14: Curse of the Dead
• Design as virus 13: Tsunehisa Kimura
• Design as virus 12: Barney’s faces
• Design as virus 11: Burne Hogarth
• Design as virus 10: Victor Moscoso
• Design as virus 9: Mondrian fashions
• Design as virus 8: Keep Calm and Carry On
• Design as virus 7: eyes and triangles
• Design as virus 6: Cassandre
• Design as virus 5: Gideon Glaser
• Design as virus 4: Metamorphoses
• Design as virus 3: the sincerest form of flattery
• Design as virus 2: album covers
• Design as virus 1: Victorian borders