Squar­ing the Cir­cle (The Sto­ry of Hipgnosis)

It’s an instant extra star when Oasis mas­ter­mind Noël Gal­lagher turns up in a doc­u­men­tary as a talk­ing head. He’s not the focus here, in Anton Corbijn’s film chart­ing the sal­ad days of rock album art­work mae­stros, Hipg­no­sis (aka Aubrey ​“Po” Pow­ell and Storm Thorg­er­son). Yet his are by far the most mem­o­rable seg­ments, most notable being one where he lam­basts the cov­er art­work for his own mul­ti-plat­inum-sell­ing (What’s the Sto­ry) Morn­ing Glo­ry? as being some of the shittest ever made, and them lam­basts him­self for sign­ing off on it.

Com­e­dy Noël antics aside, the film is what you might call an old fart spec­tac­u­lar, as lots of age­ing white guys, many of whom are wear­ing leather waist­coats, rem­i­nisce about the joys of the 1960s, when you couldn’t move for dou­ble gate­fold prog rock con­cept albums and it was social­ly accept­able for your pro­fes­sion­al work­space to not have a toi­let (psst, they used the sink!). Cam­bridge scen­esters Po and Storm struck up their part­ner­ship while doss­ing about with Pink Floyd, even­tu­al­ly being com­mis­sioned to cre­ate the cov­er art­work for their 1968 album, A Saucer­ful of Secrets.

Storm was the graph­ic design man, an expert at tint­ing and illus­trat­ing, but also a wild con­cep­tu­al thinker. Po was the pho­tog­ra­ph­er, set­ting up crazy shoots which would often involve splic­ing many dif­fer­ent pic­tures togeth­er to form a mag­nif­i­cent final piece that was instant­ly recog­nis­able as the work of the Hipg­no­sis team. The film whisks through the cre­ation sto­ries of key art­works, main­ly those done for Floyd, Led Zep­pelin and 10cc.

The film ini­tial­ly appears to offer a cel­e­bra­tion of an era where such things as work­place con­duct and basic san­i­ta­tion stan­dards didn’t real­ly exist, and many of the anec­dotes cli­max with some vari­a­tion on the line, “…and so we took our idea to the pen­cil-necks down at the record com­pa­ny, and they blew their fackin’ stacks!”

There’s also a creep­ing sense that every­one is in tac­it agree­ment that Storm – who passed in 2013 – was actu­al­ly a real­ly ​’orri­ble bloke. No-one quite comes out and says it (many do say he was abrupt, extreme­ly rude and hard to work with), but it’s only Roger Waters who caps off the crit­i­cisms with, “…but he was also a genius.” Po, mean­while, who is still alive and nar­rates the bulk of the sto­ry, comes across as the more ground­ed and cir­cum­spect (but no less cre­ative) of the pathfind­ing duo.

While it’s cer­tain­ly inter­est­ing to hear the sto­ries behind such icon­ic LP cov­ers as Dark Side of the Moon and Zeppelin’s Hous­es of the Holy (which is par­tic­u­lar­ly juicy), it’s only Noël Gal­lagher (that man again!) who’s offer­ing a more objec­tive cri­tique of what album art­work actu­al­ly means and how it no longer holds the val­ue that it once did. He’s no nos­tal­gist, but he clear­ly yearns for a time when kids would be unknow­ing art col­lec­tors mere­ly by dint of own­ing one of the LPs in the cur­rent hit parade.

For­mal­ly, the film plays things very safe, with Cor­bi­jn cap­tur­ing his sub­jects in gor­geous­ly-lit mono­chrome and leav­ing all the colour aside for the cov­ers as they’re pre­sent­ed on screen. It’s a fun lit­tle diver­sion that’s more inter­est­ed in the sala­cious gos­sip and anec­dotes than it is offer­ing a more broad inquiry into how these art­works more gen­er­al­ly enhance the music they’re being used to sell.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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