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A PLETHORA OF POP MUSIC BOOK REVIEW #5
The Work of Hipgnosis: Walk Away René
How a group of chancers changed the face of visual language.
It’s the late sixties. You’re standing at an airport in Morocco watching the passengers disembark with their suitcases. Suitcase after suitcase. Then here comes two English chaps with balls. Big balls. Inflatable plastic balls, that is.
Who are these lunatics, you wonder? Not lunatics.
This is Hipgnosis.
Published in 1978, The Works of Hipgnosis: Walk Away René, documents a blazing visual fire that Aubrey Powell and Storm Thorgerson, later joined by Peter Christopherson (of Throbbing Gristle infamy), ignited atop the world of rock and roll. In the space of a decade, Powell and Thorgerson, known as the design team Hipgnosis, didn’t just change the visual language of rock music, they took that language to the world.
Could they have imagined in 1973, when designing their iconic prism cover for Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon that fifty years later it would be the most present visual down at the local shopping mall?
The first clue to their collective sensibility is in the three-way wordplay of their name: hypnosis, hip and gnosticism. If you were to…
