Trivia / Hipgnosis

• Budget-Busting Element: the insistance on on-location photoshoots was an infamous part of the Hipgnosis process.
  • For the 10cc album "Look Hear?", the consept was a sheep laying on a Freudian Couch on a beach in Hawaii, which became complicated by there only being only a handful of sheep on the islands, at an university agricultural department, and no psychoanalyst couches, so one had to be made custom just for the shoot. And then, the photo was shrunk to the height of three millimeters on the LP cover.
  • The cover for Wings (Band) greatest hits album is a photo of a statue Ringo Starr bought against a snow bank. The snow bank is a mountain top in the Alps, where it was flown via helicopter.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Thorgerson and Powell deal with this trope imaginatively in their retrospective book For the Love of Vinyl: The Album Art of Hipgnosis. In the introduction to the (nearly) complete list of their covers at the back of the book, they admit that "There are some designs we would rather like to forget altogether"; within the list, these are marked with an icon of a turkey.
  • Also, every time they mention their pre-Hipgnosis book cover company Consciousness Incorporated, they apologize for the name.
  • Thorgerson was not afraid to express his disappointment when the sleeve he did for Pendulum was tampered with by the band without his consent.
• Star-Making Role: Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon was so overwhelmingly successful that it brought Hipgnosis even more recognition than they'd already achieved. Before that, the cover for "Elegy" for the band The Nice was their calling card in the music industry.
• Troubled Production: The photoshoot for "Animals (1977)" by Pink Floyd was a small disaster, as there was trouble inflating the pig balloon, fickle weather, and then the balloon broke free and floated into the airspace of Heathrow airport, grounding all flights.
• Wag the Director: As discussed in the retrospective/art compendium Vinyl. Album. Cover. Art, while the studio usually managed to get creative control over their projects, in some cases the artists were powerful enough to basically impose a vision on them. In particular, their collaborations with Paul McCartney tended to fall under this, as McCartney's wife and creative collaborator Linda was herself a talented photographer and McCartney himself was, well, one of The Beatles.

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