The most entertaining rock doco – if you will, rockumentary – of the past year wasn’t much about music. Squaring the Circle is, instead, about Hipgnosis, the duo who went from LSD-scoffing Cambridge flatmates of early Pink Floyd to the guys putting refracting prisms, startled cows, and burning men on their album covers. And who also brought their visual pun-heavy, maximalist touch to the LP artwork of Led Zeppelin, 10CC, Paul McCartney and Wings, the Alan Parsons Project, and many more.
All three living Pink Floyd-ians turn up in the film by storied music photographer Anton Corbijn to pay tribute. So do Robert Plant and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, and McCartney, who hears for the first time that one of his covers came from someone else’s Hipgnosis reject pile.
It’s funny, touching, very 70s and dreadfully English, despite the director being Dutch. Mostly, it’s a portrait of the Hipgnosis partnership – Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey “Po” Powell. The duo went from artsy hippie chancers knowing little about graphic design or photography to Concorde-flying brand consultants to the stars, charging their record companies megabucks. That was until they became yesterday’s men, thanks to artistic ego, ambition, forays into film-making that caused precarious finances, and the 1970s becoming the MTV 1980s.
Still, they delivered a catalogue of startling, how-did-they-do-that? images many decades before Photoshop or any computer assistance.
Among the albums getting the most attention are Pink Floyd’s early 70s heyday The Dark Side of the Moon, Led Zeppelin’s Presence and Houses of the Holy and Paul McCartney & Wings’ Band on the Run and Venus and Mars. There are tales of mad inspiration, like Houses of the Holy with its small children crawling up the rocks of the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland. And there are stories of going to great lengths for perplexing results, like The Nice’s Elegy album artwork, which involved a trip to the Sahara to photograph a line of red footballs in the dunes. Or 10CC’s Are You Normal? on which Powell photographed a valium-sedated sheep on a psychiatrist’s couch in the shallows of a Hawaiian beach – only for the pic to be used as a small inset on the cover, at Thorgerson’s insistence.
Thorgerson died a decade ago but archive interviews make him a big presence. He was the impossible difficult artist, the over-thinker “who won’t take yes for an answer”, in the words of Floyd drummer Nick Mason. The film is centred on Powell, still very much alive, who learnt art photography on the job and was the pragmatic, diplomatic, realistic foil in the partnership.
Via his storytelling, the doco makes how they did the artwork for say, Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here (the burning man one which featured actual pyrotechnics), more interesting than a behind-the-music contemplation of the 1975 record itself.
What is also striking about Squaring the Circle is its framing. The interviews and archive footage are all delivered in black and white, which might be a Corbijn trademark but it also makes the Hipgnosis artwork glow from the monochrome.
Having photographed many musicians, made album covers, shot music videos and one rock biopic – Control, about Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis – Corbijn was initially reluctant when Powell came to Amsterdam in 2020 to convince him to direct the film. “But he’s a good storyteller and a good salesman, so I capitulated.”
He thought he was an interesting choice, given his own musical photography roots, “Because I’m post-punk and Hipgnosis were with all the dinosaur bands. So the attitude is slightly different. But I admired how many ideas they had come up with and got away with. It’s astounding that they started with not knowing anything and did one little thing for their friends from school and, as Jimmy Page says, it’s not just the ideas they had for Led Zeppelin, it was for every band, one after the other. The interviewees – even the ones who had fallen out with Thorgerson, like Floyd’s Roger Waters – were easy to gather.
“The work that Hipgnosis did for these people was so loved, and they themselves are loved by the people who worked with them, that they all came on board.”
And in his photographic and music clip work, Corbijn knows well what it’s like to help design the aesthetic of a music era as Hipgnosis did, though the 68-year-old’s work has diversified since he made 1990s rock look so grainy with his videos for U2, Depeche Mode, Echo & the Bunnymen, Nirvana, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Rollins Band and more.
“There are now a few different periods in my work. I did my initial pictures in black and white, and I did square pictures. So I try to keep it that I don’t fall into too much repetition when I look through the lens. This is important for me, but hopefully, that makes me also relevant for other people, though I don’t know. It’s very hard to predict what people will like.
“I try to say no to a lot of young bands who ask me to do things because I did a lot of things when I was young for young bands that doesn’t feel right for a lot of young bands now. I think they should have people their age. This guy comes with all this luggage with him.”
These days, Corbijn sounds as busy and as multimedia as ever. As a film director, he followed Control with arthouse hitman movie The American starring George Clooney, then the John le Carré espionage thriller A Most Wanted Man, and Life about the friendship between James Dean and Life photographer Dennis Stock.
His next film is Switzerland, an adaptation of Joanna Murray-Smith’s play (which featured in the Auckland Theatre Company’s 2023 programme) about writer Patricia Highsmith, played by Helen Mirren. That might seem like a fitting match. Like Corbijn’s work, the author’s work and life had many shades of grey.
Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis) is now available to stream on DocPlay. To read more about Anton Corbijn’s own photographic rock history, go here.