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Last October, when Roger Waters brought his “This Is Not a Drill” tour through Austin, Texas, he also took the time to record a nearly three-hour appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast. These are typically rambling affairs, guided by the host’s idiosyncratic curiosities, and about halfway through, following a riff by Waters about nuclear […] More
The filmmaker Anton Corbijn’s documentary “Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis)” tells the tale of the London design company devoted to crafting the perfect LP sleeve.In early 1980, Aubrey Powell, the then-33-year-old co-founder of the pioneering British design company Hipgnosis, flew to Hawaii to photograph the cover for the British rock band 10cc’s “Look Hear?” album.The shoot involved a specific sheep (only one was available on Oahu, at a university farm) seated on an old-timey psychiatrist’s couch (which had to be constructed by a Honolulu props company) on the island’s North Shore. The sheep, out of its element and skittish from the crashing waves, ruined the first day of the session, so a veterinarian was called in to tranquilize the animal for day two. Success.The final cost of the sleeve design, including airfare and a sheep wrangler, came to £5,043 — about $26,000 in today’s money and a big sum for the time. (But then again, as Powell, known as Po, said in an interview, back then the music industry “was awash with money.”) In the end, at the behest of Hipgnosis’ other co-founder, Storm Thorgerson, the U.K. version of the LP jacket was dominated by the words “Are You Normal” in large capital letters. The photo of the sheep on the chaise longue was shrunk to about the size of a postage stamp.A scene from the documentary shows the 1980 shoot for 10cc’s “Look Hear?” album artwork, which involved a sheep.Aubrey Powell/Hipgnosis LtdIn an interview, the 10cc singer and bassist Graham Gouldman admitted that though he’d had the album art explained to him in the past, he couldn’t recall what it meant. “But I know it’s a brilliant picture,” he said. As for all that pricey effort for such a tiny image? “It doesn’t matter, does it?” Gouldman said. “It’s art. So it’s got to be done.” He added, “And in Hipgnosis’ case, if you can get the record company to spend the money, then good for them.”The Dutch filmmaker Anton Corbijn, the director of “Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis),” a documentary on the design firm that opens in New York on June 7, had a slightly different take. “It’s just not normal to fly all the way to Hawaii to do that picture,” he said. “But it makes for a good story.”“Squaring the Circle” is full of this and other good stories about the oft-absurd lengths the London-based Hipgnosis traveled in pursuit of the perfect LP sleeve in the era before Photoshop. Among the 415 album covers Hipgnosis made between 1968 and 1983 was Pink Floyd’s “Animals” (1977), for which a 40-foot inflatable pig was photographed floating between the chimneys of London’s Battersea Power Station. Unfortunately, the single cable affixed to the pig snapped, and up the balloon went — into the flight zone for Heathrow Airport.“That was all very exciting, and rather alarming,” recalled the Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, whose bandmate Roger Waters came up with the idea for the shoot, “because it was obvious that you could have a major disaster for an airline that happened to fly into the escaping pig.” No planes were harmed in the making of the LP cover, but in the end, Hipgnosis had to resort to a photo collage to achieve the desired effect.The documentary — shot largely in high-contrast black and white by Corbijn, himself a rock photographer and video director known for his work with U2 and Depeche Mode — features new interviews with Powell, plus a number of high-profile former Hipgnosis clients, including all three surviving members of Pink Floyd (David Gilmour, Mason and Waters) and Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. Paul McCartney, Peter Gabriel and Gouldman are also among the talking heads. Noel Gallagher, a fan, provides some modern-day context and comic relief.HipgnosisA selection of Pink Floyd album covers designed by Hipgnosis, clockwise from top left: “Atom Heart Mother,” “Wish You Were Here,” “The Dark Side of the Moon” and “Animals.”HipgnosisMuch of the film focuses on the close working relationship between Powell and Thorgerson, who came up together in the Cambridge, England, art scene of the 1960s, where they were friends with young members of Pink Floyd. (Peter Christopherson, a founding member of the British industrial band Throbbing Gristle who died in 2010, became a full partner in Hipgnosis in 1978.) The design studio would end up doing nearly all of Pink Floyd’s album covers, including “Atom Heart Mother” (1970), which was simply a photograph of a cow in a field, and, most famously, “The Dark Side of the Moon” (1973), with its iconic image of a triangular prism refracting light into a rainbow pattern. (Hipgnosis’ second-best-known cover also came out in 1973: Led Zeppelin’s “Houses of the Holy,” which features a group of naked children scaling basalt columns.)The “Atom Heart Mother” jacket in particular represented a major departure from the style of the time, which Mason described as putting “a picture of the lovable moptops on the front.”“We started making demands — which Pink Floyd totally backed us on — saying ‘No title, no name of the band on the cover,’” said Powell, now 76. “This was unheard-of in the world of marketing and record companies.” He described presenting the “Atom Heart Mother” artwork to the suits: “When you walked in there with long hair and earrings, showing them a picture of a cover of a cow, they would go apoplectic.”It tended to be Thorgerson, by all accounts a stubborn genius, driving the record executives to apoplexy. “The greatest line about Storm was that ‘He’s a man who wouldn’t take yes for an answer,’” Mason said. “It was almost inevitable that whatever was done, particularly by the record company, would involve Storm having to shout at them.”Thorgerson and Powell took different approaches to communicating with artists and labels.Hipgnosis LtdThorgerson, who died in 2013, could be confrontational with the musicians as well. “He didn’t care if it was Paul McCartney or Roger Waters, he would express himself quite vehemently,” Powell said. “And often I would have to go around fighting the fires to maintain some kind of credibility. At the end of the day, it kind of worked because I managed to persuade the artists that it was the idea that was important. Forget about Storm’s personality.”Corbijn said that, ultimately, the documentary was a “story of love and loss.” Hipgnosis came to an end at the dawn of a new era, in which music videos ruled and compact discs, with their significantly smaller artistic canvases, became the dominant mode of distribution. (Of course, today most people see album art in miniature on their phones.) Thorgerson and Powell, who were moving over to filmmaking, had a falling out over money and didn’t speak for 12 years after that. “It was like the end of a marriage,” Powell said. The two reunited after Thorgerson fell ill; he died of cancer at the age of 69.In more recent years, Powell said, he’s been heartened to see that Hipgnosis’ album covers have broken “that barrier to be taken seriously as fine art.” He added, “A lot of thought went into those pictures. We didn’t take photographs of the band and slap it on the front with their names big and the title in big white letters. This was work that was taken extremely seriously. And I hope that comes over in the film.”Powell pointed to Hipgnosis’ cover of Led Zeppelin’s final studio album, “In Through the Out Door” from 1979, which involved lovingly recreating an actual New Orleans juke joint in a studio in London. He indicated that making the album’s visuals (which, after all that work, came wrapped in a brown paper bag) likely cost more than it did for the band to record the music itself.“You know,” Powell said with a laugh, “that sums up the period of time.” More
Pink Floyd’s enduring blockbuster merged grandeur and malaise. Very much a product of its era, it became one of the best-selling albums of all time.Glum, ponderous songs about madness, mortality and greed, punctuated with tense instrumentals. Was that a blueprint for a blockbuster? It hardly sounds like the makings of one of the best-selling albums of all time.But there’s no denying the popularity and tenacity of “The Dark Side of the Moon,” the indelible album that Pink Floyd released 50 years ago, on March 1, 1973. Looming like an inscrutable monolith, “Dark Side” spent nearly all of the next 14 years — through punk, disco, early hip-hop and the pop heyday of MTV — lodged in Billboard’s Top 200 album chart. It arrived during the analog, material days of record stores and vinyl LPs, when an album purchase was a commitment. And no matter how familiar “Dark Side” went on to become as an FM radio staple, people still wanted their own copy, or perhaps a new copy to replace a scratched-up one. In the digital era, “The Dark Side of the Moon” album returned to the charts on CD, selling and then streaming more millions.The success of “Dark Side” stoked the ambitions of Pink Floyd and its leader, Roger Waters, who has toured arenas and stadiums ever since; Waters, 79, is playing his “first ever farewell” dates this year. He conceived the “The Wall,” a narrative rock opera released in 1979, that would foreground his anti-authority reflexes, from schoolmasters to heads of state; he has performed it against the backdrop of the Berlin Wall. Decades later, Waters would go on to spout cranky, conspiracy-theory-minded, pro-Russia political statements that many former fans abhorred. When “Dark Side” appeared, all that was far in the future.There will, of course, be another deluxe edition for the latest “Dark Side” anniversary. Arriving March 24, the new boxed set has high-resolution and surround-sound remixes and other extras, though it’s largely redundant after the exhaustive “Immersion Edition” reissue in 2011. Both “Immersion” and the new set include a worthy 1974 concert performance of “Dark Side,” with brawny live sound and extended onstage jams.Waters has also announced his own full-length remake of “Dark Side,” that will have his own lead vocals — not the husky, doleful voice of Pink Floyd’s guitarist, David Gilmour — with Waters’s spoken words over the album’s instrumentals, along with “no rock ’n’ roll guitar solos.”Uh-oh.In 1973, “Dark Side” was an album that worked equally well to show off a new stereo — or, for a few early adopters, a quadraphonic system — or to be contemplated in private communion with headphones and a joint. The ticking clocks, alarms and chimes that open “Time” are startlingly realistic even when they’re no longer a surprise, and the perpetual-motion synthesizers and desperate footfalls of “On the Run” are eternally dizzying.Stately tempos, cavernous tones and solemn framing announce the high seriousness of “Dark Side,” which begins and ends with the sound of a heartbeat. The album juxtaposes overarching sonics and grand pronouncements with human-scale experience. Its tracks are punctuated with voices from Pink Floyd’s road crew and friends, dispensing loop-ready tidbits like “I’ve always been mad” in working-class accents.Like other overwhelming best sellers of the 1970s and 1980s — Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” — “Dark Side” deals with disillusionment, fear and resentment despite the polish of its production. It’s troubled and obsessive at heart, not tidy. Countless bands and producers would learn from Pink Floyd how to fuse grandeur and malaise, how a few well-placed sounds can say far more than a showy display of virtuosity.“Dark Side” was very much a product of its era. The early 1970s were prog-rock’s heyday, particularly in Britain, where bands like Genesis, King Crimson and Yes were constructing suite-length songs and unveiling elaborate conceits. But the early 1970s were also a time when the utopian promises of the hippie era were fading, pushed back by entrenched interests and corporate co-optation. “Dark Side” captures naïve hopes falling away.It was Pink Floyd’s eighth album, the continuation of a cult career that had been synonymous with psychedelia and progressive rock: with extended structures and open-ended jams, with verbal conundrums and with an oh-wow appreciation of reverberant textures and spatial effects.Pink Floyd’s founding songwriter, Syd Barrett, left the band in 1968 with mental health problems, taking its sense of whimsy with him. Waters emerged as its new, more saturnine leader. But it took a string of uneven albums, full of amorphous studio jams, before the relative concision and clarity of “Dark Side” came into focus. While the album unfolds as a 42-minute prog-rock suite — despite the necessity, in 1973, of flipping over an LP — it also features clearly delineated verse-chorus-verse songs that radio stations could play. Waters deliberately made his lyrics blunter and more down-to-earth than he had before: “Money, it’s a gas/Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash.”Waters tackled big topics: “Time,” “Money,” war, the inevitability of death, the triviality of daily life, the importance of seizing the moment. His perspective is dour. In “Breathe (in the Air),” he describes life as a “race towards an early grave”; in “Time, he observes that every sunrise brings you “One day closer to death.” But the reason “Dark Side” became a blockbuster is that Pink Floyd’s music — the full band, with Richard Wright’s self-effacing but fundamental keyboards, Waters on bass, Nick Mason’s steadfast drumming and Gilmour’s probing, slashing, keening guitar — defies all that miserabilism.The album builds dramatically and inexorably toward the songs that close each side of the LP. “The Great Gig in the Sky,” which ends Side 1, is a progression of tolling, processional keyboard chords from Wright, topped by spoken words denying fear of death — “You’ve got to go sometime” — followed by Clare Torry’s leaping, soaring, riveting vocal improvisation. She’s a pure life force, with pain and freedom and determination in her voice, refusing to accept oblivion. (Torry only received composer credit for her top line in 2005, along with an undisclosed settlement, after suing the band.)The album’s conclusion — “Brain Damage” seguing into “Eclipse,” both written by Waters — reads as bleak but feels like transcendence. In “Brain Damage,” the singer feels himself succumbing to mental illness. “The lunatic is in my head,” he warns, answered by a snippet of maniacal laughter; in the chorus, he sings, “If your head explodes with dark forebodings too/I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.”Then, in “Eclipse,” he makes his way toward a revelatory oneness — “All that is now and all that is gone/And all that’s to come and everything under the sun is in tune” — only to see it swallowed by darkness as “the sun is eclipsed by the moon.” But in both songs, the music swells behind him, with churchy organ and robust major chords, pealing guitar and gospelly choir harmonies. As the album ends, tidings of catastrophe sound like triumph; it’s a fist-pumping arena-rock finale.In recent interviews, Waters has described the message of the album more positively. “What is really important is the connection between us as human beings, the whole human community,” he told Berliner Zeitung in February. That’s revisionist; “Dark Side” luxuriates in alienation, futility and desperation. Its persistence reveals just how many listeners feel the same. More
After becoming the label’s chief in 1971, he oversaw the release of gargantuan hits like Pink Floyd’s album “The Dark Side of the Moon.”In 1970, Capitol Records’ business was struggling. The Beatles, the company’s top act, were defunct. Hits were scarce among its remaining roster. That year, the company lost $8 million.It needed a savior, and it found one in Bhaskar Menon, an Indian-born, Oxford-educated executive at EMI, the British conglomerate that was Capitol’s majority owner. He became the label’s new chief in 1971 and quickly turned its finances around, driving a gargantuan hit in 1973 with Pink Floyd’s album “The Dark Side of the Moon.” He later ran EMI’s vast worldwide music operations.Mr. Menon, who was also the first Asian man to run a major Western record label, died on March 4 at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 86.The death was confirmed by his wife, Sumitra Menon.“Determined to achieve excellence, Bhaskar Menon built EMI into a music powerhouse and one of our most iconic global institutions,” Lucian Grainge, the chief executive of Universal Music Group, which owns the Capitol label and EMI’s recorded music business, said in a statement after Mr. Menon’s death.Mr. Menon with Maurice Lathouwers of Capitol Records and the singer Helen Reddy, who had numerous hits for the label in the 1970s.EMI Music WorldwideVijaya Bhaskar Menon was born on May 29, 1934, to a prominent family in Trivandrum, in south India (now Thiruvananthapuram). His father, K.R.K. Menon, was the finance secretary under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru; the first one-rupee notes issued after India’s independence from Britain bore his signature. Mr. Menon’s mother, Saraswathi, knew many of India’s leading classical musicians personally.Mr. Menon studied at the Doon School and St. Stephen’s College in India before earning a master’s degree from Christ Church, Oxford. His tutor at Oxford recommended him to Joseph Lockwood, the chairman of EMI, and Mr. Menon began working there in 1956.A proud British institution, EMI controlled a wide musical empire, with divisions throughout Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South America. While there, Mr. Menon assisted the producer George Martin, who later became the Beatles’ chief collaborator.In 1957, Mr. Menon joined the Gramophone Company of India, an EMI subsidiary; he became managing director in 1965 and chairman in 1969. Later in 1969, he was named managing director of EMI International.Capitol, the Los Angeles label that had been home to Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee, was reeling from business missteps and declining sales, and EMI installed Mr. Menon as its president and chief executive. He slashed Capitol’s artist roster, tightened budgets and pushed for more aggressive promotion of the label’s artists.Pink Floyd’s album “The Dark Side of the Moon” was one of the most noteworthy successes of Mr. Menon’s tenure at Capitol and one of the biggest blockbusters in music history.In 1972, Mr. Menon learned that Capitol was at risk of losing the next album by Pink Floyd, which blamed the company for the poor sales of its previous albums in the United States. Mr. Menon flew to the South of France, where Pink Floyd was performing and, after an all-night negotiating session, they agreed on a deal. Mr. Menon commemorated the terms on a cocktail napkin and brought it back to Capitol’s legal department in Los Angeles, said Rupert Perry, a longtime executive at EMI and Capitol.“The Dark Side of the Moon,” released by Capitol with a huge promotional campaign, was one of the biggest blockbusters in music history; it stayed on Billboard’s album chart for 741 consecutive weeks and has sold more than 15 million copies in the United States alone.Led by Mr. Menon, Capitol continued to have success in the 1970s with Bob Seger, Helen Reddy, Steve Miller, Linda Ronstadt, Grand Funk Railroad and others.In 1978, EMI put its music divisions under unified management as EMI Music Worldwide and named Mr. Menon chairman and chief executive. He remained in that position until retiring from the music industry in 1990. From 2005 to 2016, he served on the board of directors of NDTV, a news television channel in India. In 2011, an ailing EMI was sold to Sony, which bought its music publishing business, and Universal Music.Mr. Menon, right, at a gala celebrating Capitol’s 75th anniversary in Los Angeles in 2016. With him was Steve Barnett, who was then the chairman and chief executive of the label.Lester Cohen/WireImage, via Getty ImagesIn some ways, Mr. Menon was an outsider in the Southern California music scene.“I was a very unusual and unlikely sort of person to be sent here under those circumstances to take overall executive command of Capitol,” Mr. Menon was quoted as saying in “History of the Music Biz: The Mike Sigman Interviews,” a 2016 collection published by the industry magazine Hits.Mr. Menon’s wife recalled in a phone interview that when they married, in 1972, Mr. Menon told her, “There are only two Indians in L.A.: Ravi Shankar and me.” She recounted stories of the two men — old friends from India — scouring the city’s exclusive west side in vain for good Indian food.In addition to his wife, Mr. Menon is survived by two sons, Siddhartha and Vishnu, and a sister, Vasantha Menon.Although Mr. Menon was primarily known as a manager of the business side of the labels he ran, he had the respect of many musicians. In the 2003 documentary “Pink Floyd: The Making of The Dark Side of the Moon,” Nick Mason, the band’s drummer, recalled Mr. Menon’s efforts in promoting the band’s breakthrough album, calling him “absolutely terrific.”“He decided he was going to make this work, and make the American company sell this record,” Mr. Mason said. “And he did.” More
