We were treated to a visit by Storm Thorgerson last week, album cover design legend and, as it turns out, very entertaining guy. Storm’s portfolio is overwhelming, famous for working with Pink Floyd and creating arguably the most iconic album cover of all time in Dark Side of the Moon, but has since worked with bands as diverse as Anthrax, Muse, The Offspring, Audioslave and Biffy Clyro. He admits he doesn’t always like the music, but that’s mainly because he often has to listen to it repeatedly during the design of the artwork. Storm told us that he was going to “show pictures, tell you how I did them, or what I was trying to do.” which worked for me. He also said at one point:

“I wouldn’t buy a record for it’s cover, and I wouldn’t expect anyone else to.”

…which was fantastic and kind of set the tone of the evening. He split his work into sections, which rather suspiciously spelled out his name…

S is for Sets & Scupltures

“If we get a chance to build something we do it”

Storm clearly loves to make stuff. The example below from Anthrax’s Stomp 442 album was never a whole sphere. Instead it was a quarter sphere, rotated and manipulated to create a composite image. Storm told us of his fascination for spheres, and the fact that “you never know what’s inside them, if they’re solid or hollow”

Anthrax ‘Stomp 442′ 1995

T is for Tales

“Things are richer with a story, so I try to encourage people to make one up, even if it’s not the one I intended.”

For the Biffy Clyro album Puzzle, Storm fixated on the fact that lead singer and songwriter Simon Neil’s mother had recently died. The figure in the foreground is in a fetal position, something which Storm associated with grief, and the missing piece is just beside him, although he can’t see it. A detail often missed is that of a figure being forcibly removed from the room, symbolic of having a loved one wrenched away. This is Storm’s own story, based on his understanding of the band and their music.

Biffy Clyro ‘Puzzle’ 2007

O is for Obsessions

“How much can you persuade someone to look again?”

Storm told us that he simply loved the idea of taking a cow and photographing it for the front cover of Pink Floyd’s 1970 album. The randomness of this delighted him “I’m lucky I’ve worked for people who don’t know any different. They didn’t know if my work was any good, any more than I did.” The cow was an instinctive idea and not over-thought, eventually ending up reproduced at huge scales incongruously across billboards worldwide. Storm’s insistence and the support of the band made sure it happened.

Pink Floyd ‘Atom Heart Mother’ 1970

R is for Real

“Design is in the doing”

The photograph for Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here is impressive stuff. Storm is proud that he actually set a man on fire to achieve it. Interestingly, he told us that to start with the figures were the other way round, but the prevailing wind set the unlighted man’s moustache on fire, so it was rearranged.

Pink Floyd ‘Wish You Were Here’ 1975

M is for Models

“It’s better to have something good than something shit”

Storm’s Back Catalogue is exactly that. Not a row of polite captioned JPEGs but the album covers painted on the back of lovely ladies. That’s the sort of thing you can get away with if you’re Storm Thorgerson.

It was a great talk and the man himself was very happy to talk about any aspect of his work. I decided not to mention the fact that I used to design CD covers, because those were mainly the kind of ones you find in motorway services bargain bins. Two more which he brought with him were a long term favourite of mine for Muse…

…and the newest Biffy Clyro album cover, which was frankly amazing.

Not many people make album covers like that any more.

You can see a clip of Storm talking about his work here and the poster I designed for the event here. After the talk, he even signed my copy of Dark Side of the Moon, and you can tell he’s a visual perfectionist, because he did it along one side of the prism. I liked that.