film: "Squaring the Circle: the Story of Hipgnosis" (2022)

This is the film about those guys that did all those great prog record covers in the 1970s. It is fairly straightforward formally, with an interview with surviving Hipgnosis guy Aubrey "Po" Powell intercut with older footage of the late Storm Thorgerson and contributions from other people (some more relevant than others), all combined with images of the record covers they designed and music from those records. There is no interview footage with Peter Christopherson, who joined Hipgnosis in the mid-1970s, which might be just as well. The trailer had suggested that the film was going to be a lot of boring talking heads droning on about record covers, but that proved to be misleading. Instead the film combined the interview footage with music and images to make for an appealing gestalt. If you were broadly familiar with the Hipgnosis story then perhaps the film would not tell you too much, but listening to Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd blasting out on a big cinema's sound system while watching the album covers roll over the screen makes for an enjoyable way to spend time.

One thing I wondered about while watching the film was the presence in it of Noel Gallagher. Hipgnosis did none of his record covers and in any case his band were releasing records long after original Hipgnosis had folded (split up by monetary differences and concerns about how to navigate the changing artistic climate of the 1980s). Every time Gallagher appeared on screen I felt like shouting "What the fuck are you doing here?". It is a well known fact that music documentaries often have irrelevant but well-known figures shoehorned in by the production team on the basis that it will be easier to secure distribution if the film features Bongo yapping away, so initially I was wondering if that was what was going on here. And yet Squaring the Circle features contributions from a Beatle, two members of Led Zeppelin, and all surviving former members of Pink Floyd, as well as Roger Dean and Peter Saville. That's such a high yield line-up that it's hard to see why it would be felt necessary to pad it out with Noel Gallagher. So why was Noel Gallagher in the film?

After the fact I found myself thinking that maybe Gallagher's presence was a bit less irrelevant than I had initially thought. The other people in the film all talk about the creation of album covers, but he was the only person who really talked about how someone buying records engaged with them. I think that was a perspective worth having, even if Gallagher did occasionally find himself approaching "And now I've got to make my own tea" territory.

images:

Aubrey Powell & Storm Thorgerson (Film Forum: "Squaring the Circle (the Story of Hipgnosis)")

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