I’ve just reshot the “Animals” cover, which was the pig over the power station. There’s a photo in the exhibition here of a fresh shot you did at the site of the original “Animals” cover shoot. You’ve been involved with designing some of the group’s new reissues or boxed sets. So that’s when we started Hipgnosis, and thank you, Syd Barrett. And Storm said, “You know what? That’s a great name for a company, if we join the two words together.” Hip meaning cool, and the gnostic meaning why. He was not very well at that point he had taken too much acid. One day Storm and I arrived back in the flat, and somebody written in on this pristine white door, h-i-p g-n-o-s-i-s, and Storm said, “What asshole did that?” We walked in and there was Syd standing with a pen, very sheepish. When Storm and I started out, we were all living together in this flat in South Kensington in London. When he was asked “What’s the name of your band?,” he couldn’t think of anything… He saw this album cover, and he said, “Oh, Pink Floyd,” and that was the name that stuck. And of course they got the name Pink Floyd from Syd. VARIETY: Can you talk about where the name Hipgnosis came from? On the eve of the opening of the exhibition (itself covered in more detail in this previous story), Po spoke with Variety about some of the indelible Floyd images he and Thorgerson designed. After he died in 2013, Powell (or “Po,” as he’s known) took the baton, and has served as art director on recent projects like the recent “Later Years” boxed set, a remix drawn from it of “A Momentary Lapse of Reason” coming out as a singular remix this fall, and an “Animals” boxed set due in 2022. The exhibit also goes well into the covers Hipgnosis didn’t do, like “The Wall,” before Thorgerson rejoined the fold in the post- Roger Waters era. Powell is one of the co-curators of the exhibition, which ensured it has deep insights into the imagery they created for Floyd from their second album on through to essential creations like “Ummagumma,” “Atom Heart Mother,” “The Dark Side of the Moon,” “Wish You Were Here” and, finally, “Animals.” The current exhibition is almost as much a testament to the power that they held over the public imagination during Hipgnosis’ glory days as it is to the band’s aural intrigue. That’s the power of the iconography being celebrated in “Their Mortal Remains.”Īnd it’s the power of the graphic and photographic work done in the ’60s and ’70s by Aubrey Powell and his late partner, Storm Thorgerson, who as the founders and creative principals of Hipgnosis defined much of what was great about album art in that era. Down on the corner, and in surrounding blocks, you can find tourist shops selling “Dark Side of the Moon” T-shirts (mostly unlicensed, probably) - but it’s not because they’re capitalizing on the Floyd exhibition being in the neighborhood it’s that they sell them every day of every year, just like most other T-shirt shops in the world. stop on an international tour in the heart of Hollywood. The studio LP was more experimental, each member getting a certain amount of space on the record to make his own music - Richard Wright's "Sysyphus" was a pure keyboard work, featuring various synthesizers, organs, and pianos David Gilmour's "The Narrow Way" was a three-part instrumental for acoustic and electric guitars and electronic keyboards, and Nick Mason's "The Grand Vizier's Garden Party" made use of a vast range of acoustic and electric percussion devices. Roger Waters' "Grantchester Meadows" was a lyrical folk-like number unlike almost anything else the group ever did.“The Pink Floyd Exhibition: Their Mortal Remains” has just opened at the Vogue Multicultural Museum, making its first U.S. "Astronomy Domine," "Careful with That Axe Eugene," "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun," and "A Saucerful of Secrets" are all superior here to their studio originals, done longer, louder, and harder, with a real edge to the playing. They also sound like they've got the amplifiers to make their music count, which is more than the early band had. Featuring the band's second lineup (i.e., no Syd Barrett), the set shows off a very potent group, their sound held together on-stage by Nick Mason's assertive drumming and Roger Waters' powerful bass work, which keep the proceedings moving no matter how spaced out the music gets. The live set, recorded in Birmingham and Manchester in June 1969, is limited to four numbers, all drawn from the group's first two LPs or their then-recent singles. For many years, this double-LP was one of the most popular albums in Pink Floyd's pre-Dark Side of the Moon output, containing a live LP and a studio LP for the price of one.