Cover stories

These days, Aubrey Powell is a genial 70-year-old who can be found most mornings having breakfast at his local Knightsbridge café. But in the late 1970s, he did something that surely no other human being has done before or since. He photographed a sheep lying on a psychiatrist’s couch on a beach in Hawaii. Its coat had been treated with Vidal Sassoon products, and it was sedated with Valium because it was scared of waves.

So what on earth was he up to? The answer — as anybody who recognises Powell’s name will guess — was creating one of the 373 album covers that his company Hipgnosis designed back when LPs ruled the world. (In this case, for 10cc’s Look Hear?)

Now Powell — known as Po — has gathered all 373 together for the first time, in a book that for some of us thrillingly recalls those many happy hours spent flipping through album racks in record shops. Po’s accompanying commentary does acknowledge the occasional misstep. (‘An embarrassment to the Hipgnosis catalogue,’ he writes of one particularly dodgy schoolgirl-based sleeve.) Nonetheless, what’s most striking is how endlessly inventive yet consistently dazzling Hipgnosis covers were: not just the famous ones for the likes of Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, but also those for, well, virtually every 1970s rock band you can think of — and plenty that you probably can’t.

Having joined Po in that Knightsbridge café at the decidedly non-rock’n’roll hour of 9 a.m., I ask him what it was like seeing Hipgnosis’s work collected together. Did it create in him the feeling Paul McCartney (another former client) often seems to have: that of a man who can’t quite believe what he achieved in his younger days?