It will arrive in cinemas and on-demand on July 14th and tells of Hipgnosis, the art collective of Storm Thorgerson, Aubrey Powell and Peter Christopherson, who created a number of iconic record sleeves for the likes of Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath and many more.
Jimmy Page and Robert Plant interviewed separately for “Squaring The Circle (The Story Of Hipgnosis)” which will open in cinemas across the US.
“It was the most expensive cover that we did,” Page says in the film’s trailer, referring to the cover of In Through the Out Door. “That cover was better than the album,” he continues with a laugh.
Led Zeppelin fans will already know Blake as the author of “Bring It On Home: Peter Grant, Led Zeppelin and Beyond”, his excellent 2018 biography of the band’s manager Peter Grant.
Paying subscribers to the LedZepNews Substack can listen to our full audio interview with Blake and read the complete transcript of our interview here. They can also read the entire archive of LedZepNews emails sent since 2015.
Jimmy Page is still appreciative of Hipgnosis’ work
Hipgnosis’ work for Led Zeppelin played a vital role in building up the band’s mysterious image through album covers like Houses of the Holy and Presence. Blake interviewed Page for his new book and found the musician remains appreciative of the design group’s work, even if he still bears a grudge. (LedZeppelin-news)
“He was very keen to talk and gave up a lot of time for this,” Blake says of Page. “Jimmy Page’s attention to detail is second to none, nothing gets past him. And that’s why those Led Zeppelin records sound as good now as they did in 1974 or 1975. They sound like they could have been recorded yesterday. And I think he respected that same attention to detail in Hipgnosis.”
But Page clashed in the seventies with Storm Thorgerson, Hipgnosis’ often-abrasive co-founder. “He didn’t get on with Storm,” Blake says of Page. “Storm pissed him off quite early on in their working relationship by suggesting he put a tennis racket on the cover of a Led Zeppelin album because the music was a racket. And Jimmy Page was still smarting about this when I spoke to him about it. And it’s like, this is nearly 50 years ago. Let it go, Jim. But he wouldn’t let it go.”
“But in the same breath, he completely recognised that they were artists that would go to the end of the earth to do what they wanted to do,” Blake continues. “And that’s why they had such a great relationship with Led Zeppelin and with Led Zeppelin’s manager Peter Grant who’s a big part of this because they pissed off Storm, ‘get rid of Storm, we’ll have Po’, and he took Po under his wing and Po got a lot of work and Hipgnosis did a lot of work for Grant and for Swan Song.”
