It was usually Thorgerson, a stubborn genius by all accounts, who drove the record executives to apoplexy. “The best line about Storm was that ‘he’s a man who doesn’t take yes for an answer,'” Mason said. “It was almost inevitable that whatever was done, particularly by the record company, would mean Storm would have to yell at them.”
Thorgerson, who died in 2013, could also be confrontational with the musicians. “He didn’t care if it was Paul McCartney or Roger Waters, he would express himself pretty violently,” Powell said. “And many times I had to put out the fires to maintain some sort of credibility. At the end of the day, it sort of worked because I managed to convince the artists that it was the idea that was important. Forget Storm’s personality.’
Corbijn said the documentary was ultimately a “story of love and loss.” Hipgnosis came to an end at the dawn of a new era in which music videos predominated and compact discs, with their considerably smaller artistic canvases, became the dominant distribution method. (Of course most people see thumbnail album covers on their phones these days.) Turning to filmmaking, Thorgerson and Powell got into a fight over money and then didn’t speak to each other for 12 years. “It was like the end of a marriage,” Powell said. The two reunited after Thorgerson fell ill; he died of cancer at the age of 69.
In more recent years, Powell said, he was encouraged to see Hipgnosis album covers “breaking that barrier to being taken seriously as fine art.” He added: “A lot of thought went into those pictures. We didn’t take pictures of the band and put them on the front with their names in big letters and the title in big white letters. This was work that was taken extremely seriously. And I hope that comes across in the film.”
Powell pointed to Hipgnosis’ cover of Led Zeppelin’s final studio album, 1979’s “In Through the Out Door,” which lovingly recreated a real New Orleans juke joint in a London studio. He indicated that making the album’s footage (which came packaged in a brown paper bag after all that work) probably cost more than the band did to record the music themselves.
“You know,” said Powell with a laugh, “that sums up time.”