![]() ![]() Some of the crew at Giant’s Causeway in 1972. I put the children in different positions on the rocks, shot them like that, realised where I could cut round and the whole thing was done in 20 minutes.’ We’d create imagery that was sharp front to back and had developed this technique of cutting out, sanding down the edges of the paper to be Rizla-thin, blacking them, then gluing them down and creating these hyper-realist looking pictures.īecause the rocks were octagonal I realised that I could cut round them. Smith ran out of make-up and had to resort to using car paint on the models, but Powell then had a brainwave… ‘At Hipgnosis we were experts at creating collage pictures. For five days it poured with rain and was absolute misery.’ Powell reveals, ‘All the cast had to get up at 4am because I wanted to get a sunrise or sunset – that was the idea, to get a glorious view. The family was cast – the children were siblings Stefan and Samantha Gates – and Oscar-winning make-up artist Tom Smith did the gold and silver paintwork on the family’s bodies. I didn’t really take that onboard at the time.’ Powell admits, ‘It was a very unsafe place to go. It was the year of Bloody Sunday and 479 deaths, due to the Troubles, so locals treated an English crew with suspicion. Get an advance and don’t fuck up.”’ Hipgnosis decided to shoot the ‘science fiction family’ idea at Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland in late 1972. Powell reveals, ‘I called Grant and asked. Choose whichever you want and go and do it.”īack at their studio, Powell and Thorgerson realised no budget had been mentioned. Powell recalls, ‘Peter Grant suddenly called a halt to proceedings, saying, “We’re going off to Japan to tour. ’Īnother idea was to carve out the ZoSo logo with bulldozers on the plains of Nazca in Peru, but this was rejected due to the likely huge cost and tricky politics involved. I suggested a science fiction family being led forward by a kind of alien and they would be painted in gold and silver… this appealed. ![]() I talked about recreating the book’s end where the children in the book, in a kind of apocalyptic scene, go up in the sky to escape the “overlords”. Powell says, ‘I brought a book by Arthur C. Powell and Thorgerson met the band – Jimmy Page, singer Robert Plant, drummer John Bonham and bassist John Paul Jones – and their notoriously truculent manager Peter Grant at Grant’s offices in London. I phoned the secretary of the band’s management company to make an appointment and said, “Could we have a title, some lyrics, was there music to listen to or something to go on?” The message came back, “No. Of course, we said “yes”.’ Powell reveals, ‘There was no brief at all. He liked the atmosphere of that and said, “Would you be interested to work for Led Zeppelin?” It was a very misty picture and we painted a flying saucer into the mist. Hipgnosis was co-founded by Aubrey Powell and the late Storm Thorgerson in 1967 and Powell recalls, ‘Page had seen an album cover we’d done for Wishbone Ash, called Argus, which was a photo of a warrior shot in the south of France. The commission for design agency Hipgnosis to create the Houses of the Holy album cover came about after Led Zeppelin’s lead guitarist Jimmy Page telephoned the company’s studio. They wouldn’t get away with that now, etc, etc… We reveal the fascinating story behind the jaw-dropping album artwork for Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy (1973), as executed by Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell But we're not gonna concentrate on singles because we're gonna concentrate on the albums.Naked kids – in car paint. And sure, okay, something needs to be played on the AM station for heralding the fact that there's an album. "So I'd learned that the thing to do was to be making albums. And it's there, it's alive and well.' And then you go back to England, be faced with doing some silly single. ![]() It was so refreshing to be in a tour bus, listening to, like, the local FM station and saying, 'Yes, this is what we've all been about in music. "They don't have some silly tune, singles. "FM radio was alive and well at this point of time, and they were playing whole album sides, for heaven's sake," Page told Mason. The band made its name on the underground circuit of touring, and by American FM radio (given that their recorded output did not led itself easily to bite-sized pop hits for AM radio play). Songs featured included "Whole Lotta Love," "Ramble On" and "Living Loving Maid (She's Just a Woman)." The second studio album by Led Zeppelin, released in October 1969. ![]()
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