5 album covers in our archive
Behind the Covers currently documents 5 Pink Floyd album covers from 1967 to 1979. Read together, the entries show how the artwork changed from release to release, with each story identifying the designers, photographers, source material, and design decisions behind the sleeve.
Cover evolution
Pink Floyd's most stripped-down sleeve is a plain white brick wall. Behind it sits a feud, a fired design group, and a political cartoonist scribbling the title in red across a kitchen table in the South of France.
A 40-foot helium pig named Algie floats between the chimneys of Battersea Power Station on Pink Floyd's 1977 cover. During the shoot it broke free, drifted into Heathrow's flight paths and grounded planes before landing in a Kent farmer's field. The image you see is a splice of two different days.
Two businessmen shake hands on a sun-baked studio backlot — and one of them is on fire. Pink Floyd asked Storm Thorgerson how to picture people who hide their true feelings, and he answered: 'Set a man on fire.' A real stuntman, fifteen takes, and a singed moustache later, here's the result.
A keyboardist asked for something as classy as a chocolate box. What he got was a beam of white light splitting into a rainbow against pure black, a design pulled from a 1963 physics textbook that would end up on more T-shirts than almost any image in rock. Here's how Pink Floyd's prism came to be.
Fashion photographer Vic Singh made Pink Floyd's kaleidoscopic Piper at the Gates of Dawn front cover with a prism lens George Harrison had given him, a Hasselblad, strobe light and the band's brightest psychedelic clothes. Syd Barrett created the rear-cover illustration, not the front photograph.
