5 album covers in our archive
Pink Floyd is featured in Behind the Covers' archive with 5 album covers spanning the 1970s and 1960s. Released across Harvest/EMI and Columbia/CBS Records, Harvest Records, Harvest Records (UK) / Columbia Records (US), Harvest (UK) / Capitol (US) and EMI Columbia labels, the artwork sits in the rock tradition. Each cover is documented in our archive with design notes covering graphic design, minimalist, hand drawn, typographic, conceptual, photography. Below you'll find the full story behind each Pink Floyd cover — designers, photographers, label history, and the visual choices that defined the release.
Pink Floyd's most stripped-down sleeve is a plain white brick wall, no text at all on the original. 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.
A fashion photographer borrowed a prism lens from George Harrison, asked a brand-new, unsigned band to wear the brightest clothes they could find, and split their faces into a kaleidoscope. The result became the only Pink Floyd studio album to put the band's own faces on the front. Oh, and he reportedly never got paid.
