Wish You Were Here

The handshake is the most ordinary gesture in the world, and that is exactly why it stops you cold here, because the man on the right is engulfed in flame. He's calm, knees slightly bent, palm extended to greet a colleague in a grey suit, while orange fire licks up his arm and rolls off his shoulder into the bright sky. The setting could not be more mundane: a pair of stuccoed warehouse buildings with curved roofs, a clean empty stretch of tarmac, a manhole cover dead-centre at the bottom of the frame, the whole scene flooded in flat, cloudless Californian daylight. Nothing about the place suggests danger. The danger is the point.

This was the cover of Wish You Were Here, released on 12 September 1975. The studio shoot happened on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, California, and the burning man wasn't an effect. He was Hollywood stuntman Ronnie Rondell Jr., layered into a fire-retardant suit and wig beneath the business clothes, doused with accelerant, and set alight. Facing him in the cooler-coloured suit stood a second stuntman, Danny Rogers (Jr.), the unsinged half of the deal.

The idea came from Storm Thorgerson, who conceived and directed the image and, when pressed on how to actually depict it, said simply: 'Set a man on fire.' He'd been turning over the notion that people hide their real feelings for fear of getting burned, a phrase that doubles as music-industry slang for being cheated out of royalties, an idea drawn straight from the album's track 'Have a Cigar.' Two men in suits, one quietly ablaze, sealing a handshake: the absent sincerity made literal. Aubrey 'Po' Powell, Thorgerson's partner at the Hipgnosis design studio, photographed it, later recounting the shoot first-hand.

It did not go smoothly. Thorgerson recalled paying the stuntman $1,000 to be lit with accelerant, and the fire held its shape for take after take, until the fifteenth, when the wind shifted and blew the flames back into Rondell's face. It cost him an eyebrow and part of his moustache. The serene, almost corporate poise of the figure on the cover hides the fact that a man really was burning, really got hurt, to make it.

Fire was only one quarter of a larger scheme built on the four classical elements. For water, a diver enters Mono Lake without a splash. For air, an invisible nude model trails a red veil in a Norfolk grove. For earth, a faceless 'Floyd salesman' (an empty suit) stands in the Yuma Desert on the back cover, absence in human form. The whole package circled the theme of presence and its lack.

Then Thorgerson pushed the concept one cruel step further. Borrowing the opaque-sleeve trick from Roxy Music's Country Life, he had the finished artwork hidden inside black shrink-wrap, so the album art was literally absent at point of sale: you bought a record you couldn't see. The only thing on the outside was a sticker designed by George Hardie showing two mechanical hands clasped in a handshake, its original pencil-and-felt-tip artwork on card later turning up at auction. Pink Floyd's US label, Columbia, was horrified at shrouding the cover in black plastic and demanded it be changed, but were overruled.

What survived the wrapper is an image people keep returning to: a flat blue sky, two unremarkable buildings, a deserted lot, and one perfectly composed man on fire shaking hands as if nothing were wrong. The eye lands first on the flames, then drifts to the second man's unbothered face, and the discomfort is the whole story: a polite gesture between two figures, one of them quietly being consumed.