Pink Floyd ~ The Dark Side of the Moon

Pink Floyd ~ The Dark Side of the Moon

Record Label: Harvest, Capitol
Release Date: March 1, 1973

[I may have made a mistake in the references, do mention if I have - note to self, never start messing with reference numbers just before publishing]

There are little album covers that are as iconic as the prism on the album cover of Pink Floyd - The Dark Side of the Moon. I decided to start off my quest to dig up information on album covers here.

A quick introduction:
The album was created by Storm Thorgerson, or rather the artgroup he founded called Hipgnosis. He cofounded the group with Aubrey Powell. He made artwork for rock artists such as Dream Theater, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, The Scorpions, Europe, Genesis, Muse and many, many more.

Unfortunately Thorgerson has died last year, but that won't stop us. There will be plenty of album covers by Thorgerson on this blog. In fact, I think I will create a separate post on Hipgnosis and/or Storm Thorgerson one day. Anyway. Back to the dark side of the moon.


Let's first explore that exactly is depicted.

From Wikipedia (Album page):

The album's iconic sleeve, designed by Storm Thorgerson (wikipedia), features a prism that represents the band's stage lighting, the record's lyrical themes, and keyboardist Richard Wright's request for a "simple and bold" design.

This is more important than it may seem. Pink Floyd were among the pioneers of light shows and were actually famous for them.

"Wish You Were Here" during their "Division Bell" tour at Earls Court on 17th October 1994.
Photo by Syd Young (Click to go to Flickr)

It is likely that neither anyone at Hipgnosis nor anyone from Pink Floyd really realized how big everything was about to turn out. Pink Floyd was what everyone was looking for and the marketing wise this album was a bomb. Most of the success of the album had to be analyzed afterwards rather than be estimated beforehand. From A brief history of album covers[1]:

Pink Floyd's light shows had been a hallmark of the band's live performances since their 60s days performing in London's UFO Club. Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell reflected this with one of the most iconic album sleeves of all time for The Dark Side Of The Moon, with their design of a prism refracting white light into a spectrum: simple physics and something record buyers might relate to from school. 'The prism was a way to talk about the fact that this band ... would do light and sound [at their shows]', Thorgerson has recalled. It is also claimed that Roger Waters wanted a sleeve that reflected 'madness of ambition', and that the triangle is the symbol for ambition. 

To top it off, the simplicity and recognizability turned them, and the prism, into an icon. An icon which is still immensely popular today. The cover continues the trend to have visuals that trigger interest, without having the need to put the band's name and album name on the front. Examples of earlier albums:

Obscured by Clouds

Atom Heart Mother

The album was released in a gatefold LP (those things you can open and close like a birthday card, there are pictures down below). The sleeve was designed by Hipgnosis and George Hardie. Hipgnosis had designed several of the band's previous albums, some which broke earlier traditions. When EMI was presented with the covers of Atom Heart Mother and Obscured by Clouds, they expected traditional designs with words and a bandname. Hipgnosis realized the text is usually subordinate to the visuals (or the text becomes part of it). Apparently Richard Wright (a pianist) told them to make something "smarter, neater—more classy"[2] for The Dark Side of the Moon (no clue how he got involved with this). The prism design was inspired by a photograph Thorgerson saw in a brainstorming session with Powell.

The relationship between Pink Floyd and EMI Records was an interesting one, as we can read in an interview with the band. Source: Classic Albums (an interview Dave Gilmour)[3]:

"Did EMI have any idea what they were getting?"
"We were always incredibly arrogant with EMI, and record companies in general. Our attitude basically was that we'd deliver them a record and they would sell it. We would deliver them the finished music and the finished art work, and they would sell it. They never had any real say in what we did, how we did it, or anything, except that, of course, keeping one's eye on how they actually do marketing is totally impossible. You can't completely control it. But we always figured that as long as each record did a bit better than the last one, or made them a significant profit, then they couldn't really say anything to us. So we weren't under that particular type of whip, as so many people have been."

the Silver Surfer

Back to the cover. Hipgnosis showed Pink Floyd seven designs, but all four members agreed that the prism was by far the best. One of these designs that was turned down was what had to become a photo (it was a drawing at this stage) of the Silver Surfer from the Marvel Comics, a legend confirmed in an interview with Storm Thorgerson by Rolling Stone. The drawings of the other designs were lost (also mentioned in that interview).
So why the Silver Surfer you ask? Thorgerson wasn't really interested in the character at all, but he thought it was nice symbolically: Floyd as the surfer and his fans as waves, going wherever he goes.



The design represents a number of things[4]: the band's stage lighting, the lyrics, and Richard Wright's request for a "simple and bold" design. And, as mentioned before, possibly Roger Waters' 'madness of ambition', where the triangle is the symbol for ambition. Thorgerson confirms the triangle standing for 'thought and ambition' in the aforementioned interview with Rolling Stone. Waters also pitched the idea of the light spectrum continuing through to the gatefold[5]. Another interpretation is that the light represents unity, while the prism represents society. The refracted light would symbolize absence of unity[6].

The gatefold design depicts the heartbeat sound that is used throughout the album, complementing the music and blending visuals and music together:

The heartbeat's sonar wave & the spectrum continues through the gatefold

The back contains Thorgerson's suggestion of another prism recombining the spectrum of light, allowing for interesting layouts of the album in record shops.[7]

Second prism on the back 

Observant readers (or Pink Floyd fans, colour maniacs...) may have noticed the colour spectrum of the album is 'missing' a colour: indigo. Well, this is only because the general distinction of colours is using seven colours, Hipgnosis for some reason decided to go against this and go with six. Not only that, as you may remember from school, a spectrum in real life is a gradient with no definite boundaries and the prism would already separate the colours from the point where the light enters it.

The album came with two posters and several pyramid-themed stickers. One of the band in concert, the other an infrared photograph of the Great Pyramids of Giza that Powell and Thorgerson took. [7]

Poster with pictures of Pink Floyd in concert

Pyramid themed stickers

Infrared poster of the Great Pyramids of Giza

As little as they expected EMI to mess with their creativity, in turn they left most of the album design to Hipgnosis. From Classic Albums (an interview Dave Gilmour)[3]:

"What was the band's input on the art work?"
"Well, the input we have is that Hipgnosis come up with ideas and we say yes or no. And when they came in with the prism thing, it was obviously very strong, and I think we pretty well all agreed instantly that it fitted perfectly. And I still think so. And, in fact, the amount of times that people have tried to copy the idea, and tried to do something similar, has proved that most people think of it as a very, very powerful image."

"Do you have any theories as to why this record became such a monster? It's more than just a big record.""[...] Like I said before, we did know, long before it came out, that it would sell. We knew commercially, if you like, that the package - the record and the cover and everything together - was going to be far, far stronger than anything we had done before." 

All in all quite a nice story if you ask me.

The whole package

[EDIT]
From the Storm Thorgerson website:

"Pink Floyd in their infinite wisdom perused our 7 complex detailed roughs for this cover in a drab basement room at Abbey Road - submissions over which we at Hipgnosis had toiled for weeks - but managed to decide within 3 minutes which one they liked. No amount of cajoling would get them to consider any other contender, nor endure further explanation of the prism, or how exactly it might look. That's it, they said in unison, we got to get back to real work, and returned forthwith to the studio upstairs. Appropriateness was the key. The refracting glass prism referred to Floyd light shows - consummate use of light in the concert setting. Its outline is triangular and triangles are symbols of ambition, and are redolent of pyramids, both cosmic and mad in equal measure, all these ideas touching on themes in the lyrics. The joining of the spectrum extending round the back cover and across the gatefold inside was seamless like the seguing tracks on the album, whilst the opening heartbeat was represented by a repeating blip in one of the colours. But to look back now and reflect upon how the actual artwork itself had no colour, being just a tint lay, and how the spectrum was missing a colour anyway, and how the whole design was only cobbled from a standard physics textbook diagram (albeit cunningly), and how there was another album called DSOM only a year previously, all of this just goes to show how such matters pale if a design feels 'appropriate'. How fitting it is to be fitting!"

Extras:
All of Hipgnosis' art for this album
The New Yorker on the 'death of album art' (an article posted shortly after Thorgerson died)
An interesting post on superhype I found while looking for a reference

A video of Storm talking about working with Pink Floyd (might be a bit hard to understand him, but I found him genuinely funny and intriguing. give it a shot):

References (literature):

1. A brief history of album covers, ISBN 978-1-8478-6211-2
2. Harris, John (2006), The Dark Side of the Moon (third ed.), Harper Perennial, ISBN 978-0-00-779090-6
3. Classic Albums, ISBN 0-563-36246-4
4. Classic Albums: The Making of The Dark Side of the Moon (DVD), Eagle Rock Entertainment, 26 August 2003
5. Schaffner, Nicholas (1991), Saucerful of Secrets (first ed.), London: Sidgwick & Jackson, ISBN 0-283-06127-8
6. Weinstein, Deena (2007). "Roger Waters: Artist of the Absurd". In Reisch, George A. Pink Floyd and Philosophy: Careful with that Axiom, Eugene!. Open Court. ISBN 978-0-8126-9636-3. p.86
7. Harris, John (2006), The Dark Side of the Moon (third ed.), Harper Perennial, ISBN 978-0-00-779090-6

~ jar