When a Beatle calls you up the year after they broke up, you went, ‘Yes, please, I would like to work for you.’ Because Paul McCartney was god to us at that time. He said, “I don’t want you to design anything. I want you to be an art director for us. I want you photograph my idea, which is a bunch of people escaping over a prison wall.” And I have to say, in a way, we sold our souls to the devil because we knew being associated with Paul McCartney would help our career.
And he was so pleased with that image. You see in the film that it became a relationship for the next 20 years. I really enjoyed working for Paul. It was a bit like working in art school. Everything was sort of cutting up bits of paper and sticking things and scribbling on notepads.”It’s been 50 years this year actually, and it stood the test of time so well. It’s still absolutely all over the shop, which is very flattering.
But I was looking through a book about refraction of light and Storm suddenly said to me, ‘I’ve got it. We should do a pyramid with a refraction going through it. And that would sum up Pink Floyd.’ And it did, because in those days, Pink Floyd’s live shows were all about lighting and effects. In fact, you rarely saw the band. They were all in darkness. I think David Gilmore used to play most of the concerts with his back to the audience. So the idea just gelled with them.
It’s so simple and so un-Hipgnosis, because we were known for photo designs, not for graphics. But it led to Storm suggesting we need to go to Egypt and shoot pyramids to add to the enigma of the whole album. In those days people just said yes. Money was no object. So off we went to Egypt, took some photos, and then you had the whole package. It created quite a roar at the time, people were wondering what it was. But most importantly, the album was probably one of the greatest albums ever made.