Other candidates? The sleeve of Pink Floyd’s Animals, aka The One with the Pig Flying over Battersea Power Station. Remarkably, though, Wings Greatest might not be the London-based studio’s peak madness in their pursuit of album art befitting their rock star clients. “But then someone said: ‘Well, you could have just gone in a studio, in London, got a big pile of salt and stuck the statue on top of it.’ But, you know,” the musician laughs, “that’s just too easy!” And as he points out, this was the late Seventies and “there was a lot of that in those days” – “that” being visionary ambition, indulgence and folly. “We loved it, it looked great,” he says in the film, directed by Anton Corbijn and including contributions from a roll-call of Seventies titans, from McCartney to Jimmy Page and Dave Gilmour. “I was stuck up there for about six hours.”īack on terra firma, McCartney pronounced himself pleased with the image that adorned the cover of his first post-Beatles compilation. And there I am, stuck on an area about the size of an average person’s sitting room, with a 10,000 foot drop all around me… And I completely have a phobia about heights.” Still, Powell, true to reputation, was nothing if not rigorous. “We had to jump off,” the designer continues in the film, “tak this 70lb statue. “So we took a helicopter up, which could only land on the edge,” remembers Aubrey “Po” Powell in Squaring the Circle, a new documentary about Hipgnosis, the legendary graphic design company he co-founded in 1967 alongside Storm Thorgerson. When he realised that might be impractical, McCartney lowered his expectations. But he wanted the chryselephantine piece, by Art Deco sculptor Demétre Chiparus, to be photographed “somewhere really special”. For the cover art of his next album, 1978 compilation Wings Greatest, he was keen to use a statue of Semiramis, Queen of Babylon, that he’d spotted at Christie’s.
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