THORGERSON I think that Roger and Syd were not that ordinary…or the others, for that matter. GW What were the Floyd guys like as teens? Ordinary, red-blooded young English lads? Roger was more on the fringes of our peer group we both chased the same girl…but he won that one. It was just a gang in Cambridge… a group of teenagers who came together, not unlike, I should think, they do in many places in America. Also with Dave, because he used to hang around with us, even though he was younger. Roger’s mom and my mum were best friends. THORGERSON It began with Syd, but also with Roger. GUITAR WORLD: How did your association with Pink Floyd begin? All this, of course, after he is assured that “the fact that I don’t know anything about guitars doesn’t disqualify me from being in Guitar World, is that right?” Gilmour also notes with obvious affection that “Storm has always had a big mouth,” an observation confirmed by the designer during a long conversation in his London office, in which he generously shares his thoughts about Floyd, Zeppelin, his myriad other projects and the general state of album art. “Storm’s ideas are not linked to anyone’s ideas of marketing: that they are atmospherically linked to the music is a bonus. “He has been my friend, my conscience, my therapist and of course my artistic advisor…,” Gilmour writes in the foreword of Mind Over Matter: The Images of Pink Floyd (Sanctuary Music Library), a 176-page tour of the incredible graphic world Thorgerson has created for the band. He’d blanch at any reference to him as the band’s fifth member, but in Floyd’s extra-musical domain, it was Thorgerson’s vision that set the controls for the heart of the sun. With the notable exceptions of The Wall, The Final Cut and a handful of other releases, Thorgerson was responsible for the visual face of Pink Floyd. Starting with A Saucerful of Secrets in 1968, Thorgerson became Pink Floyd’s chief album designer, crafting a series of indelible images-the picture-within-a-picture cover of Ummagumma, the cow of Atom Heart Mother, the prism of Dark Side of the Moon, the Easter Island–style totems of The Division Bell.īeyond the albums, there were videos and concert films, as well as covers for solo projects by Gilmour and Barrett. They went their separate ways in college, but everyone wound up in swinging London during the mid Sixties, as rock and roll culture took over the city. Thorgerson and Waters played rugby together. No band has trusted Thorgerson more during the past 30 years than Pink Floyd, whose relationship with the designer dates back nearly five decades to Cambridge, England, where Thorgerson grew up with Floyd’s original band leader Syd Barrett, who was a year behind him in school, and former bassist Roger Waters, who was a year ahead.
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