Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 19 December

Squaring the Circle: The Story of Hipgnosis (Corbijn, 2022)

Regular read­ers of this news­let­ter will know that I am a big fan of music doc­u­ment­ar­ies, so much so that I have to ration them out lest they swamp all the oth­er content.

Squaring the Circle is good (and dif­fer­ent) enough to break through the fire­wall, partly because it is made by the pho­to­graph­er film­maker Anton Corbijn (The Joshua Tree album cov­er shoot and the 2007 fea­ture Control, about Joy Division’s Ian Curtis) and partly because it’s not really about music at all.

Aubrey “Po” Powell was a lonely teen­ager, effect­ively aban­doned by his par­ents who chose not to return to England to care for him when he was kicked out of pub­lic school in the early 60s. In Cambridge, he struck up a friend­ship with the ras­cally Storm Thurgerson and his mates David, Nick, Roger, Rick and Syd who were about to become the Pink Floyd.

He and Storm stumbled into graph­ic design when they were asked to cre­ate an album cov­er for Floyd’s first album “A Saucerful of Secrets” and they went on to corner the mar­ket in rock, prog-rock and pop album cov­ers for the next 13 years, des­pite being the most chaot­ic of oper­a­tions and frac­tious of relationships.

You’ll know their work – and if you came of age dur­ing the punk peri­od you will know and hate the music it rep­res­en­ted – and the film is an intriguing mix of social his­tory and design war stor­ies, told mostly by Powell with help from many of his celebrity rock­star cli­ents. The dif­fi­cult Storm – about whom Floyd’s Nick Mason says “he was man who wouldn’t take ‘yes’ for an answer” – fea­tures in archive foot­age as he passed away in 2013.

It makes a refresh­ing change to hear from the likes of the liv­ing mem­bers of Floyd, Paul McCartney and Peter Gabriel talk­ing about some­thing that they care deeply about but abso­lutely are not experts in. Regular music doco talk­ing head Noël Gallagher is very funny, espe­cially when he dishes on how much he hates the sleeve for “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?”, Oasis’ biggest selling record and wishes he’d paid more atten­tion at the time. “Who signed off on that? Oh, I did.”

Where to find Squaring the Circle: The Story of Hipgnosis

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Aotearoa and Australia: Streaming on DocPlay

USA and UK: Streaming on Netflix

Further reading

For RNZ, I sampled three of the many, many new Christmas enter­tain­ments that have landed on the stream­ers this month: Merry Little Batman (Prime Video), Candy Cane Lane (Prime Video) and Hannah Waddingham: Home for Christmas (AppleTV+).