Friday 2 January 2015

Psychic TV - Terminus (Filmed by Peter Christopherson)


Doublevision - TV Wipeout
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Also filmed by Sleazy

There was a third part to Hipgnosis, in Peter Christopherson, though, right?
What happened was that Storm and I had struggles in those early years of Hipgnosis – I won’t say they were easy at all. We were a young, budding creative art house and it was learn-as-you-go, nobody gave us the ground rules, and we were working in a world that was extremely resentful of the kind of work we were doing.
The old fashioned record companies had their own sleeve art departments, were very staid in their views and didn’t want young upstarts encroaching on their world – while we were coming along with images like the Pink Floyd cow that had no writing on the front, no explanation, not even the name of the band, and they thought we were extremely disrespectful to the industry… which we were.
But at the same time, we knew that in the world in which we lived this was to be highly regarded. So Storm and I developed all this stuff together, but inevitably rifts and cracks started to appear, which we couldn’t wallpaper over, because we wanted to go different ways – I wanted to do much more of my own thing, and he wanted to plough onwards as we were and keep me back a bit.
Then we found Peter Christopherson by chance: he wandered into our studio looking for a job, and he had an amazing portfolio. He had these great pictures of people, naked figures, very bizarrely angled and posed – little did we know that he’d been working in a mortuary and they were corpses he’d photographed while he’d been there. But he was very good at lighting and good in the darkroom, so we employed him immediately, and thankfully he proved to be a very good balance between Storm and I – so if things got heated, Peter was a sort of bouncing board for both of us.
He was younger, he had a very different outlook to both of us, he was already involved with that very early movement of industrial music – which I think became, or fed into, punk in a way – he acted as a balance between the two of us, and the three of us together were just formidable in design, photography and ideas too.
Aubrey Powell

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