Episode 92: Mark Blake tells the remarkable story of Hipgnosis

When I was a young teenager, just getting into music, I would be in record shops and find myself drawn to the strangest of record sleeves. A prism refracting a rainbow. Mermaids crawling over rocks. A man shaking another man’s hand, one of them on fire. And my personal favourite, two men on a beach, their heads actually big toes, with a goat behind them. But of course!

I didn’t know who any of the bands were at the time, but those sleeves made my mind race and helped me form an opinion of whether I might like the record or not before I’d even heard it. If only I’d had a copy of Us and Them: The Authorised Story of Hipgnosis, the new book by acclaimed prog scribe Mark Blake, which tells the extraordinary story of the legendary design house that moulded the iconography of rock - Led Zeppelin, Paul McCartney, Genesis, Black Sabbath and of course Pink Floyd - between the late 1960s and the early 1980s.

Though it’s not out for a while, February 2nd, 2023 in fact, I thought I’d give Mark a bell to talk about what to expect from the latest Nine Eight release.

I wasn’t disappointed. 

(Pssst. Join the Substack!) 

• Twitter - @jamesjammcmahon
• Substack - https://spoook.substack.com
• YouTube - www.youtube.com/channel/UC8Vf_1E1Sza2GUyFNn2zFMA
• Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/jamesmcmahonmusicpod/