Prog rock album covers are talked about constantly and researched rarely. The images are everywhere; the people who made them, how they worked and which records they actually signed are much harder to establish, because sleeve credits are the part of a release nobody transcribes. This section fixes that. It writes about the designers and the writers – their training, their methods, the records they are credited on – and it does not describe the pictures, which are a search away and not mine to reproduce.

Why the sleeve mattered

The commercial logic has disappeared so completely that the ambition of this packaging now looks eccentric. In 1973 a record was bought in a shop by somebody who could not hear it first. The sleeve was thirty-one centimetres square, it was the only information available at the point of sale, and it would sit in the buyer’s room for years afterwards. For progressive rock the stakes were higher still: records with no singles, long tracks and little radio presence were sold on the strength of the album as an object. A sleeve that announced the music as serious did work a chorus would otherwise have done, which is why the most ambitious packaging of the era belongs to the least commercial music.

The painters

Roger Dean is the name most people reach for, and the least accurately understood: he trained in industrial and furniture design, took a master’s at the Royal College of Art in 1968, and made his first mark with a chair rather than a sleeve. His association with Yes begins with Fragile in 1971, and the band’s interlocking bubble logotype first appears on Close to the Edge in 1972 – sketched on a train before the band had begun work on the album. He and his brother Martyn also built their stage sets.

The photographers

Hipgnosis worked the other way entirely. The studio, founded by Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell and housed at 6 Denmark Street from early 1970, built things and photographed them rather than drawing them, on Hasselblad medium format, staging theatrical scenes at real locations with constructed props. It designed for Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Genesis, Black Sabbath, Yes, 10cc and many others, did not quote fixed fees, and dissolved in 1983 – the year the twelve-inch sleeve began to lose its place as the industry’s main visual surface.

Storm Thorgerson has his own guide, because his career runs well beyond the studio: film and television at the Royal College of Art rather than graphic design, then Hipgnosis from 1968, Greenback Films after 1983, and Storm Studios from the early 1990s. More than a hundred album designs, from Pink Floyd in 1968 to bands two generations younger.

The writers

The other half of this section is about words, and it exists because lyric credits are even less read than sleeve credits. Peter Sinfield co-founded King Crimson as its lyricist without playing an instrument in it, ran the light show and mixed the concerts, wrote the words on the first four albums, then wrote for Emerson, Lake & Palmer, produced Roxy Music’s debut, and supplied the English lyrics that carried Premiata Forneria Marconi to an international audience.

Polly Samson has done the comparable job for the Pink Floyd and David Gilmour catalogue since 1994: seven of eleven tracks on The Division Bell, six of the seven songs with words on On an Island, the single track with words on The Endless River, and nearly all of Rattle That Lock and Luck and Strange. On a plain count of the material she is the principal lyricist of everything Gilmour has released under either name in thirty years.

How these are written

Two rules, and they are the reason this section looks different from the rest of the internet on the subject. First, no descriptions of the images. The pieces are about the people, the methods and the credits; what a sleeve looks like is not something I am going to reproduce in words. Second, credits are taken from release documentation rather than from received wisdom, and where a release lists two or three names – a design studio and a separate illustrator, which was the normal arrangement – all of them are given. Attributing a whole sleeve to one famous name is almost always a simplification of what is actually printed on the record.

The credit nobody reads

One last observation that runs through every piece in this section. The visual and verbal identity of progressive rock was largely built by people who were not in the bands and are not in the histories. A designer sketched the Yes logo on a train before the band knew about it, and it has survived every line-up change since. A lyricist who played no instrument was a founding member of King Crimson and wrote the words on four albums. A novelist has written the words to almost everything David Gilmour has released since 1994. A studio in Denmark Street gave Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Genesis their public faces and charged whatever the client thought it was worth.

None of those people appear in the standard account of the music, which is a story about musicians. That is the gap this section exists to fill, and filling it accurately means going to the credits rather than to the folklore.

Go deeper

For the records these sleeves belong to, start with the best progressive rock albums of all time, and for the musicians the greatest musicians in progressive rock. The equipment that made these records is covered in the guide to prog rock gear, and the rooms they were made in in the studios where British prog rock was made. The full story of the bands – British, Italian, German, American and modern – is told across the five books of my Beyond the Sound series.

Want the full story behind these records? The books map every scene and every era →

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