Pink Floyd could have put four musicians on an album cover.
It would certainly have been easier.
Instead, they gave us a cow. A prism. Two businessmen shaking hands while one of them was on fire. Battersea Power Station with an enormous pig floating between its chimneys.
Eventually they built a wall across their own stage and disappeared behind it.
None of this was accidental decoration. Over time, Pink Floyd became unusually good at taking an idea that began in music and allowing it to escape into photography, graphic design, animation, film and physical objects.
Sometimes very large physical objects.
The visual material wasn't simply packaging around the music.
It became another way of expressing it.
When the band stopped being the picture
Pink Floyd's relationship with Hipgnosis, founded by Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell, began in the late 1960s. Thorgerson already knew members of the band from Cambridge, and the relationship eventually gave Hipgnosis unusual freedom to experiment.
That freedom mattered because album covers were still enormously important objects.
There was no thumbnail competing for attention on a phone. Records sat physically in shops, surrounded by thousands of other records. The cover had to make somebody stop.
The conventional solution was obvious: put the artist on it.
Pink Floyd increasingly chose not to.
Atom Heart Mother made the point rather efficiently in 1970. The front cover contained no photograph of Pink Floyd, no band name and no album title.
It contained a cow.
Not a psychedelic cow floating through space. Not a cow carrying some elaborate progressive-rock symbolism.
A cow in a field.
She looks reasonably unconcerned about her unexpected career in music marketing.
The image partly came from a desire to escape the increasingly elaborate psychedelic artwork of the period, but it also demonstrated something important. Pink Floyd didn't need to make themselves the visual product.
That gave Hipgnosis room to make the idea the product instead.
The artwork learned to speak
By Wish You Were Here in 1975, the relationship between the music and its visual presentation had become considerably more sophisticated.
The album dealt with absence, alienation and disillusionment with the music industry. Hipgnosis didn't simply illustrate those subjects. It created another set of ideas around them.
The most famous image shows two businessmen shaking hands on a studio lot while one of them is on fire. The visual joke is simple enough: somebody is getting burned.
But it belongs perfectly inside an album preoccupied with sincerity, absence and the machinery surrounding musicians.
Other images continued the idea. A faceless businessman could represent somebody selling a product while revealing almost nothing of himself. Even the original record was concealed inside opaque black wrapping, hiding the artwork the buyer had supposedly just paid for.
That is where Pink Floyd's visual identity becomes particularly interesting.
The cover wasn't explaining the record.
It was thinking about the same subjects in a different language.
And once that principle had been established, there was no particular reason for the visual idea to remain trapped on a cardboard sleeve.
Which brings us, inevitably, to the pig.
The pig leaves the ground
For Animals, Roger Waters wanted Battersea Power Station on the cover with a pig floating between its chimneys.
The practical response might have been to create an illustration.
Instead, a 40-foot helium-filled inflatable pig was built.
For the first day's photography in December 1976, the weather refused to cooperate. The following day the pig broke free from its moorings and escaped.
This was inconvenient.
It was also an unusual problem for an album-cover shoot.
The pig climbed high enough to enter the Heathrow flight path before eventually coming down in Kent. The finished Animals cover was assembled using photographs from different days.
Had the story ended there, it would have remained one of rock's better pieces of album-cover folklore.
But Pink Floyd weren't finished with the pig.
They took it on tour.
During the 1977 In the Flesh shows, an enormous inflatable pig appeared above audiences. The production also incorporated animation by Gerald Scarfe and large inflatable figures designed for the stage.
Something significant had happened.
An idea had begun in the music, become an image for an album, been constructed as a physical object and then appeared above thousands of people during a live performance.
The artwork had escaped from the sleeve.
The concert was changing too
Pink Floyd were already unusually interested in what a concert could be.
Projection, elaborate lighting, their large circular screen and experiments with quadraphonic sound had been expanding the experience well before Animals. The audience wasn't simply being asked to watch four musicians reproduce an album on stage.
But there is a difference between spectacle and visual storytelling.
A bigger lighting rig makes a concert bigger.
A giant pig hovering above an audience because the music has populated its world with pigs, dogs and sheep is doing something else.
It carries the idea into the room.
That distinction became increasingly important as Pink Floyd's productions grew.
The technology wasn't merely there to make the band appear impressive. It could become part of what the band was trying to say.
And Gerald Scarfe gave them an entirely new visual vocabulary with which to say it.
Giving the ideas faces
Scarfe was already known for political cartoons and animation when Pink Floyd approached him after seeing his work on television.
His style was a particularly good fit.
Scarfe didn't draw authority politely. He distorted it. Bodies stretched, faces twisted and unpleasant characteristics became grotesquely physical. His work could be funny and disturbing at the same time.
He initially produced animation for Pink Floyd's live performances, but his involvement became much deeper when Roger Waters began developing The Wall.
Waters played Scarfe early material in 1978, and the psychological world of the album began acquiring a visual population.
Authority, fear, sex, education and emotional damage could now have bodies. Scarfe's characters weren't realistic portraits of people mentioned in songs. They were exaggerated manifestations of what those people represented inside the central character's mind.
That made them portable.
They could exist as drawings, become animation, appear during concerts and eventually enter film.
Pink Floyd were no longer merely giving music accompanying pictures.
They were building a world in which the same ideas could move between different media.
Then Waters came up with an idea that made the inflatable pig look almost administratively sensible.
Build the bloody wall
At the centre of The Wall is a straightforward metaphor.
Emotional injuries accumulate like bricks until a person has constructed a psychological barrier between himself and everybody else.
You can write songs about that.
You can project images about it.
Or, apparently, you can employ people to build the thing during the concert.
For the original Wall performances beginning in 1980, Pink Floyd's production used roughly 450 foldable bricks to construct a barrier approximately 33 feet high and 260 feet wide.
It was assembled gradually while the show was taking place.
As the wall grew, the musicians became increasingly obscured.
Eventually, the audience that had paid to see Pink Floyd was confronted by an enormous wall where Pink Floyd had previously been.
It is difficult not to admire the perversity of this.
Rock concerts generally spend fortunes solving the problem of making performers visible to enormous audiences.
Pink Floyd spent a fortune making themselves disappear.
But that was precisely why it worked.
The wall didn't merely illustrate isolation. It imposed isolation on the performance itself. The physical relationship between performer and audience changed as the metaphor was constructed in front of them.
Scarfe's animation could then transform its surface. Huge inflatable characters inhabited the production around it. At the climax, the structure came down.
The stage wasn't presenting the concept anymore.
The stage had become the concept.
The bigger they became, the further away the audience felt
There is another reason The Wall is such an interesting culmination of Pink Floyd's visual evolution.
The band had become enormous.
That success pushed them into enormous venues, and Waters increasingly disliked what those venues did to the relationship between performer and audience.
The distance bothered him.
During the 1977 tour, his frustration famously reached the point where he spat at a fan near the stage in Montreal. Waters later connected that experience and his growing sense of alienation from large audiences with the idea of constructing a wall between performer and crowd.
There is a magnificent contradiction in what followed.
Pink Floyd responded to the emotional alienation created by enormous rock productions by creating an even more enormous rock production about emotional alienation.
And somehow it made sense.
The scale wasn't disguising the subject.
The scale was the subject.
Provocation without behaving outrageously
This is where Pink Floyd's version of provocation differs from the chaos in our first Entertainment Insights article.
They weren't primarily provocative because the members were throwing televisions out of hotel windows or manufacturing personal scandal.
The provocation was usually in the work.
Pink Floyd repeatedly ignored the conventional boundaries around how music was supposed to be presented. Album artwork could carry an idea instead of advertising the musicians. An image could leave the record sleeve and reappear as a physical object above a concert audience. Animation could turn psychological ideas into characters. Eventually, the architecture of the stage itself could become part of the argument.
That approach produced an unusual side effect.
For one of the biggest bands in history, Pink Floyd themselves could almost disappear from Pink Floyd's visual identity.
Think of the images associated with them.
You don't necessarily picture Roger Waters or David Gilmour first.
You may see the prism.
The burning businessman.
Battersea Power Station.
The pig.
The wall.
Their ideas became recognisable enough that the musicians didn't always need to stand in front of them.
That is a rather extraordinary achievement in an industry built around famous faces.
From the stage into the cinema
The visual journey didn't stop with the concerts.
Alan Parker's 1982 film Pink Floyd – The Wall took the material into another medium again, combining live action with Scarfe's animation.
By then, The Wall had become difficult to describe as merely an album with associated artwork.
The music, characters, animation, stage production and film were different manifestations of the same central world.
And that's probably the most interesting way to understand Pink Floyd's visual legacy.
They didn't simply commission excellent album covers.
They didn't simply spend increasingly ridiculous amounts of money on concerts.
They became unusually comfortable allowing an idea to change form.
A musical concept could become a photograph. The photograph could inspire a physical object. The object could become part of a live performance. A drawing could become animation. A metaphor could become architecture. The whole thing could eventually become cinema.
There was a progression to it rather than a collection of unrelated clever tricks.