Longtime designer Storm Thorgerson’s book, Taken By Storm: The Album Art of Storm Thorgerson, detailing his work with such bands as Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and The Mars Volta.

The Sydney Morning Herald takes a look.

The book features sleeves, covers and artwork for books, bands and exhibitions dating from the late ’60s up to 2006, for acts such as Led Zeppelin, American neo-prog outfit Mars Volta, Israeli agit-prop group Ethnix and English pomp rockers Muse. He even managed to make glum Irish popsters Cranberries look complex.

But more than anything he became the visual spokesman for the Floyd ethos. The way Thorgerson manipulated images, created abstract conundrums and played with puns, props and memory for Pink Floyd made his reputation. And the band’s.

As Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason says: “It was important to have an album sleeve that we liked and we felt enhanced the record but it’s not as though the images necessarily directly related to the music.

“When one thinks of Atom Heart Mother [a cow in a field looking mournfully at the camera] that’s about the opposite of an album cover, really. Something like Ummagumma [a series of repeated but slightly changed photographs of the band disappearing in a set of mirrors] is a great sleeve but it’s not an explanation of the content. On a good day it takes it in another step in almost any direction.”

It’s why Thorgerson’s work is so appropriate for the band in that it could mean everything and nothing, depending on the listener. Literalism was something avoided by the band, lyrically, musically and visually for a good part of its career.