By Nick Haramis

Click here for a selection of Storm Thorgerson's most famous album covers!

The cover of Taken By Storm: The Album Art of Storm Thorgerson, left.

There are only a few hours left before Storm Thorgerson unveils his new exhibit at Splashlight studios in Manhattan, and the revered artist looks a touch impatient. Not because of the show, mind you��������he's been through the rigmarole countless times. No, the man is upset because he wants his mint tea. He's prickly, in a likeable way. His words are at once crass and articulate, as he juggles toilet humor ("It must be quite a drop from the Empire State Building") and ruminations on contemporary aesthetics. Fittingly, the 63-year-old British artist walks the line between pop culture and high art, a balance that has served him well throughout the past five decades, since starting the Hipgnosis design studio in 1968. In that time, he's created some of the world's most memorable album art, from Pink Floyd's cow (Atom Heart Mother) and Led Zeppelin's mutated children (Transmissions) to Muse's giant ball of metal debris (Absolution). Below, he talks about setting people on fire, drugging farm animals, and why he's got a right hook ready for Anthony Kiedis.

BLACKBOOK: Are you happy with the exhibit?

STORM THORGERSON: Moderately.

BB: What would you have changed?

ST: It's a very nice space, but it's a bit dislocated.

Mind Over Matter 4: Images Of Pink Floyd by Storm Thorgerson and Peter Curzon, left.

BB: Why the interest in album cover art?

ST: My musical background is zero. Sometimes I would say to Pink Floyd, "You know that tune that goes like this?" and they'd say, "Please, please don't try to hum our tune, because you'll massacre it. I'm tone-deaf and I can't play an instrument for love or money. Although I'd be happy to do an album if somebody offered me a contract, but I think that's about as likely as getting a full sentence out of Bush. The two things are probably pretty remote.

BB: How do you approach the conceptual part of your design process?

ST: I don't ever begin in one place. Music is always at the root of it, but that doesn't mean that's where I start. Music is the background that informs what I do. It may come from the lyrics, from a title, from something the band has told me that they wouldn't have told anyone else.

I never cared much for sales, so I like to avoid speaking with managers and labels. Also, the maxim that sex sells doesn't apply to music. If you look at the top ten albums of all time, I don't think that there are boobs on any of them. By and large, the opinions of record labels make me throw up. I've always been interested in obsessions and preoccupations. Most artists, including musicians, usually have preoccupations��������politics, art, girlfriends, small owls��������all of which are colored by some sort of madness. In my time, we've subjected sheep to drugs, flown pigs, set people on fire, cut trees with a helicopter, put people on tall poles and stretched them out across a landscape, taken pictures of animals in special clothing, and nearly drowned people in rivers.

BB: How collaborative is the process?

ST: It depends on how much interest the bands take. Sorry, I'm going to answer this.

[Chats on phone.]

We're in a bit of a row with a label right now. We're making a box set of mini vinyls for all of Pink Floyd's studio albums in their original covers. Wish You Were Here was wrapped in black shrink wrap and they're claiming they can't find it. You can bomb Iraq but you can't find black shrink wrap? You can send objects to Mars, but you can't find black shrink wrap? Bollocks.

BB: Your work was turned down by Red Hot Chili Peppers, no?

ST: We're not very pleased with them. You can tell them for me, if you see them, that I'd like to give them a piece of my mind. Mostly because what they ended up doing was crap. Being turned down is a fact of life, but being turned down in the face of crapola seems quite silly.

The Cranberries' Wake Up And Smell The Coffee, 2001, left.

BB: Is it difficult to be inspired by acts you don't like?

ST: If it was really ghastly, like the worst music in the world produced by a skiffle band in Venezuala, then it is possible I might turn them down. But it's still unlikely. I decided long ago that judging was quite irrelevant. I'm more of a translator than a critic.

BB: Have certain shoots been especially difficult?

ST: Some have been fraught with terrible problems, because we tend to do things for real, and not on the computer. Take a shot like [Gentlemen Without Weapons'] Transmissions, which has people sitting on long poles across the countryside. That was a real disaster, because of the weather. It had rained for two or three days, and so it was almost impossible to dig the holes and erect the poles. Dig the holes and erect the poles! I am in the wrong business.

The 800 beds we used for [Pink Floyd's] A Momentary Lapse of Reason are wrought-iron hospital beds, heavy beds. We had to put them all out, and then it rained, and we had to bring them all back in again. And of course, if you set a man on fire [Floyd's Wish You Were Here], you're a bit worried he'll burn to death, so that's a stunt. The statues we built for [Floyd's] The Division Bell, which are each the size of a house, were transported from a flatbed lorry from London, and then carried by hand across a field. The 200 red gym balls we used for [The Cranberries'] Wake Up and Smell of Coffee were bouncing across the beach, and it was very arduous because we kept having to collect the balls from down the beach.

BB: Have you had any ideas that have been too ambitious to complete?

ST: When we were doing [Floyd's] Echoes, I had this idea to build nine castles across the land. And they were all different. It was a great idea, but I can see why it would be seen as excessive.

BB: How many of your ideas have been fueled by drug-induced creativity?

ST: I'm sure someone has summed this up far better than I ever could, but drugs allow you to see over the garden wall. That is, you might live a cloistered life, mentally, and drugs allow you to see other parts and pieces. I feel the same way about art and design. Psychedelics are in there, definitely, but it's part of a whole rich tapestry.

BB: Does your work get a fair shake in the art world?

ST: No, I don't think it does, but it doesn't particularly bother me, except when someone rips me off. For example, Damien Hirst stole my idea, I think. It was an idea about ducks on a wall. Sometimes it feels like my work is under-appreciated, which is why I do the exhibitions, to see if these works can stand on their own. Hopefully, people won't just like them because they remind them of their favorite band or their first fuck, but because they also quite like the picture. The most important thing is to keep working, and to have fun. I'm very lucky. People pay me to keep dreaming. The man upstairs has decided to balance the books. He attacked me with a stroke, but I also have a job I love.