Description

Hipgnosis nearly lost the job before it started. Storm Thorgerson's first idea for Led Zeppelin's fifth album was a tennis racket on a green court, which the band took as a joke that their music was a "racket". Aubrey Powell took over, and drew on Arthur C. Clarke's novel Childhood's End for a scene of children climbing towards something unknown. A location in Peru was considered before the team settled on the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland.

The shoot was a struggle. For ten days Powell tried to photograph the basalt columns at dawn and dusk, and for ten days it rained. The two child models, siblings Stefan and Samantha Gates, were photographed in black and white and then printed repeatedly into a single image so that eleven figures appear to scramble over the rocks. The results disappointed everyone until an accidental tinting effect in the darkroom produced the strange orange and purple glow that made the final cover.

As with the band's previous album, the sleeve carried no name and no title, so Atlantic was allowed to wrap American copies in a paper band that had to be torn to open the record. The image was nominated for a Grammy in 1974 and still unsettles people: decades later Stefan Gates told the BBC he found it sinister, though his sister disagreed. He also admitted he had never heard the album.

Credit

Design by Hipgnosis; photography by Aubrey Powell