You might have seen that we have our own album artwork expert here at Loud And Quiet, although it’s safe to say that Clive La Bouche has never cast judgement over any record sleeve as iconic as those created by Hipgnosis in the 1970s. Throughout that decade (and a couple of years either side), the duo of Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey “Po” Powell changed the way that musicians – and in turn fans – thought about album sleeves forever. The cover of Dark Side of The Moon is one of theirs, and all of Pink Floyd’s artwork: flying pigs and burning men and acid-inspired kaleidoscopes that proved that an album sleeve could be its own piece of conceptual art without a direct link to the artist or their music. Everyone does that now, but Hipgnosis invented it in the decade of rock excess, where big ideas were encouraged by even bigger budgets, which is how they ended up photographing the cover of Wings Greatest (a potentially cheap hits compilation that featured a photo of a statue in the snow) on Mount Everest.

The list of Hipgnosis’ work goes on, through Led Zepplin and Yes and Peter Gabriel and 10cc – all the bands of the era who had money to burn, and people in the case of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, on which a man who’s not on fire shakes hands with a man who is; a dangerous, over the top, iconic metaphor for artist/label relations within the music industry. Or, to put it another way, the next time you’re in a vintage store that also sells old vinyl, any of the sleeves that look ridiculous in 2023 but like they would have cost a bomb to create in their day, Storm Thorgerson and Po Powell were most likely the pair that came up with them.

Photographer and filmmaker Anton Corbijn was the perfect person to make this documentary about the rise and fall of their difficult partnership – a man responsible for the iconic himself, through his videos for Depeche Mode’s ‘Personal Jesus’ and Joy Division’s ‘Atmosphere’, to scratch only the surface of his visual contribution to music. In Squaring the Circle, he somewhat elevates the conventional male-music-legends-getting-misty-eyed-for-the-70s documentary style with the same classy black and white treatment and spacious framing he brought not just to Control in 2007, but all of his photography work before it.

We’re still talking about a talking heads BBC Four style music documentary here, which does of course mean that Noel Gallagher keeps turning up with increasingly boring exaggerations about how his children don’t even know what record sleeves are (an insult to both their intelligence and ours at this point), but with Po on camera to tell the story himself, along with all of Pink Floyd, Paul McCartney, Peter Gabriel, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, this format can’t get much better than this.