"Etched in the memory..to really stretch the listener’s imagination"

“The band and Peter Grant kept saying how the LP was like a lick of new paint, a return to their bluesy rock roots, but updated with a different twist – so the colour was to represent that. It was like you were looking inside the bar through its dusty window and the smear was where you’d wiped the pane with your sleeve to peer through. Peter Grant said we could put it in a brown paper bag and it would still top the charts. So we did and he was right!” Storm Thorgerson, Q Magazine, 2003.

The album, which was released with six different versions of the bar scene artwork available, became Led Zeppelin’s final number one album in its second week on the Billboard chart, September 15, 1979. It vaulted over The Cars, The Knack and Supertramp’s Breakfast In America.

“This is a design I love dearly to this day. The whole atmosphere is frozen in time and etched in the memory. The sepia quality was meant to evoke a non-specific past and to allow the brushstroke across the middle to be better rendered in colour and so make a contrast. This self same brushstroke was like the swish of a wiper across a wet windscreen, like a lick of fresh paint across a faded surface, a new look to an old scene, which was what Led Zeppelin told us about their album. A lick of fresh paint, as per Led Zeppelin, and the music on this album… It somehow grew in proportion and became six viewpoints of the same man in the bar, seen by the six other characters. Six different versions of the same image. As Robert Plant agreed later, it was very over the top, but then rock n’ roll is over the top.” Storm Thorgerson, Eye Of The Storm, 1999.

“They were huge, mega huge in terms of sales, their reputation and their sound. We wanted to reflect that in our artwork, go way over the top… We wanted the cover to really stretch the listener’s imagination.” Storm Thorgerson, Q Magazine, 2003.