Eye of the Storm

Storm Thorgerson has carved out an impressive career over the last 40 years as one of Britain's - possibly the world's - best-known album cover artists. His client-list teems with rock aristocracy, from Pink Floyd and Megadeth to The Mars Volta and The Cranberries (see 'Bury the Hatchet, 1999' above). To lend their music a distinctive visual dimension, Thorgerson likes to 'mess with reality' and create truly eccentric album art. The man is clearly blessed with an imagination worthy of a surrealist painter, but he has always been a photographer through and through - chiefly because his optical illusions are then all the more mind-boggling, but also because, by his own admission, he can't draw for toffee.