The Enigma on the Cover

Album covers have always played a central role in the saga of Pink Floyd. Starting with the world-famous triangular prism refracting a beam of light, immortalized on “The Dark Side Of The Moon”, not to mention the legendary cow of “Atom Heart Mother“, the man on fire from “Wish You Were Here” and the memorable white bricks of “The Wall”. There is another cover, though, that marks a decisive turning point in the history of the English band: that of “A Saucerful Of Secrets”. The Pink Floyd's second studio LP is packed with mystical, psychedelic and imaginative elements, not only in its sound but also in its incredible artwork, the first the band commissioned from Hipgnosis, the studio run by the late, great Storm Thorgerson.

In 1968, Pink Floyd were going through a delicate transitional phase. After the experimental bender of “The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn”, the English pioneers were leaving behind the  Syd Barrett era and searching for a new musical identity. Barrett, in fact, had begun showing symptoms of schizophrenia (likely triggered by his heavy use of LSD), becoming increasingly absent from the band's life: live shows were growing unbearable for him, as was the pressure the music world placed on the man rightly considered the group's creative mind. The band then settled on a compromise solution, bringing in guitarist David Gilmour (already a childhood friend of both Barrett and Waters), who, according to management's plans, was meant to cover for Barrett's shortcomings. But Barrett's precarious mental state led him into an impenetrable self-isolation and a gradual withdrawal from the music scene. It's in this climate of instability that “A Saucerful Of Secrets” was born, a watershed record for Floyd, not only musically but also because it marks the start of their long collaboration with Hipgnosis, the studio founded by Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell.

The Alchemists and the Superhero

Tasked by the band with finding a visual key capable of translating the album's complex creative vision into images, Storm and Aubrey talked things over at length and decided to consult the musicians themselves. “When we talked to Floyd, it seemed like the best way to give a visual representation of the music was to show some of the things that caught their interest, and present them in a way that was consistent with the music,” Thorgerson would later recall. And in 1968, what caught the interest of the young Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Richard Wright and Nick Mason was a jumble of influences, from esotericism to science fiction, from visual art to comic books. Influences that intertwined with the anti-materialistic currents of hippie counterculture, to which the early Pink Floyd were, at least in part, sympathetic. Suffice it to recall that the back cover of the album would later appear in a famous scene from “Zabriskie Point”. Even the title “A Saucerful Of Secrets” seems to evoke a mysterious, enigmatic imagery.

Storm and Aubrey started working in Hipgnosis's darkroom, like alchemists searching for the perfect graphic fusion capable of conveying the sensations evoked by the band's sound. The result is a psychedelic collage, layered and deliberately chaotic, weaving together esoteric references, pop imagery and alchemical symbols. The studio set out, in particular, to represent the dreamlike visions of three “altered states of consciousness”: religion, psychedelic drugs, and the music of Pink Floyd. Within this frame, Hipgnosis built a mosaic that recomposes and reinvents a variety of sources.

Among the most striking elements is a Marvel superhero, Doctor Strange, today a central figure in pop culture but at the time still almost unknown: he had only debuted in 1963, in “Strange Tales” issue 110. Thorgerson and Powell drew on three panels taken from “The Sands Of Death”, published in July 1967 in “Strange Tales” issue 158. On the cover, Doctor Strange appears in a dramatic pose on the right; on the left are a series of planets and the character of the Living Tribunal. In the Marvel universe, Stephen Strange is a supremely talented neurosurgeon who, after a car accident damages his hands, searches in vain for a cure until he reaches the Himalayas. There, the Ancient One teaches him the mystic arts, turning him into a sorcerer endowed with extraordinary powers. Among the entities he interacts with is the Living Tribunal, the three-faced cosmic judge tasked with preserving the balance of the universe. The planets visible on the cover don't represent different worlds: they are instead different visions of the same Earth, part of the catastrophic prophecy the Living Tribunal reveals to Doctor Strange.

At the centre, meanwhile, stands a figure taken from the alchemical text “Janitor Panophus”, found in the “Musaeum Hermeticum” of 1625 and reprinted in Latin in 1678 and 1749. Storm and Powell recoloured and altered the illustration: a philosopher-gardener set atop the mountain of planet-metals, engaged in the Great Work. Around him – as Andrea La Rovere reconstructs on AuralCrave – appear “alchemical symbols inscribed in the trees”. It is “a typically Rosicrucian work that iconographically synthesizes the alchemical world, with the empyrean above and the natural world below”, while “the esoteric symbolism underlying the image is extremely complex, almost initiatory, and essentially represents the path the alchemist pursues through knowledge”. In the lower part of the cover, meanwhile, we find a series of vials, inspired by one of the most important texts of alchemy, the Splendor Solis attributed to Salomon Trismosin, thought to have been Paracelsus's teacher. “Once again – La Rovere notes – we are looking at the representation of three alchemical stages, Nigredo, Albedo and Rubedo”.

Four Floyds in a Vial

Amid this psychedelic chaos there is also room for small photos of the four Floyds, seated on the bank of a river – probably the Cam in Cambridge – inside a sort of glowing vial, next to the diagram depicting the various planetary phases. Even the “Pink Floyd” lettering at the top took on symbolic meanings, starting with a spacing that has generated all sorts of theories over the years. The difference between the US and European editions, and the unusual gap between certain letters (particularly the “y” and the “d”, in the version with the incomplete wording), have fuelled the – probably unfounded – theory of an indirect nod to Syd Barrett. An anecdote, also reported by La Rovere, that, while lacking solid grounding, fits into the mythology woven around this period of the band's history.

The bond between the English band and the world of comics didn't end there: the inclusion of Doctor Strange further stoked Roger Waters's curiosity about graphic novels, even fuelling the idea of a psychedelic animated film, a sort of acid, sci-fi take on “Sgt. Pepper's” that, however, never saw the light of day. The influence of comics also resurfaces in the writing of “Cymbaline”, the track that closes the first side of the soundtrack to the film “More” (1968): the lyrics include the line “And Doctor Strange is always changing size”. In later years, the relationship with comics would resurface in 1974, when Thorgerson suggested creating a comic-book insert to accompany the “The Dark Side Of The Moon” tour (“The Pink Floyd Tour Program”, a small booklet with a sci-fi cover, enriched with contributions from Nick Mason, himself a skilled illustrator, already responsible for the cartoon-style cover of the 1971 compilation “Relics”).

Released in June 1968, “A Saucerful Of Secrets” captures a band in transition, one in which Barrett's echo is still present, but a new balance is beginning to take shape, with the permanent arrival of Gilmour, the consolidation of Waters's role, and the search for a more structured musical language. The lengthy title track, with its four-part architecture, already prefigures the conceptual ambitions of the years to come: a piece that, as Waters would put it a few years later, seems like a musical transposition of Pink Floyd's artistic arc, beginning with instinct and ending in wonderful order and clarity. It's the bassist himself who wrote the other standout tracks on the album, such as the tribal-psychedelic raga that opens “Let There Be More Light”, the mysterious and captivating “Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun”, a masterpiece of cosmic music, and “Corporal Clegg”, which keeps a tighter link to the style of the debut album. There's also room for two compositions written by Rick Wright (“Remember A Day” and “See Saw”), who sounds remarkably inspired throughout the album, contributing to its pervasive dreamlike sound.

The album is rounded off by a Barrett composition, “Jugband Blues“, a small, delirious sketch in which the guitarist shows himself to be perfectly aware of his mental isolation, declaiming lines that, read in hindsight, seem to answer in advance the album the other four would dedicate to him a few years later.

Thanks to its enigmatic cover, “A Saucerful Of Secrets” would also remain the first true translation of the Floyd universe into a coherent visual imagery, a laboratory that anticipates the symbolic power of “Atom Heart Mother”, the perfect geometry of “The Dark Side Of The Moon” and the allegories of “Wish You Were Here”. Through the partnership with Hipgnosis Studio, an artistic vision would take shape that would leave a lasting mark on the entire iconography of rock.

(Contributions by Filippo Neri)

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10/03/2026