Mother Nature throws incredible lasers onto the Giants Causeway where that album cover was shot!
A place to add to your bucket list and take in. If only I could afford to go back again, so much more to see there.

The cover, produced by the legendary London-based design firm, Hipgnosis, was shot on the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland. Aubrey Powell, the Hipgnosis partner who actually designed the cover, told Q magazine in 2003 that the concept was based on Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Childhood’s End, where hundreds of millions of Earth’s children gather together to be taken off into space.

But there’s an odd factoid or two about the Houses of the Holy album cover that might surprise you: First off, it was not a small army of naked children with wigs on, it was only two kids, a brother and sister, who were photographed over the course of ten days at dawn and at dusk. One of them went on to become a world famous TV presenter, Stefan Gates, of the BBC’s popular Cooking in the Danger Zone show.

Gates said of the shoot, which he did at the age of five with his older sister Samantha:

“We only got a few quid for the modelling and the chance to travel to places we had never been before. Our family wasn’t well off, we certainly couldn’t afford holidays, so it worked out great for us.

“For the Zeppelin cover we went to Ireland during the Troubles. I remember arriving at the airport and seeing all these people with guns. We stayed in this little guest house near the Giant’s Causeway and to capture the so-called magic light of dawn and dusk we’d shoot first thing in the morning and at night.

I’ve heard people saying they put wigs on several children. But there was only me and my sister and that’s our real hair. I used to love being naked when I was that age so I didn’t mind. I’d whip off my clothes at the drop of a hat and run around having a great time, so I was in my element. My sister was older so she was probably a bit more self-conscious.”

“It promptly rained for ten days straight. I shot the whole thing in black and white on a totally miserable morning pouring with rain. Originally, I’d intended the children to be gold and silver. Because I shot in black and white and it was a gray day, the children turned out very white. So when we hand-tinted it, the airbrush artist, by accident, put a kind of purple tinge onto them. When I first saw it, I said, ‘Oh, my God.’ Then we looked at it, and I said, ‘Hang on a minute, this has an otherworldly quality.’ So we left it as it was. Everybody was so cold, and so freaked out because it wasn’t working, that the only thing I could keep everybody together with was a bottle of Mandrax and a lot of whiskey.”

Oddly, in 2007 Stefan Gates claimed to have never listened to the album and that he felt there was something perhaps sinister about the cover image. “It carries too much significance for me,” he said at the time. “A part of me wants to go out to the Giant’s Causeway with a big pair of speakers, strip naked and play it just to see if I have some kind of great epiphany.”

Samantha Gates, now living in South Africa, recalls:

“I remember the shoot really clearly, mainly because it was freezing cold and rained the whole time.

“We were naked in a lot of the modelling shoots we did, nothing was thought of it back then. You probably couldn’t get away with that now.”

After graduation in 1981 I used my first pay check to lay down a deposit on a pair of KEF Cantor II speakers. Almost 40 years later I still use them virtually every day. Vinyl, Tape, MinDisk & CD have all come and gone but these amazing speakers are still with me. Best investment I ever made!

Well. That was a certain inspiration for the guys in the Porcupine Tree.
They even grabbed the intro. =)