Tuesday, 27 April 2010
The thing that immediately struck me when I met Douglas Adams was that he was almost the double of a friend of mine, another photographer called Gordon. Not only facially, but he was the same (large) size and had the same sort of dress sense and a similar gait. It was uncanny. As soon as I got home that day, I rang Gordon and told him that I’d just met his doppelgänger. “Oh yes” he said “everyone tells me that.”
I didn’t think much more about it until a couple of years later when I was hanging out with Gordon at the Cannes Film Festival. He and I had just got into the year’s glitziest party and we were both sitting, just inside the entrance, watching all the big movie stars arrive and get pounced on by a huge gaggle of the most highly accredited paparazzi.
We were just about to go off and get a drink when we saw Mick Jagger arrive, together with a huge entourage. There was a big commotion as he waltzed past the paps, completely ignoring them (including people like Dave Hogan, who he must have known personally). Then he did something very odd. He saw us, walked straight over and embraced Gordon like a long lost son. He asked him how he was, made a big show of it all, then turned on his heels and walked off again. Gordon was dumbstruck. And if you knew Gordon, you’d know how remarkable that is in itself. He’d never met Mick Jagger before and had never much liked the Rolling Stones’ music. So we were both completely mystified.
Afterwards the only explanation either of us could think of was that Mick Jagger had mistaken Gordon for Douglas Adams.
This photograph dates from a time when I was really just a rock fan, playing at being a photographer. But I’d started to look for bands and musicians to persuade to let me photograph them. With or, more usually, without any good reason. My day job was that of an advertising agency art director and, in that business, you learn to develop a certain amount of chutzpah. Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s all admen thought they were the masters of the universe anyway. So one day I rang up the Slits’ office (God only knows how I got the number) and got straight through to Vivienne Albertine. So I just nonchalantly asked her if I could do a photo shoot with her band. Now, I’m sure the very first thing she would have asked me was “what’s the photo for?” I honestly can’t remember exactly what I said. Maybe I lied, I don’t remember. At that point I’d had only about half a dozen photographs published, so I was a real novice. But certainly a novice with a lot of front.
This is a portrait of Tony Lambrianou (RIP) and Freddie Foreman commissioned by Vox magazine. Freddie Foreman who is, incidentally, the father of the actor Jamie Foreman, was once known as ‘Brown Bread Fred.‘ If you don’t know your cockney rhyming slang, the significance of this nickname won’t be obvious but save to say they were both once rather dangerous men. They were both associates of the Kray firm and they both served serious prison time for their involvement in the murder of Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie. 
I once photographed the lead singer of a San Francisco girl band called Lupe Max (the name of the band now escapes me). She was very beautiful with long, wavy (and at that time red) hair, tattoos and lots of earrings. She also had earrings in places where there were not necessarily any ears. Her small house had one main room that was packed full of an array of the most incredible, hippy dippy junk and there were feather boa's, whips, Nazi helmets and all sorts besides. It was hard to find anywhere sensible to even sit down. She collected animals but, apart from her pet white wolf, a boa constrictor and a couple of caged tarantula’s, they were all dead animals. Not stuffed animals, you understand, but squashed road kill she’d just up peeled off the road. She had 3 or 4 cats, a couple of dogs and several others that were way,way past any sort of forensic identification whatsoever. They were all laying around and propped up as a sort of household decoration. It seems that she just liked the way they looked, all brown and decayed and disgusting looking. I’d been there about an hour, I’d finished photographing her and I was just packing up when a pile of old her clothes in the corner stirred and some guy emerged, stood up, rubbed his eyes, looked at me accusingly and stormed out of the room. “Oh, that’s okay" she said "he's my boyfriend.” Until that point, I’d thought we were in the room alone. I made my excuses and left. She lived in a dangerous part of Potrero Hill, but I felt safer outside.
Almost all of my photographs of skinheads were taken between the summer of 1979 and the summer of 1984, and the vast majority in the earlier of those years. They were taken either in London or in some of the seaside towns easily accessible from London. Some first appeared in a show called 'Skinheads' at the Chenil Studio Gallery in Chelsea, in October 1980.
I’m not the sort of photographer that will turn up to a photo shoot and think that I’m automatically going to be able to stare deep into a subject’s psyche and, on the basis of a one-hour meeting (and sometimes a lot less), be able to say something deeply profound about them. Some photographers can do it. Yousuf Karsh or Arnold Newman, certainly. But IMHO an awful lot of photographers just think they can do it. I don’t. I think that approach can often just be asinine. Because, besides anything else, some people (especially actors and politicians) are no doubt very adept at disguising certain realities about themselves.
I suppose Nick Cave is close to being the perfect subject for any photographer. For a start he’s particularly photogenic. And he seems to like photography (his wife Susie Bick was once a top model). Also, although he’d undoubtedly deny it, he actually seems to like to have his photograph taken. So he’ll usually go the extra mile to help you get an interesting image. Not that that’s particularly hard with Nick, since he always engages with the camera so well. Not to say gurns, occasionally. This photograph was from the second session I ever did with him.
I decided to do this blog after the encouragement and support of my website guru Rupert Field. We reckon that it'd be as good a place as any for me to write about and explain how some of my photographs came about.
Okay, first off I want to explain why I decided to withdraw all my images from the various photo libraries they were with and why I then decided to market my work myself.