Boo Delicious, Los Angeles 2005.

Monday, 7 June 2010 The thing about a lot of porn stars is that, other than when they’re doing what they’re paid to do on film, they’re often rather dull people. It took me a while to come to this rather simple revelation and this session was from the time before I’d quite reached that point. Boo was so bored I almost felt sorry for her myself. But the thing that I most liked about her was that she had this haughty and aloof thing about her – like she was way too good to be doing porn and it was always a just-this-once sort of thing.

I also liked the fact that she looked more like a fashion model than a porn star.

X, Kensal Rise, London 1984.

Thursday, 3 June 2010 In those days, I think I must have been something of a photographic literalist. I drove the band all the way across London, from the West End to Kensal Rise, just so three of them could stand under these ‘x’ shaped building trusses.  These days it would take you two minutes in Photoshop to achieve the same thing.  Or, probably, one minute if you knew what you were doing.

Crystale, Skin Two, London 1983.

Wednesday, 26 May 2010 I've been taking photographs in London fetish clubs since 1983.

To begin with it was just a handful of people in one small Soho club called Skin Two (the magazine of the same name didn't exist then).  Skin Two resided in what was, during the rest of the week, a gay club called Stallions.  It was stuck away at the corner of a cobbled alleyway and you’d never find it if you didn’t know it was there. 

The Skin Two night was the brainchild of a young actor called David Claridge, who later went on to achieve infamy as the hand up the furry arse of breakfast TV’s star puppet 'Roland Rat'. 

The original Skin Two club was very, very dark and the atmosphere was testy and to the outsider, somewhat foreboding.  I was physically threatened several times in the early days.   Non fetishists, like myself, were certainly not made to feel welcome and possibly not without good reason.  Many people who wanted to go to the Club would have had day jobs that could have been ruined if photographs of them in a "seedy Soho nightclub" got published in the wrong places.  Indeed, when the British gutter press found out about the secret night life of Roland Rat, David had to end his association with Skin Two and the once a week club closed.

But, the seeds were firmly sown and, pretty soon, the club reopened in the same place on the same Monday night but under a different name - Maîtresse.  Which became fairly popular.  And it was quickly followed by Der Putsch and a couple of others.

Reknown fashion photographers like Helmut Newton and Bob Carlos Clarke had long included images of fetishwear in their canon and, by the mid '80s, PVC and rubberwear had become all the rage.  For a while it was a staple of all the hippest pop videos  and the trendiest fashion glossies.  By the mid '90s, two London fetish clubs that had come along in the wake of the early pioneers, Submission and Torture Garden, could easily fill large 3000 plus capacity venues.  And they came from all over the world to those clubs too.  Then no doubt went back home and started their own fetish clubs.  

Nowadays the fetish look is no longer the height of fashion, Submission has gone and Torture Garden has become fairly mainstream (you still have to wear all the gear to get in, mind).

For 16 years, until December of last year, I had a page in Loaded magazine called 'Getting Away With It' and that was virtually entirely shot in fetish clubs.  My subjects were almost always young women expressing themselves in a deliberately provocative way but I intentionally kept any sort of photographic direction to an absolute minimum - people find this last part hard to believe but it's true.  I was also very interested in the home-made clothes people often wore to fetish clubs and the way they would often creatively and humorously accessorise their clothes. 

I like to think that during the GAWI years I developed a style of combining documentary portraiture and erotica in a way that hadn't, as far as I know, really been done much before.  This latter point I've never been all that sure about, so if you have a  counter view feel free to email me and put me right.  I don’t bite.

Rita D’Albert, Los Angeles 1991.

Sunday, 23 May 2010 I defy anyone who hasn’t been there (or who hasn’t just read the above caption), to recognize precisely where this shot was taken.  It looks like a real wilderness but it’s actually just a few metres from Mulholland Drive, the road that runs through the middle of one of the world’s largest conurbations.

One time bass player with the LA all-girl band the Pandoras, by this time, Rita was in the band Human Drama.  These days she’s better known as Ursulina in the hugely popular Lucha VaVoom show, which she also co-founded.

We’d had the idea to do this shot for a while but the day I decided to actually do it, I found Rita had sold her sitar.  So we had to drive by McCabe’s Guitar Store and hire this one.

Skinhead girls, Bank Holiday, Brighton 1980.

Friday, 21 May 2010 The photograph above has become quite well known due to it's association with Morrissey's 1992 'Your Arsenal' tour.

This has been written about by others before but, since I now have a blog, I may as well write my own version of how this came about.

A couple of times during 1991 the well known music biz publicist Murray Chalmers mentioned, whilst we were engaged on other work, that Morrissey (who I knew to be a friend of his) would like to buy some prints of my photos of Skinheads. I was rather flattered that someone like Morrissey would know about this work and possibly my vanity led me to assume he just liked the images and intended to stick them on his wall.

In February '92 I received a short note, through the post , from Morrissey himself. It comprised a photostat of one of my photos, from the cover of a skinhead fanzine, and it said - "Derek, Can you send me a print? I'll explain why." This was followed by a couple of phone calls from Murray urging me to do so.

I produced a print and sent it to Morrissey, via Murray, and that was, I thought, the end of it.

But a few months later, I received a call from Jo Slee who told me she worked for Morrissey and that Morrissey would like the okay to use the skinhead image in a montage which would be projected during a one off performance in France. She said very specifically that it was a one-off and if they decided that they wanted to use the image in any other way, they would come back to me.  Again, I was pretty flattered by this and it didn't seem like a big deal. My chief concern, at that point, being the reaction of the two female skinheads themselves.

I heard no more from Jo Slee but when I eventually saw some live photos of Morrissey's infamous 'Madstock' gig in Finsbury Park, I recognised my skinhead image as the stage backdrop.

I can't say I was particularly pleased. For a start Jo Slee had told me the French gig was just a one-off. But more importantly the image was being used in a completely different way than the way I'd been led to believe (solus as opposed to part of a montage) and I had no knowledge or understanding of the precise context of it's inclusion. I had no way of knowing what the skinheads themselves would think, or do, if they saw it.

NME did a cover story on the gig and, since I was one of their senior photographers at the time, they asked me for an explanation of the circumstances surrounding how Morrissey had came to use the image.

I did my best to explain the little I knew and I sent them a xerox copy of Morrissey's note.

Unfortunately for all concerned, the NME article pretty much came out and called Morrissey a racist (which I thought was really dumb) and soon afterwards I received another call from Murray who said that Morrissey was particularly aggrieved that I'd let NME see his note to me. I couldn't really see why, but Murray pointed out that Morrissey had put his home address on the back of the note and was livid to think that anyone at NME would find out his address. I told Murray that Morrissey had written his address on the back of the envelope, not the note, I hadn't shown the envelope to anyone and had anyway sent NME only a xerox copy. Either way though, I was given to understand Morrissey was extremely unhappy that I'd shown NME anything.

Nevertheless, I came to an arrangement with Jo Slee for limited use of the image on the entire tour.

Some weeks later, I was in LA working on a piece on Gallon Drunk for NME (who happened to be supporting Morrissey on Tour) and we were eager to catch their gig at the Hollywood Bowl. "No chance" we were told "NME's banned." As you know, journalists and photographers never like to take "no" for an answer and, since I happened to be mates with one of Gallon Drunk at the time, we were added to their road crew for the night.

I was completely gobsmacked to see what had been done with the image of the Skinhead girls. Besides the backdrop, it was used as the cover of the tour programme, they were selling it on t-shirts and it was even the image on the tour passes.

Despite many, many letters and phone calls between myself and Jo Slee I never got paid a cent for the use of my photograph and, following conversations with several people who had better remain nameless, I realised I obviously never would. I just had to put it all down to experience and try to learn whatever lessons I could from it.

You may notice there is no actual or implied criticism of Morrissey himself here.  Other than the note, I had no direct contact with him whatsoever. He never did "explain".  I was a Smiths/Morrissey fan before this and I still am.  I love his music.

Incidentally, if you’ve read all the way down to here, you might want to know that this photograph is included in my Skinheads book, published by Blurb, and it can be found here -

http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/1117764

Blitz Club, Covent Garden, London 1980.

Monday, 17 May 2010 Was yesterday's BBC film 'Worried About The Boy' an accurate depiction of those times?

Not in my view, no.  But I think it would have been a whole lot less coherent and believable if it had been.  Those were some pretty wacky times and a lot of the characters were fairly wacky too.  

Plus many of the key participants were far more interesting and complex than either Boy George or Steve Strange but are either unheard of or far less famous than either.  I guess that was always going to be the case.  'Worried About The Boy' did capture some element of the crazy, live-for-today spirit of that club though.  But the characters were either amalgams or creatively re-imagined and the timeline was completely screwed up.

For instance, when George shows his dad the article in i-D magazine, that would have been when i-D started, in the autumn of 1980.  By that time, the group of friends that eventually became tagged as the Blitz Kids had already been all over every national newspaper, including a big spread (photographed by me) in the Sunday Times Magazine, from where the image above was taken.  George himself had been featured in a two page spread in the Daily Mail, about Bowie Night at 'Billy's', in 1978 nearly two years before.

Bowie Night at 'Billy's' is often glossed over in the whole story but that was really where it all began.  And the sort of feted media characters that Boy George, Marilyn, Steve Strange and Martin Degville eventually became, were mostly just overdressed yet rather shy teenagers during their time at Billy's.  That's not to downplay it or them.  Stepping down into Bowie Night at 'Billy's' was a little like walking through a Hieronymous Bosch painting but it was far more unselfconscious and hedonistic than Blitz ever was.  And to my mind, the best club of the era was Le Beat Route, which managed to happily exist somewhat below the radar of media attention (other than mine, obviously) and from this observers point of view, seemed to be a lot more fun.

One other thing that I think I should mention is that the seeds of the modern fetish club might have been sown back at Billy's as well.  David Claridge, the guy that started the original Skin Two Club, used to go there as did many of the people who would become well known rubber and fetish wear designers in the '80s - like Daniel James.

They really were remarkable and very creative times.  Which ended, in my opinion, when Leigh Bowery's Taboo closed in 1987.  'Worried About The Boy' was a good start but that whole era deserves something a lot better.  Or a decent documentary.  Whilst most of the participants are still compos mentis enough to able to talk about it.

Pierluigi Collina, London 2004.

Saturday, 15 May 2010 Described once by the Times as “the sexiest referee alive,” I photographed Pierluigi Collina in the St. Martin’s Lane Hotel in London. In person, he’s softly spoken and very polite. And nothing like the sweaty, bulging eyed, somewhat alien figure one used to see running around the football pitches of Europe. Which is nice.

Tiger Woods, California 1994.

Friday, 14 May 2010 This is taken on Tiger Woods’ home golf course, near San Diego, when he was only 19 and still an amateur. It was commissioned in the really early days of Loaded and very few people, outside of golf, had ever heard of him. The journalist I was there with, Tim Southwell, played half a round with him. I think Tiger won. 

I don’t play golf so Tiger drove me and my big bag of cameras around on a golf buggy. It was the first and only time I’ve ever been around a golf course. Afterwards we went to the driving range and he showed us this most amazing drive (I assume a trick shot), where he could get the ball to go outside the boundary fence and then sort of curl back over the top of it and land, perfectly placed on the fairway two hundred yards away. He did it exactly the same way several times. I tried it, and my ball went skidding across the grass and stopped about 15 feet away. These days, when I tell people Tiger Woods once tried to teach me how to drive a golf ball, people look at me as though I’m mad.

Back then he was very nice, relaxed, talkative and extremely charming.

The Rolling Stones, Earls Court, London May 1976

Monday, 10 May 2010 (This is a continuation of the story immediately below).

Gradually over the next couple of years, I started leaping over barriers and clambering onto stages and shooting live bands wherever and whenever I could: Labelle, The Hammersmith Gorillas, Betty Davis, Maria Muldaur, The Rolling Stones, The Kursaal Flyers, Vinegar Joe, Eddie and The Hot Rods – I’ve still got boxes full of live photos of them all.  Some are not very good and most of them have, rightly, never seen the light of day.

But all too soon, like virtually every proper job I’ve ever had, I was declared surplus to requirements at the ad agency with the Miranda account.  So in order to continue my ersatz career as a music photographer, I went out and bought myself a second-hand Nikkormat.

But it was still the proximity to that live music that was the main attraction, not taking the photos.

Then something significant happened to me one night, in late 1976, at a Vibrators show at Kingston Poly.  I was crouched on the side of the stage, about three feet to the side of the band’s speaker stack and, as soon as the band came on, the audience started to go crazy.  It was my first live sighting of ‘punks’.  Bedecked in all kinds of ludicrous apparel, they were leaping and writhing around in front of the stage, shouting and spitting and going absolutely barmy.  And, more significantly, they were a darn sight more photogenic than the band. I didn’t quite have the gumption to start photographing them there and then, their manner took me aback slightly, but I knew that next time I encountered them I would make a bit more of an effort.

And I felt a frisson of something that night and I wasn’t quite sure why.  Apprehension certainly.  The punks were ostensibly fairly violent looking and some were none too careful where they aimed their globules of phlegm.  But there was something else too.  There was an excitement, a rawness and a vitality about them that was completely different to anything I’d encountered before.

Though I was drawn and repelled in almost equal measure that night (a feeling I’ve since become very familiar with) I felt a compulsion to try to record of what I saw.  So, a few weeks later, in December of that year, when ‘The Roxy’ (the UK’s first punk club) opened its doors in Neal Street, Covent Garden, I was one of those standing in the queue.

Ron Wood / Eric Clapton / Pete Townshend The Finsbury Park Rainbow, London 1973.

Saturday, 8 May 2010 Determining exactly when and where this all started for me is very easy. It was at the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park , London on January 13th 1973.

Back then, I wasn’t a photographer, not even a keen amateur, just an advertising agency art director with a flatlining career. Thinking back though, right from my early teens I was always interested in looking at photographs and I’d often cut out and keep the ones I liked from newspapers and magazines.  So I guess there must always have been something there. 

In 1967, when I left school and enrolled at Ealing Art School, I don’t think I was even curious as to how a camera worked. Those of us on Ealing’s Ground Course (a first year of general art studies to establish where one’s talents might lay) were required to spend half a day a week using a camera and learning the rudiments of photography. Sadly, it all went in one ear and out the other with me and whenever I had the need to use the medium, perhaps for making a photo-litho or a silk-screen, I’d go to Bill Patterson, one of the photography tutors, and say, ‘would you mind just running through this bit for me one more time?’ He’d usually sigh, take the camera or film from my hand and say, ‘Give it to me, I’ll do it.’

He was a lovely man but perhaps not blessed with the required patience to deal with a lot of whacky students, so I tended take advantage of this quality in order to avoid any unnecessary toil. Which was perfectly fine, except that it meant when I left art school four years later, I hardly knew how to process film and I certainly didn’t know what all the little numbers on the front of the camera meant.

Fortunately, I went straight from college into the advertising business, so I thought I didn’t need to. But a couple of years, and a couple of job changes later on, I found myself working in an agency that had a camera account – that of the late and not very lamented Miranda SLR - and I was told to use one and try it out, so as to get to know better what it could do.  (Not so much, as it happened, but we obviously didn’t say that in the ads).

So one night a few weeks later, when I went to see the above named gig, I just happened to have the camera and some film with me. The seats my girlfriend and myself had bought were terrible, almost the very back row, and it was like watching an ant performing on stage.  So I thought - I’ve got a camera, why don’t I just go down to the front, climb into the pit and pretend to be a photographer?   In those days there was virtually no security at rock gigs, so it was perfectly possible.

So, rather unchivalrously leaving my girlfriend where she was, I ran down to the front and, effecting the air of someone who did this sort of thing for a living, hopped over the low wall and watched the rest of the gig from behind the borrowed Miranda. It was a tremendous buzz, being just a few feet away from some of my musical idols.  Bathed in the same coloured lights as them and in front of thousands of people just like them, I could see and hear every little detail.  And it was an infinitely more profound and worthwhile experience than sitting in the seats right at the back.

When I got the photos I'd shot processed, I found that completely by luck and with no element of judgement whatsoever, they weren’t that bad.   Okay, by no means good but not that bad.

And so, very gradually over the next couple of years, I started leaping over barriers and clambering onto stages and shooting live bands wherever and whenever I could...

(to be continued).