Iggy Pop, Music Machine, Camden Town 1977.

Monday, 14 June 2010 In the late '70s I was working in an ad agency that was slap bang in the middle of Soho and through the windows of said agency we had a front seat view of the rich pageant of Soho life parading around only a few feet below.

The agency was only a few yards away from the passage next to ‘Raymond’s Review Bar’ and we were able to observe the prostitutes, armed policemen, con men, clip girls, drunks, fighting Irish, junkies, glue sniffers and all manner of street people. These types were very thick on the ground in the Soho of the '70s.

One got very used to seeing some of them. There was one guy I used to see a lot. A dyed-haired, lanky git, normally dressed from head to toe in leather who obviously thought of himself as some sort of covert rock star. He also wore eye-liner. He always looked totally messed up, emaciated and out of it. It was not an appealing sight. I remember being particularly appalled by seeing the lanky git walking through Soho market with his scrotum hanging out of a hole in his trousers. He seemed totally oblivious.

Working right in the middle of Soho did have it's advantages though. My office was a 30 second jog away from the best second hand record shop in the country - ‘Cheapo Cheapo’ - and every Wednesday morning, at about 11.00 o’clock, the new review copies would arrive and be put straight out into the racks.

I was, by this time, a voracious reader of both Sounds and NME and my journalistic heroes were Charles Shaar Murray, Nick Kent and Danny Baker.  I pretty much bought every record they gave a decent review to. 

So every Wednesday at exactly 10.55, I'd make an excuse at work and jog down to Cheapo Cheapo to buy, at about half price, some of the records that had been favourably reviewed in the previous weeks rock papers.  I didn't realise it at the time but there was every likelihood these were exactly the same copies that had been so reviewed.

I'd often see the lanky git hanging about Cheapo Cheapo at the same time as me and I assumed he'd worked out what time the review copies arrived too. I always tried to make sure I got to the best records before he did and, for some strange reason, I always seemed to.

I'd been doing this for quite a few years in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.  Until eventually I got the sack from the agency, became a photographer and I met the writer Cynthia Rose.  Through her, I got a crack at working for the NME myself. 

One day, when we were both hanging about Virgin Records in Oxford Street, she introduced me to my hero Nick Kent. And I recognised him as the lanky git. The very same lanky git that I'd seen rather too much of once before. 

(And so it eventually dawned on me that he hadn't been hanging about ‘Cheapo Cheapo’ buying the records but rather selling them the ones I'd then been buying).

The above story is just a feeble excuse to recommend, to anyone reading this, Nick Kent's fantastic new book 'Apathy For the Devil' which is a '70s memoir of his time as a rock writer and it has some absolutely fantastic stuff about the Rolling Stones, Iggy Pop, Chrissie Hynde and the Sex Pistols.  It's just about my favourite book since his last one 'The Dark Stuff.'

Oh and I apologise for calling him a git.

Phina Oruche, New York 1994.

Monday, 14 June 2010 Twelve years before the Liverpudlian actress was taken to the nation’s heart (or possibly not) in ‘I’m a Celebrity... Get Me out of Here!’ I’d photographed her as a 19 year old model in New York. I had the idea to photograph her in the ‘Meat District’ on the lower West Side, due to the fact that’s it’s very grungy and, in the daytime, fairly deserted. Save for all the other photographers and camera crews with the same idea. Things were going great until a pickup truck with three tough-looking guys in it pulled up to watch. From a distance of about five feet. They didn’t say anything. They just sat there quietly watching. Phina was completely spooked. And since there was only the two of us there, no big crew or team of bodyguards, we decided to move on. Loaded never ran any of the photos anyway.

Enoch Powell, Eaton Square, London 1983.

Friday, 11 June 2010 Irrespective of his ridiculous views on race relations, Enoch Powell was certainly one of my strangest ever subjects.

I was commissioned to photograph him by the NME and, together with the writer Stephen Wells, we turned up at his very grand flat in Eaton Square to meet a guy who seemed determined, for some reason, to try to make us laugh. 

For someone who achieved a starred double-first from Cambridge University, and who was often referred to as the greatest political mind of his generation, he struck me as a bit of a twit. To start with, he began by deriding my accent and the way I talk. He enquired as to whether I might be an Australian?  I’m a Londoner, born and bred and though my accent isn’t of the typical gor-blimey cockney variety, it’s never (outside of the US) ever confused anyone before.  Then he asked me about the origins of my name and started to try to find something funny about that.  Next he spoke to a woman who had been detailed to bring us some tea and called her “dear” and invited us to speculate on what his precise relationship with her was (it was his wife).  All the while he was grinning at us like Sid James in a Carry On film.  

His desire to trivialise the situation must, I guess, have been some sort of bizarre tactic to make us forget to ask him anything remotely serious.  It was a little patronising of him and it didn’t work.  Steven Wells (aka Swells, now sadly deceased himself) was far too canny an interviewer for that and he managed to ask him all the questions I'm sure he would rather have not been asked.  

Enoch Powell was a proud man but, in my judgement, by this stage of his political career, a little sad.

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.