Theo Kogan, The Astoria, London 1993.

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Thursday, 8 July 2010 I always loved to photograph Theo (lead singer with the Lunachicks). She was, without doubt, one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever worked with but, for some weird reason, always seemed intent (in those days, at any rate) on making herself look unbeautiful. Always gurning and pulling faces. But in a somewhat photogenic way. Seventeen years later she still looks fabulous. I’ve always thought age takes a long time to wither real beauty.

“It’s classified.” Mardi Gras, London 2000.

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Friday, 2 July 2010 What's in a name?

One of the first things most photographers will come to learn when shooting editorial portraiture is that there are really no rules any more.  There hasn't really been for quite a long time.  And fashion photographers threw away their rule book even earlier. Photographers doing just whatever the heck they want, probably goes back as far as Man Ray and the dadaists.

But for documentary portraiture there still have to be a few rules, in my humble opinion, otherwise we'll never know what exactly the photograph is suppose to be documenting.  Although everyone's rules will still no doubt be different, one of mine concerns captioning, which I always feel needs to be as accurate as possible but with one exception - names.  

If I photograph someone in a club or on the street, I don't usually ask my subject to sign a model release.  But I'll always ask for their name.  Yet they are obviously under no obligation to give it.  Or give me their correct name.  Or speak to me at all.  And I completely accept that.  So that if someone just walks off and doesn't want to tell me their name, I'll just caption that photograph as "anonymous".

Also, if someone gives me a name that is clearly not their correct name (and says something like "just call me Ethel Minge" for instance) I'll make a judgement as to whether to use that name in the caption or not.  Clearly many people prefer to be known by nick names (like 'Belsen' or 'Tuinol Barry') and that's fine too. Besides, many people are probably better known by their nick names than their real ones. 

And there will also be occasions, like at Gay Pride, where some people will not want me to have their real name for perfectly understandable reasons.

There will also be times when I'll ask one of my subjects what their name is and they'll say something which I find interesting in itself.  And so I'll use that in the caption.  As in the example above.  It was shot at a Gay Pride event which had been rebranded that year as 'Mardi Gras'.  I asked the bloke what his name was and he simply responded "It's classified."   

Which was perfectly good enough for me.

Kylie Minogue, Chalk Farm 1994.

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Saturday, 26 June 2010 I guess I should have seen it coming but the polystyrene ‘K’ she’s holding here was my real-life Spinal Tap moment. Just in case you don’t know, there’s a bit in that film where the band decide to perform in front of a huge polystyrene recreation of Stonehenge. Unfortunately they get their inches and feet mixed up and it comes back from the makers about three feet tall. Nevertheless they still perform behind it, looking completely ridiculous.

How I failed to heed the lesson from what is one of my favourite films, I’ll never know. But I didn’t. I simply asked my assistant to organise a large polystyrene ‘K’. Thinking about it, did I say “large” or “huge” or “massive” or just “enormous”? Either way, I knew what I meant and I meant ten feet high, not 10 inches!

Henry Rollins, Chicago 1995.

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Friday, 18 June 2010 It’s jobs like this that make being a rock photographer actually seem like real work. Although Henry Rollins himself was perfectly charming and polite, my schedule meant I had to fly to Chicago, get a cab to the venue (an old theatre) take the photos, then get a cab back to the airport and jump straight on a plane home. I didn’t get to see the gig and my feet hardly even touched the Chicago sidewalk.

No matter how long or short my photo sessions are, they always seem to stay with me, in sharp focus, forever. One of my shortest ever sessions was a single frame in duration and the subject was Miles Davis. I think it was 1983. Together with the writer Robert Elms, I’d gone down to meet Miles at the Grosvenor Hotel in Park Lane. When we met his PR man in the lobby, he told us that Miles was far too ill to be photographed but he might, just, be able to do the interview.

We went up to Miles Davis’s suite to find him sitting on a sofa, happily doodling away in a sketch pad. He didn’t look up. But, by the same token, he didn’t look too ill either. Of course, it  has to be said though, I’m not a doctor.

Miles was surrounded by about half a dozen people, tentatively standing around talking in whispers. I stood just inside the door and managed to click off one frame before I got a raised hand and an old-fashioned look from the PR guy.

I guess I could have put up more of a fight, but if we’d been chucked out, Robert would not have got his interview either, so I didn’t. I guess to have photographed the great man at all was something.

Nevertheless, that session lasted a whole lot longer than one I did with another jazzer, John Lurie. When I met him he was a picture of health. I was standing in front of him with the camera up to my eye about to start snapping, when someone walked over with a magazine article to show him. John Lurie stood there, silently reading the article in front of me for about a minute. Then he angrily threw the magazine across the room and stormed off. The magazine article had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with me but it made no difference. I lost out on John Lurie completely that day.

Fifi Dennison, Willesden 1991.

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Thursday, 17 June 2010 I always loved photographing Fifi (aka Fiona), she was funny, inventive and always eager to get in front of a camera. But I never really knew anything about her life. Often I prefer it that way because it doesn’t always help to photograph someone if you know them too well.

I think she was a singer but to be completely honest, at that time I’d never heard a not of her music.  Her full stage name was ‘Fifi La Douche D’Or’ which sounds really classy, unless you know what it means.

This shot was taken in a huge car breakers yard near the famous railway  junction.  I attempted to ask the guy running the place for permission to shoot there but when I walked into his office he said, without even looking up “Whatever you want, the answers no.”

So we simply went round the back, climbed over the fence and did it anyway.  Bearing in mind that I’m not exactly sure what the Statute of Limitations is on trespass, I may have just imagined this.

Iggy Pop, Music Machine, Camden Town 1977.

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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.

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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.

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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.