Chrissie Hynde, Soho 1990.

Tuesday, 29 March 2011 In the late '70s I was working in an ad agency that was slap bang in the middle of Soho and through the first floor windows of said agency, we had a front seat view of the rich pageant of Soho life only a few feet below.

The agency was only about 50 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, 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-black haired, lanky twerp, 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 completely out of it.

It was not always an appealing sight. I remember being particularly appalled by seeing the lanky twerp walking through Soho market with his scrotum hanging out of a hole in his trousers. He seemed totally oblivious to this.

Working right in the middle of Soho did have it's advantages though. My office was a 45 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 heroes were Charles Shaar Murray, Nick Kent and Danny Baker.  I pretty much bought everything they gave a decent review too.

So, every Wednesday at exactly 10.55, I'd make an excuse at work and run down to Cheapo Cheapo to buy, at about half the RRP, 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 twerp hanging about Cheapo Cheapo at about 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 a few years during the late ‘70s.  Until eventually I got the sack from the agency, became a photographer and I met the NME writer Cynthia Rose.  Through her, I got a crack at working for NME myself.

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

(And so it dawned on me that he hadn't been hanging about Cheapo Cheapo waiting to buy the records but rather selling them the ones I'd subsequently been buying).

The above story is just an excuse to recommend Nick Kent's fantastic 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 and the Sex Pistols.  It's just about my favourite rock book since his last one 'The Dark Stuff.'

I don't have a photograph of Nick Kent.  But his book has quite a lot about the time when he lived with Chrissie Hynde and so I've used a photograph (detail) of her.

Coincidentally it was taken almost right outside Cheapo Cheapo.

And if you should ever read this Nick, I apologise for once calling you a twerp.

http://www.faber.co.uk/work/apathy-for-devil/9780571232857/

Southend Seafront, Spring Bank Holiday 1979.

Tuesday, 29 March 2011 As I trawl back through my archive, I often come across photographs I don't specifically recall taking.

The above being just one example.  It was taken on Southend Seafront during the Spring Bank Holiday in 1979.  I'd come down on the train from London with a group of about 50 skinheads but I found ample time during the day to wander round and photograph other young people.  Such as a group of rock n' roll fans (in those days often known as either 'rockers' or 'teds') assembled outside the Minerva pub, next to the Kursaal amusement park.

The young girls in the photograph look to me to be about 14.  One of them has a badge on her jacket that reads 'Vintage Rock & Roll Appreciation Society.'  She also had the words 'teds' written on both shoes.  Even in 1979 they must have seemed awfully young to be fans of music genre which was at it peak in the late '50s.

I'm very pleased I took photographs like this at that time but I'd certainly think twice about doing so now.  These days, the overly protective spirit of the times doesn't seem particularly conducive to photographing young people one doesn't know in the street.

How would modern society treat great photographers like Cartier-Bresson, Bert Hardy, Diane Arbus and Robert Doisneau, who all made a good part of their careers out of photographing kids and young people in the street?

I don't really know but I fear it would be a lot harder now than it was when they were alive.

Alexei Sayle, London 1982.

Thursday, 17 March 2011 After I became a professional photographer, Alexei Sayle, the Liverpudlian comedian and writer, was the first famous person I got to know quite well.

In 1980, my 'Skinheads' photography show had gone to Exeter University and the night I went down for the opening, Alexei played a gig there. 

He went down extremely badly that night, because all the students took him at face value.  At that time, his stage persona was that of a cockney wide boy, in a tight mohair suit and a pork pie hat, and a lot of his act was aimed directly at the students themselves.  So eventually he ended up by just standing on stage hurling insults at them.

Afterwards we got talking and I immediately warmed to the guy because he was the complete opposite of his stage persona.

Off stage he was thoughtful, softly spoken and quite charming.  And extremely funny.  A few months later I got commissioned to photograph him by the Face magazine and we became friends.  This shot from that session was later used on the cover of his first book ‘Train To Hell.‘  I also shot the cover for his 1985 record 'Didn't You Kill My Brother' where we parodied the famous David Bailey shot of the Kray Twins (when I can find that one I’ll post it here too).

People often say that off stage, comedians are rather dour and depressing characters.  I've photographed many and seldom found that to be the case.  I think it's a bit of a tired cliche.  In my opinion, it's just about the last thing you could ever say of Alexei Sayle.

John Galliano, Soho 1985.

Thursday, 17 March 2011 I'm afraid I don't have anything intelligent or perceptive to write about the predicament John Galliano currently finds himself in.  I don’t want to kick the bloke when he’s down but if you’re going to go around hurling racist insults at people, whether drunk or not, you deserve everything you get and probably more.

This is a previously unpublished photograph of John Galliano when he was still a student at Central Saint Martins art school.

I photographed him at the time of his degree show when there was  already a considerable buzz about him in the fashion world.  He was the undoubted star of his year.  The photo was taken in the alleyway at the rear of the building in Charing Cross Road and shows him sitting on large blocks of wood waiting to be hewn by the fine art students.

Photographing rock stars and celebrities (part 1).

Wednesday, 9 March 2011 When one gets hired to shoot rock stars or celebrities, there are a whole host of unexpected and sometimes quite bizarre intangibles which can trip up the unwary photographer.  And, come to that, often the wary one too.  It sometimes seems that whatever potential scenario you try to take account of, another unforeseen one will rear it's ugly head.

I was once hired to shoot the singer Luther Vandross for the English music magazine NME.  He was well known to be slightly unreliable in matters pertaining to the press, so there were quite a lot of transatlantic calls made and assurances given before myself and a journalist set off from London.  As we boarded the plane, everything was fine.  About half way across the Atlantic, unbeknownst to us, Mr Vandross started to eat.  And when we touched down in Atlanta, Mr Vandross had decided he'd put on too much weight and could no longer be photographed.  Much pressure was brought to bear on him by his UK record company but he wouldn't budge.

So I just had a few days off, wandering around seeing the sights in Georgia.

The weight problems of the stars are obviously not the only intangible to scupper a shoot.  Occasionally the subject, the actual star or stars themselves, are the least of one's problems.

I once had a mobile studio set up in one of the rooms at the Dorchester Hotel in London and I was just about to do a shoot with Stevie Wonder.  I'd even got as far as doing a few polaroids or him.  He was perfectly happy and seemed in a great mood.  Then someone from his management walked in and, possibly because we'd arranged the shoot with Stevie Wonder's record company and not run it by this particular individual, the shoot was immediately cancelled.  Again there wasn't anything I, the record company or even Stevie Wonder could seem to do to change this guy's mind.  All the more odd because the shoot had been arranged in order to promote Stevie's next record.

One time, I'd been asked to shoot an English rock band in Los Angeles (it was a long time ago but they'd still best remain nameless).

On the day of the shoot they all turned up at my hotel in a big van with their girlfriends and the band’s manager and his boyfriend.  We all drove off to look for somewhere good to do the photos and it quickly became clear that the manager was under the mistaken impression that he was the one that had commissioned me and therefore he was the one calling the shots.

He started going on about what he wanted and what he didn’t want, without any reference to what the magazine that had commissioned me might want.   "I want to do this" he was saying “and next I want to do that" etc., etc.

His ideas for what shots I should do were mind numbingly unoriginal.  Like having his band photographed in front of the Hollywood sign and then doing something with them sprawled next to the stars on Hollywood Boulevard.

I told him that I was not keen to do photographs that would just amount to standard tourist type stuff.  I explained to him that the magazine wanted some interesting and original photos and they would not give a shit about what he wanted.   Obviously I didn't put it exactly in those words.  To begin with I was charm personified and I was doing my absolute best to get him to see things my way and yet allow him to save face in front of his band and the various partners.

But he wasn't seeing my point of view at all.  As far as he was concerned, he was the manager of the band, they did what he told them to do and, as far as he was concerned, so did anyone who worked with them.  So, at this point, I did have to make myself a little bit more blunt.   So then it degenerated into a full scale row.  And the manager's boyfriend and some of the girlfriends started unhelpfully chipping in with their ideas as well.  So we were driving around getting nowhere.

All the while, the band themselves just sat there in silence.

So we drove about like this for a bit, the band looking more and more depressed and then the manager went into a bit of a sulk.  At this point I decided to keep my mouth shut to prevent things getting any worse.

On the suggestion of the van driver of all people, we drove up to Griffith Park and I shot a few rolls of the band posing amongst some rocks.  But by this time they looked far too hot, tired and dejected.  So it was decided, I don't recall by whom, to call the whole shoot off and try again the next day.

The next day the band turned up without their manager or his boyfriend.  Or any of the girlfriends, who'd conveniently all had to fly back home.  This time the band were talkative and positively cheerful. There were no arguments.  We wandered about and did some photographs not far from the hotel on Sunset Boulevard.  It was enjoyable and we a few laughs along the way.  And the pictures came out great.

Afterwards, I learnt that the day before, everyone had been in a terrible mood before they’d even got to me.  My arguing with their manager (which they'd found quite funny) had had very little to do with it.  It was the fact that the girlfriends where there that had made them so moody.

Apparently the girlfriends had all flown out to spend a few days with the band in LA and it had stopped the band having of the sort of fun that all British bands like to have when they're on tour in the US, especially in LA (whatever sort of fun that may be?).  As soon as the girlfriends had left, everyone cheered up no end.

X, Kensal Rise, London 1984.

Wednesday, 9 March 2011 I decided to post this photograph because it's a perfect example of the kind of photograph that no one really has to take any more. At least, I don't need to.

It's an unpublished photograph of the the Los Angeles punk band X.  It was taken in 1984 and it was commissioned by The Face magazine.

It was in the early years of my career as a professional photographer and I was still finding my feet stylistically.  I used to try incredibly hard in those days, maybe too hard.  I often used to sketch out several ideas and show my subjects and ask them to pick one.  Or I would spend ages driving around town trying to scope out the perfect location for the photos.

In the case of the photo above, I'd found this building in North West London that had these old metal trusses running through it and the end parts were in the shape of 'x's.  I met the band at the offices of their record company, in Central London, and persuaded them to let me drive them to this location, about half an hour's drive away.

Always the press officer at that particular record company (WEA) would say to me "why don't you do the photos on the roof of our building."  I presume she said this to every photographer that ever came to her office to shoot a WEA band.  I think X were just happy to get out of the office for a while.  But it led to an hour or so of driving and twenty minutes taking photos. Which, as I'm sure you can imagine, is not an ideal balance.

Of course, these days people don't need to take photos like this because the 'x's could easily be put into any old wall with Photoshop.  And that's even if anyone were so daft as to need to be as literalist about things as I was back then.

In the great film about Helmut Newton 'Frames From The Edge' he explains that he never wasted any time in strange or exotic environments looking for interesting locations and he'd always find the perfect spot to shoot very close to his hotel.

Whether this is really true or not, it's certainly an interesting discipline.

You can watch frames From The Edge here -

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2644030231343746587&hl=en#

Neil Young, Phoenix Festival 1996.

Wednesday, 9 March 2011 Whatever else I do in my life, good or bad, I'll go to my grave secure in the knowledge that at least Neil Young likes me.

The year was 1991 and I'd been hired by the British music magazine NME to photograph Sonic Youth.  At the time they were on tour with Neil Young.  That afternoon, together with the journalist Gavin Martin, I'd driven with Sonic Youth on their tour bus from San Francisco to the Arco Arena in Sacramento, where they were both playing in the evening.  The four members of the band, Gavin and me were wandering around in the bowels of the stadium looking, if I remember correctly, for catering.  I was carrying a big tripod and a very heavy bag of cameras and lenses and was lagging back by about 30 metres.  Neil Young walked up behind me and said to me "Hey, I really love youse guys" and without waiting for any sort of response, hurried off again.

I wasn't too sure exactly what he meant.  Like most big rock stars, he's probably no great fan of photographers and journalists per se (he certainly doesn't do many interviews).  You may think, possibly correctly, that he simply assumed I was a member of Sonic Youth's road crew and the comment was made in their general direction.  Who knows?  Maybe it's best I don't analyse the comment too closely.  Besides, I'm happy to take whatever compliments I can get.  Especially from someone I've been a fan of since my teens.

* The above photograph is correctly captioned.  I couldn't find a photo from the Sacramento show.  If I do, I'll switch them.

Ealing Art School and The Sixties.

Thursday, 3 March 2011 Don't let anyone who wasn't there try to kid you otherwise, the 1960s were a fantastic time to be alive.  Or at least they were if you were young and living in London.

The famous Wordsworth quote  "Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive but to be young was very heaven" seems to fit with my recollection of the 1960s perfectly.  Even though we lived in the shadow of the Cold War and The Bomb etc.  it seemed to be a time of great optimism.

I haven't yet seen it myself but currently there's a show on at the Truman Brewery in Brick Lane, East London called 'Stormtroopers in Stilettos'.  It's a large-scale exhibition about the band Queen and covers their formative years.  I knew Freddie whilst we were both at art school back in the late 1960s, so I thought now would be a good time to tell that tale.

In September 1967, at the age of 16 I became a student at Ealing School of Art.  Only a few weeks previously, I'd ambled into school after the summer holidays, not at all looking forward to being a sixth former and studying for my A-levels for two years.

For various reasons which I won't bore you with now, I wasn't exactly welcomed back with open arms by most of the teachers.  Save to say, I was a cocky and rather self-confident schoolboy and used to spend too much time larking around.

But, fortunately for me, I got on very well with the art master, Mr Edwards.  I was quite good at art and I'd got both my O and A levels a couple of years ahead of time.  So Mr Edwards pulled a few strings and got me enrolled into a course at Ealing School of Art, which was due to start only a few days later.

The '60s was a fantastically creative time and none more so than at British Art Schools.  I missed both Pete Townshend and Ron Wood at Ealing by a few years but amongst my contemporaries were Freddie Mercury (then Bulsara), the author Robert Rankin, the film director Thaddeus O'Sullivan  and the illustrator Alan Lee.  Of the four of them, the only one whose talent really shone out brightly at that time was Alan Lee.  I was a very conscientious worker at Art School but Alan was something else.  He was usually the only one who was there hard at work when I got in in the morning and was often still working, in an otherwise empty Art School, in the evening when I left to go home. I would often tarry by his desk and watch fascinated as he hunched over, drawing these amazingly intricate illustrations of ancient warriors, fantasy battles and the like.   All done in  old fashioned pen and ink.  In those days I could draw quite well myself but Alan's talent was light years ahead of mine.

On the other hand, Freddie's talents weren't quite so obvious.  Or at least not to me.  I well remember his degree show which was based solely on the image and the lyrics of Jimmy Hendrix.  And it was pretty cursory at that.  The illustrations were  colourful  Shepard Fairey style  posterizations of photographs (probably traced on the Art School epidiascope) but they were not particularly good.  I remember thinking at the time that, if it wasn't for the fact that he was such a popular guy, he most probably would never have been allowed to get as far as having a degree show and graduating.

Sorry if this pricks any Freddie Mercury fans bubble but I was certainly not alone in this view.

I had another reason to think negatively about Freddie.  As I said, I was 16 when I went to Ealing and Freddie was four years older.  Four years is quite a lot when you're that age and probably even more so in my case.  I was an only child, I still lived at home with my parents and grandmother, and I was very unworldly.

On the other hand, Freddie was sophisticated, clearly intelligent, a real extrovert and had oodles of charm.  One rarely saw him on his own and he was usually the centre of attention in whatever group he was with.  He was always very fashionably dressed, usually in tight t-shirts, hoop neck sweaters, wide flares and stacked heel boots.  I think I'm correct in remembering that he was one of the few students bold enough to wear white flares, always a risky business at an art school, where there's liable to be  still wet paint or printing ink in all sorts of unlikely places.  But Freddie fit right into the mood of the times perfectly.  Of all of us students, he was the one that looked the most like a would-be rock star - whereas I was still scuffling round in my old white school shirts and tank tops knitted for me by my grandmother.

It was the afternoon of last day of term before Easter '68.  The whole of the art school, almost to a man and woman, was squeezed into the small lounge bar of the Castle pub in St Mary's Road, across from the college building.  You couldn't move.  I was with my girlfriend of the time, a fellow art student.  She was attractive and vivacious and I was totally enamoured with her.  We must have made an unlikely couple.  Because the pub was so crowded, my girlfriend was sitting on my lap.  It was an arrangement I by no means disapproved of.

Being students, there was plenty of drinking going on and eventually I had to get up and use the bathroom.  When I got back, I was somewhat shocked to see Freddie Bulsara had taken my place and my girlfriend was  now sitting on his lap.   To start with, I wasn't too bothered, I assumed that as soon as my girlfriend noticed that I'd returned, she'd turf him off and I could reassume my former, very agreeable, position.

This wasn't what happened.  They both completely ignored me.

So I did what any immature and fairly unassertive teenage boy would do - I stood there sheepishly for a bit and then stormed off in a huff.

I don't exactly know what I expected.  Maybe that she would come running after me and apologise.  Back then, I clearly didn't know women very well.  But this didn't happen.  She probably didn't even see me leave.

For the most of the Easter holiday, I sat at home feeling sorry for myself, playing my records and waiting in vain for my now ex-girlfriend to telephone.

Needless to say, that call never came.

But, I hear you wonder, why on earth would Freddie have made a play for my girlfriend if he was, rather famously, gay?  Well, although I don't claim to have any special knowledge in this department, he appeared fairly enthusiastically heterosexual at the time.  And he was popular with everyone but especially women.

How on earth, you might also ask yourself, could this silly girl chose the handsome, talented and sophisticated Freddie Bulsara over me?

I have no idea, crazy isn't it?

Anyway, after being rather morose for about a fortnight, I managed to steel myself and remained relatively friendly with my ex-girlfriend.  But I never once discussed with her her relationship with Freddie.  A few months later, she became pregnant and left art school for good.  Not, I hasten to add, pregnant by Freddie.  Freddie was, by this time, history with her too.

For some reason, which I honestly can't now explain, after this Freddie and I became rather friendly.  Maybe it was that now we both had something in common.  I guess teenagers and young men don't harbour resentments about women the way they might when they're older.  He'd have been a very hard guy to dislike either way.

Plus I was also very good friends with a guitarist in Freddie's  first band - Tim Staffel.  He was also at the art school and we used to play five-a-side football together at lunch times.  So I heard about the formation of Smile, almost as soon as anyone, from him.  Smile later evolved into Queen when Tim left to join Humpy Bong (in the perspective of the time Humpy Bong, with an ex-Bee Gee in their number, seemed like the much surer bet).

I was looking forward to seeing Smile the night they played in Ealing Art School student union bar.  I didn't think they were very good but, as the world soon came to know, Freddie was a marvellous singer.  Albeit one that seemed, at the time, to be a little too keen on aping Robert Plant.

Wikipedia says that "Mercury possessed only rudimentary skills" on the guitar but having played with him during a few of the very impromptu, large scale art school jam sessions, I can say this wasn't quite true.  He certainly played an acoustic guitar very musically and in my judgement showed a decent enough talent on the instrument.  He played barre chords in the open tuning style, very rhythmically a little like Richie Havens.  He played the guitar far better than I and most others at those sessions.

After Freddie left art school, I often used to pop into the Kensington Antique Market for a chat with him.  He worked upstairs on a stall selling leather boots.  Not as Wikipedia also says "clothes."  The kind of glam rock style, stack heel boots he wore himself at the time.  At that point, I felt somewhat sorry for him, assuming he'd be stuck in that sort of job for quite a while.

Of course, that's not how things turned out.

After he became a huge star, I only ever saw him once again.  It was at Ronnie Scott's in 1974 after a gig by the American funk singer Betty Davis.  I'd been taking photographs and, as the club cleared slightly, I noticed Freddie sitting at a table on his own.  He called me over and we had a beer together.  We spoke about old times and he was just as warm and friendly as ever.

Fame appeared not to have changed him at all.  Whether as the iconic rock star or as an unknown fellow student, he always seemed to have plenty of time for people.  A truly lovely guy.

As ever, if you have any comments, please email me.

*The woman in the photograph above wasn't my then girlfriend.  I have very few photographs from that time. She was simply a compliant model for an advertising project I was working on.  It was shot in the art school canteen.

http://www.stormtroopersinstilettos.com/

Skin, Chelsea 1999.

Monday, 28 February 2011 Skin, the singer with the British rock band Skunk Anansie, is certainly one of my favourite ever subjects. The photograph above was from the second session I did with her.

This time, before the shoot, Skin insisted that she wasn't going to do any photographs on her own.  She said that all my photos had to feature the entire band.  

With someone like Skin, most photographers will always tend to concentrate on her, to the exclusion of the rest of the band.

And I’m no different.   I’d always far rather photograph one remarkable looking human being alone, than one remarkable looking human standing next to several average Joe’s.  And more often than not, that’s what the publications want too.

If the band needs the publicity, the better and more interesting the photographs are, the more they’ll get used and the more prominence they’ll get.  So there’s a pay off.

But the musicians themselves won’t always see things this way and that’s completely understandable.

Often the bands handlers will decree that their charges can only be photographed with each member having a very carefully, predetermined amount of prominence.

I don’t know whether it’s internal politics or in their contracts or what but the degree to which some bands stick to such a rigid hierarchical arrangement of their personnel is quite bizarre.  It certainly doesn’t seem very rock n’ roll.

You only have to look at photographs of Oasis or the Rolling Stones to see what I mean. It’s no accident that the same people are always on the edge of the frame or always peering over someone else’s shoulder.

Once, before a shoot, I was taken aside by the lead singer of a certain band that I won’t name and quietly asked to make sure the drummer was always right on the edge of the frame, because they were “thinking of sacking him.”  The shoot was being done on the cliff edge at Beachy Head, where there’s a 600ft drop.  It did cross my mind that maybe the singer had something more permanent in mind.  He was notoriously unpredictable and was certainly the sort that might have had.  But as it turned out the shoot was quick and fairly painless...for all concerned.

But the drummer was indeed sacked soon afterwards.

These are the sort of issues one runs into with rock band photography.  It’s hard enough taking good photographs of (usually) four or five scruffy young men as it is, without having to worry about all that nonsense.

To be fair, some bands, like REM or U2, have a genuine knowledge and respect for the art of photography and they’ve both worked with some real greats.  So it can, occasionally, be very much easier by the time the rest of us get there.

But if you want to be able to do the job, you have to learn to deal with it either way.

Regarding the image above, as it happened, after a while the rest of Skunk Anansie got bored with standing around being photographed and just wandered off.

Leaving me to do the sort of photos of Skin that I'd really wanted to do all along.

Cheer up mate, you’ve just won an Oscar.

Monday, 28 February 2011 Congratulations to Trent Reznor for winning an Academy Award (with co-composer Atticus Ross) for the soundtrack to ‘The Social Network.’

This is a previously unpublished shot from the photo session I did with him in Hollywood in 1994.  Maybe he looks a little miffed because we’d wanted to do the shoot at the Watts Towers but it’d been closed?

Anyway, I’m pleased for him, it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.