Steven Berkoff, Covent Garden 1993.

Friday, 6 May 2011 So far in this blog, I've told several stories about times when someone rich or famous has incurred my chagrin.  But these things aren't always one way.  Despite appearances to the contrary, I'm not perfect and have, on several occasions, upset my subjects.  For a variety of reasons, some known, some unknown.

Once, five time Academy Award winning composer John Barry indicated to a colleague, by means of a simple, universally recognised hand gesture, that my approach didn't appeal him too much.  Said colleague (the writer Gavin Martin) duly informed me about this but only after we'd left.

Obviously an apology would be a bit too late now.  I really loved John Barry's music and he’s genuinely one of the greats.

I sincerely regret whatever it was I did to disconcert him.

It also seems I didn't impress Steven Berkoff too much either.

He told me that he'd "never been spoken to like that" in his life. He comes from Stepney, in London's rough East End, so I found that one a little hard to believe.

Other than the time I went to a hillside in sunny Spain, to photograph a chap in a sweltering rubber inflation suit (the story of which I will have to leave for another time) it was my strangest ever shoot.

I was with the journalist Barbara Ellen.  We'd arranged to meet Steven Berkoff in an office (I think it was his agent's) in Covent Garden.  It was a bright sunny day - for anyone who doesn't know London, Covent Garden is always packed with tourists on days like this - and I'd had to park some distance away.

Barbara and I were asked to wait in the office reception area and, after Steven Berkoff hadn't arrived for nearly an hour, I realised I was going to have to go out and put a little more cash in my parking meter.

I couldn't have been gone much more than about about ten minutes but on my return, I walked into the room I'd just left and found Steven Berkoff had arrived.  But he was simply sitting in a chair next to Barbara silently staring at the wall opposite, as was she.  Neither of them looked at me, neither of them said anything and they both had the appearance of patients in a doctors waiting room.

I suppose I assumed they'd spoken and probably already had a disagreement about something.  Barbara could certainly, at times, be a little spiky, so it was not beyond all possibility.

Certainly neither of them looked very happy.

Nevertheless, since I still had a photograph to take, I walked over, held my right hand out and attempted to introduce myself.  Twenty years on, I can't remember my exact words but they were very probably "Hi, I'm Derek Ridgers, I'm here take your photograph".

For some reason which, to this day, completely escapes me, this form of words seemed to upset him.  This was when he told me he'd never been spoken to like that before.  He stood up to his full height of about five and a half feet and informed be that he was cancelling the shoot and, what's more, he was going to ring up my editor and make a complaint.

It's an understatement to say that I was gobsmacked by this odd reaction.  I'd photographed him before and he'd been sweet.

But actors can be wild and crazy people and Steven Berkoff certainly has this sort of reputation.

So... I was faced with a decision as to whether to respond in a similar manner, have a row and then get thrown out.

Or to apologise, grovel a little bit and do whatever it took in order to get the job done.

It was really no contest, I chose the latter option.  99 times out of 100 I would do so again, though I do know a couple of photographers, actually very good ones, for whom it seems to work better the other way around.  That’s just not my style.

For me it's always just a case of trying to be a professional and coming away with at least one decent photograph.

So I did my bowing and scraping bit.  Steven Berkoff eventually came around and I got my shots.  When I left, we parted on good terms.

Barbara never said a word, not then or since.  Maybe she'd been rude to him before I got there and that was what he was on about?  She got her interview but seemed not to want to talk about what had taken place beforehand.  I still can't understand it.  I haven't seen her now for many years but if I do, I'll ask her exactly what happened and post it on here.

Maybe he was still in character for a part.  That might make sense.  Some actors do stay in character for weeks whilst they're preparing to play some roles.  It's the only explanation I can think of.

So if he looks a little sour in my photograph above, this is the reason.  I don't mind that.  He plays a lot of villains in films.  I didn't really want him looking too happy.

Poly Styrene, Bhaktivedanta Manor 1982.

Saturday, 30 April 2011 RIP Mari Elliott aka Poly Styrene.  This is a previously unseen photograph of her taken at Bhaktivedanta Manor in Hertfordshire. It was commissioned by The Face magazine.

It was the one the few times I ever met her but she always struck me as being warm, friendly and so full of life.  53 is just way, way too young.

Elizabeth Berkley, Santa Monica 1999.

Saturday, 30 April 2011 I photographed the star of the (much maligned) film Showgirls in the southernmost penthouse suite on the top floor of the Hotel Shangri-La in Santa Monica.

It was a favourite location of mine because the management of the hotel were relaxed about photography, there was a great view of the Pacific and almost 180 degrees of natural light in the bedroom. It was clearly a favourite of several other people too.  The denouement of ‘White Men Can’t Jump’ was filmed in the same suite and one the guys working in the hotel told me that Helmut Newton and Herb Ritts had both shot there.  So the photographic vibes were excellent.

Poly and Mark, Sacrosanct, London 1986.

Saturday, 30 April 2011 Another previously unseen photograph (detail) of Poly Styrene, shown here with Taboo doorman Mark Vaultier (also no longer with us, sadly), at Sacrosanct, Shaftesbury Avenue in 1986.

South Central, Los Angeles 1996.

Wednesday, 20 April 2011 Raymond Chandler said it was "a city with no more personality than a paper cup".  Clive James called it "paradise with a lobotomy".  Dorothy Parker famously called it "seventy two suburbs in search of a city" and Frank Lloyd Wright said that "if you tilted the whole country sideways, Los Angeles was the place where everything loose would fall".

It’s been the constant butt of generations of American comedians since the early years of the last century, when it was little more than village.  Film makers like Woody Allen and Mel Brooks snigger and make jokes about it, and even actors like Harrison Ford, that owe their whole livelihood to the place, deride it, refuse to live there and spend as little time in the city as possible.

I love LA.  I don't mean that in a sarcastic Randy Newman type way, I mean I genuinely love being there.  But one thing that I've never quite understood is why most Americans seem to hate LA so much?  You hardly ever hear an American ever say a good word about LA, whether or not they've ever actually been there.  Google will turn up an enormous number of examples of famous Americans being snarky about Los Angeles and they almost always seem to me to be cliches.

And not only Americans.  Every time I hear a British actor talking about living or working in Los Angeles, they always have something rude to say about the place.  It's almost always rude and almost always very ill-informed.

Mind you, not even the Los Angeles Tourist Board always gives a very good account of the place.  In the mid '90s, many years before Google was invented, I was commissioned to write and photograph a travel article about Los Angeles and I was determined to focus on the city's hidden gems - if I could find some.  I called up the Los Angeles Tourist Board and asked them whether, other than the Watts Tower, there was anything south of Wilshire Boulevard that could possibly be of any interest to a tourist?  I got a straight answer.  "No".

In that particular case, they were probably right.   Only an idiot would write an article advising tourists to go wandering round parts of South Central, Watts, Compton or the like, and I certainly didn't do so.  But there are definitely places of great interest for a music fan in those parts - the motel where Sam Cooke was shot, for instance - and for a lover of Americana, there are some wonderful, fifties style, car washes and bowling alleys.

And for a keen photographer, there is an awful lot of subject matter.

Over the last 24 years, I guesstimate that I've taken more photographs in Los Angeles than I have in any other city, even including London, the place I was born and have lived all my adult life.  I've been to Los Angeles close to a hundred times and every time I drive up  from the airport or over the hills coming from the North or East, I experience a frisson of excitement as I see the downtown skyscrapers through the haze in the distance.  And every time, I feel genuinely glad to be back.

I've loved LA almost from the first moment I got there.  I say "almost" because it wasn't quite that way the first time.  I first went there in '87 to shoot a bunch of West Coast rappers for Island Records.  They put me up in the Beverley Hilton.  Ronald Reagan was still President and despite owning a house in nearby Bel Air, he was staying in a room on the floor below me.  So there were secret service agents everywhere 24/7.  There was a police car on the roof of the building opposite, facing directly, or so it seemed, into my window.  Also, rather bizarrely, some of the hotel staff were wearing rubber Ronald Reagan masks, one assumed as some sort of wacky tribute. I wasn't able to go out for a walk, especially at night, without being trailed by cop cars or being stopped and asked where I thought I was going.  I've come to realise, this experience wasn't at all typical.

One reason why I think I love LA so much is that I'm from the first generation of ordinary kids who grew up with TV's in their homes.  And so much of that early commercial TV was filmed in and around LA.

77 Sunset Strip, Dennis The Menace, Bewitched, The Lucy Show, Perry Mason, The Beverley Hillbillies, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Monkees, Mr Ed.

There were many others and it's quite a long list.  It didn't matter that most of those shows were so studio bound that you'd only get a glimpse of a genuine, real life street once in every half a dozen episodes.  Something of the spirit of the place existed in those shows and it somehow entered my DNA.  To a kid growing up in a grey, dreary, postwar London, that still had bomb sites everywhere and the occasional coal age pea-souper, Los Angeles seemed incredibly exotic.

And in later years, as I grew older (and maybe stopped watching so much TV) it struck me that a lot of the people I most admired had either lived or created some of their best work in Los Angeles.

Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Tom Waits, Herb Ritts, Helmut Newton, Gary Winogrand, Charles Bukowski, James Ellroy, the aforementioned Raymond Chandler...

I won't go on but it's another very, very long list.

After 35 years (and counting) of taking photographs, as much as I've been able to deduce anything about my photography at all, I've worked out that what I'm inspired by more than anything else is (i) being able to evoke a specific sense of place and (ii) sunshine.

And that's why I love LA.

Spike Milligan, Bayswater London 1995.

Sunday, 3 April 2011 I photographed Spike Milligan in the Orme Court office which he’d shared for many years with Eric Sykes.

When we met, I said, not unnaturally, “Hi, how are you?” To which he replied: “Why do you want to know, are you a doctor?” This was a line he’d often used but, since he said it without a smile, one wasn’t completely sure whether it was designed to amuse or disarm. He certainly seemed more than a little prickly and, by his own estimation, he’d been “fucking mad” his whole life. In my photos he didn’t look particularly happy but, of course, his life-long manic depression was well documented.

Sometimes a photographer will have to tiptoe around a subject somewhat and that was certainly the case here. But one could cut a guy like Spike a fair amount of slack. He was a complete comic original and had changed the face of comedy in his time.

Apart from that, he was my father’s favourite comedian and that’s certainly good enough for me.

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.

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/

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.

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.