Eurythmics, Hampstead 1984.

Friday, 20 May 2011

As promised to a couple of Eurythmics fans, I’ve included another unpublished photograph of them here.

I think this was the third or fourth session I did with the band.

I always seemed to get along with them very well.  Mind you, they were very easy to get along with, without any airs or graces, even though, by this time (after ‘Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This’), they were big stars.

It was taken in what I fondly imagined was a hard-to-find location in Hampstead, North London.  I went there often.

In subsequent years, I’ve noticed quite a few films with scenes shot there so I don’t suppose it was half as secret as I thought.

Annie Lennox, Jerusalem 1987.

Tuesday, 10 May 2011 Eurythmics were intending to shoot scenes for a pop video in and around Jerusalem.  I was flown out to shoot some photos of Annie Lennox during down-time, for a solo side project.  This is an out-take from that shoot.

I went down one day to watch them filming in an area that I believe was called King Solomon’s Baths in nearby Bethlehem. Dave Stewart was there with Siobhan Fahey (of Bananrama) who was his girlfriend at the time.She had some part in the video, which required her to not wear very much – a sort of belly dancer’s skirt and top.  As we all know, in that part of the world - the birthplace of Jesus Christ - women normally cover up completely and Siobhan had attracted a huge crowd of young Arab youths who stared at her with a rather scary mixture of lust and hate. All this unpleasant attention really seemed to freak Siobhan out and, not unnaturally, she didn’t seem to want to do any filming. It seemed more than a little inappropriate and

I think the idea was canned. Either that or they went somewhere less crowded.

This photograph (detail), which was taken on the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem, was the last time I ever photographed Annie.

In the five years between this photograph and the previous one, Annie Lennox had gone from a virtual unknown to a huge world star.  I enjoyed every moment of the time I spent photographing her.  She was always warm, friendly and very unaffected by her success.

Eurythmics, Camden Town 1982.

Tuesday, 10 May 2011 I photographed Eurythmics quite a few times in the first seven years of their existence.

In the early '80s, whilst I still had a day job at an ad agency, I got a monthly commission from Cosmopolitan magazine to search out and photograph some upwardly mobile new bands.  I can't remember the exact circumstances but somehow I'd met Cynthia Rose, a writer at NME, and she had her ear much closer to the musical ground than I had.  She tipped me off about Eurythmics.  

I hadn't been too impressed by the Tourists but eventually I went to check out Eurythmics at an enthusiastic but sparsely attended gig at the Fridge in Brixton.  I was immediately won over.  I got their phone number from Cynthia, gave them ring and photographed them hanging around in a yard outside the studio they were working in, in Camden Town.

This photograph, or one very like it, duly appeared in Cosmo.

Miss Crash, Los Angeles 2011.

Monday, 9 May 2011 On Saturday evening in London I watched, for as long as I could bear, the American performance artist Miss Crash.  Her show involves sticking long needles through her face and torso and also suspending herself from hooks through the skin of her back and knees.  I hope I'm describing this correctly because, as I admit, I didn't watch the entire show.

Her website says "Though the mainstream public may not find her choices ideal for themselves..."  I would say that this was exactly correct. But she certainly seemed to go down a storm on Saturday at Torture Garden.

I don't pretend to know a thing about this activity.  Wikipedia suggests that body suspension goes back to the Native American Mandan tribe, for whom it was some kind of ritual.  I think it's fairly safe to say that body suspension was first brought to the attention of current generations by Fakir Musafar in the late 1970s (he's a man that I've also photographed) and it's now become associated with the current popularity of tattooing and body modification, that began in the early 1990s.

That said, it will be a long time before I decide to have a go.

The photograph above was taken at her home in Los Angeles in January of this year.

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.

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.

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.

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.