Kylie Minogue, Chalk Farm 1994.

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.

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.

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.

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.