Helen Mirren, Los Angeles 1997.

Wednesday, 6 July 2011

Sometime in the early '90s, I was in LA with the journalist James Brown.  Again I found that I'd been booked to stay at the Riot House (mentioned in the previous entry).

One early evening I went into the bar to wait for James to come down from his room, so that we could go out and get dinner.  In those days the bar there was small and rather dreary.  There were only two other customers in the place.  A guy sat at the bar and Little Richard reading in one of the booths.  It sounds odd now but seeing Little Richard around the place in those days wasn't that unusual, since he lived there.  I didn't run up and ask for his autograph or anything, I just assumed he wanted to be left in peace.  

So I sat next to the guy at the bar.  He was quite a friendly, chatty bloke and, after asking me where I was from etc., he said to me in a low voice "Hey, you know who that is over there, it's Little Richard.  Why don't you go over and get his autograph?"

I said "I really don't think I want to bother him" but the guy was insistent.

"He really doesn't mind, he does it all the time" he said.

So, after being badgered a bit by this bloke, I did as he suggested.  I walked over and asked Little Richard for his autograph.  At which he pulled out some religious paperback, from a bag, signed it and gave it to me.  He seemed rather pleased to have been asked.  Apparently in those days, he always gave one of these little religious books away with every autograph. 

Just about this time, James turned up. 

I thanked the guy at the bar for his tip and me and James walked out.

When we got outside, as we were waiting for a cab James said to me "You know who that was a the bar don't you?"

"No" I said.

"That was Bobby Womack."

This isn't simply another excuse for my name dropping.  I mention this incident because it shows just how pleasant and humble some very famous people can turn out to be.  Bobby Womack for one.  He's almost as big an icon as Little Richard.  He never told me he was Bobby Womack. Or for a moment suggest I might want his autograph too.

God only knows what I did with that book.  I'm not really an autograph hunter.  I never have been.

I was searching for another photograph taken in and around the Riot House to illustrate this piece but couldn't find one.  So I've used a photograph of Helen Mirren, taken at the Chateau Marmont a few years later.

The Chateau Marmont is only a few blocks East down Sunset Boulevard but it's a far more upscale and discreet hotel than the Riot House.

Helen Mirren was tremendously good fun.

When she was asked if she’d mind if we photographed her in the shower, she didn’t bat an eye. Afterwards, she and I went for an ice cream at the Double Rainbow on Melrose.

The Beautiful South, Los Angeles 1990.

Thursday, 30 June 2011

When I look back at the time I spent as a rock photographer, it's shoots like this that sum up why it can often be such a lively and fun job.

It was a beautifully hot Los Angeles afternoon.  Paul Heaton and Dave Hemingway, from the band The Beautiful South were in the pool of a ritzy hotel.  I can't deny it, I was even in the pool myself.  And it certainly seemed like a good photo opportunity to me.

It's a wonderful pool.  It's right at the top of a very well known hotel on Sunset Boulevard and the views of West Hollywood and distant towers of Downtown Los Angeles are spectacular.

This particular pool is quite well known and it’s at the top of the the hotel forever known in the rock pantheon as the 'Riot House.'

For those that don't know, the Continental Hyatt House (or slightly more recently The Hyatt On Sunset) was the hotel most synonymous with the over the top, rock star antics of the '70s and '80s.

At their peak Led Zeppelin would rent as many as six floors there and John Bonham apparently rode a motorcycle along it’s corridors.  In 'Cocksucker Blues', the unreleased documentary about the Rolling Stones made by the legendary photographer Robert Frank, Keith Richards is seen chucking a TV off a balcony there.  The Who often stayed at the Riot House during the days when Keith Moon was at his most outrageous.  It's reported that he also threw TV's from the balconies there but, for him, that would have just been for starters.

And the hilarious end of tour party scene in Spinal Tap was filmed around the very same pool.

I suppose The Beautiful South would be about as different to Led Zeppelin or The Who as it would be possible to be and still be in the same business.  Whilst I'm sure they must have had their moments of youthful excess, for the short time I spent with them on tour in California, they were about as quiet, friendly and polite as it would be possible to imagine a rock band to be.

Me and the journalist, Stuart Maconie had met up with them a few days previously in San Francisco.  There we had all been booked into the two story Phoenix Motel which, for some unfathomable reason, all the rock bands of that era also liked to stay in.  Maybe, like the Riot House in LA, it was because the staff were similarly unconcerned by all the bacchanalia?   Or maybe it was because the TV’s had less of a distance to fall?

Whatever the reason, the Phoenix was certainly in a very rough neighbourhood, cheek by jowl with the notorious Tenderloin district.  I suppose airborne TVs were the least of the area’s problems.

On our first evening there, we went out with the band and some members of their road crew and managed to get into a fight.

Or at least "fight" is the way the incident is remembered in Stuart Maconie's otherwise wonderful book 'Cider With Roadies.'

It's not quite the way I remember it.  There were about eight or nine of us and we walked into what Stuart says was a Mexican bar called Spartacus.  I was the first one through the door and even before I'd got up to the bar, for reasons best known to himself, a real tough looking character took a swing at me.  I tried to duck and he only caught me a glancing blow on the shoulder.

Call me old fashioned but I always do my best to avoid getting into bar fights, whatever the perceived justification might be.  All the more so in countries where the police and a sizeable proportion of the citizenry own guns.  In his book Stuart claims that a fight ensued and that pool cues were involved.  I certainly didn't see any.  The Beautiful South were just not the fighting with pool cues types.  Not at all.  All I remember is getting punched once and there was a bit of shouting.  After which we all rapidly exited the bar.   We were then chased a short distance up the street.

So we simply walked around the corner and found a different, slightly more friendly bar to have a drink in.

Does this story make me and the band out to be a bunch of wimps?  I suppose so.  It's not half as rock n' roll as Stuart's version.  But if I'd ended up in hospital or in jail I'd never have had the chance, a few days later, to shoot the Beautiful South in the Riot House pool.  A photograph which later graced the cover of the NME.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cider-Roadies-School-without-Growing/dp/0091891159

Van with no wheels, Feltham 1981.

Wednesday, 22 June 2011

This may look like a van with no wheels but to me it was an epiphany.

I was prostrate, stripped to a pair of shorts in a corner of the car park of Feltham Swimming Baths at the time, so it was an odd position to be seeing the light from.  But it was at just about that moment, whilst I was taking that photograph, that I came to realise that I didn't really want to be doing that sort of thing anymore. 

By "that sort of thing", I mean advertising photography.  At that moment, I realised that, other than financially, it was never going to amount to a particularly sensible career aspiration for me.

It was in August 1981 and it was only a few months after I'd left work at the London advertising agency Royds, where I'd spent the previous three years working as an art director.

Though I say "left" that word isn't exactly right.  I was fired for reasons which, even now, I'm not completely sure about.  But it wasn't the first time I'd been fired from an advertising agency, far from it.  In those days, employers never needed much of a reason.  Especially in the rather cut-throat advertising business.

Thinking back, it might have been because I'd elected not to work on the apartheid era South African Airways account.  I don't honestly know.  I'd worked on quite a lot of successful accounts at Royds and I thought I'd done very well.  But refusing to work on the South African Airways account may have upset the ultra-Conservative (with a cap C) chairman.  I thought I had a choice but maybe I really didn't.

A few weeks later they just said "we're going to have to let you go" and that was it.

I really enjoyed working as an ad agency art director.  At times, it really was a bit like the TV show Mad Men.  But with a lot more emphasis on the mad.

In the context of 2011, some of the habits and working processes of ad men of the time would seem totally certifiable.  Even then we realised much of what we were getting away with was a little excessive.   Hugely enjoyable but certainly excessive. (I hope to tell more stories from my time in the ad world on here).

But, after ten years, a little voice in my head suggested that maybe I'd be better off out of the ad world.  And besides, if you're in the creative department and you're not at, or near, the top by the time you're 30, you're rapidly reaching your sell-by date anyway.

But my sacking came at a perfect time in my fledgling photography career.  I'd just had my second one man show ('Skinheads' in the Autumn of 1980) and I was getting my work into print fairly regularly.  Plus many of my advertising friends said that they'd give me some photography work, if I decided to try to make a career out of it.

And so, a few months after I left Royds, one of my old colleagues called me in and asked me to take a photo of a van with no wheels.  They showed me a few layouts and said it could be any van, just as long as it had no wheels.  They didn't want anything much in the background either.  That was all.  It seemed simple enough.

So that's how I came to be laying down, half naked, in the grit and grime of Feltham Swimming Baths car park.  It was the only place I could find near where I lived that would allow me to take a photo of the van without too many buildings or trees in the background.

It seemed like relatively easy money, so I hired a van and four car stands and set about the task.

Anyone who'd been watching me that day whilst I did that shoot would have seen someone drive in and park a rental van in the emptiest corner of the car park.  Then they'd have seen them jack up and remove all four wheels, remove most their clothes, (it was an extremely hot, humid day) and then go and lie down on the ground about 40 feet away take a few photographs of the wheelless van.  Then then they'd have seen that person put the wheels back on, get dressed and drive off....

Anyone watching might have thought it seemed crazy.

As I was laying there sweating, with car park grit sticking to my chest, elbows and legs, it started to dawn on me that maybe I didn't want to be an advertising photographer after all.

I didn't have an assistant in those days (it would be nearly a decade before I had one) and it simply didn't occur to me how much stress and bother I would have saved if I'd simply hired an assistant for the day.  That is what photographic assistants are for, after all, to do the hard stuff, so you don't have to.

But this was the moment I decided that that kind of photography work just wasn't for me.

The guys at the agency seemed pleased and the ad itself turned out surprisingly well.  But it wasn't the kind of photograph anyone dreams of taking and if it wasn't for this blog, this photograph would have been forgotten by all concerned three decades ago.

Tom Waits, Paris 1992.

Thursday, 9 June 2011

This photograph looks for all the world like I came across Tom Waits lounging about the jazz quarter of Marseilles or New Orleans. In fact it was taken among the cloisters in the grounds of a rather upscale hotel in Paris.

Tom Waits is quite obviously a very sharp and perceptive bloke, but his manner and boho demeanour might, if you didn’t know his work, lead you to think the opposite.  I always smile when I think of the time a very young Ian Hislop made the mistake of trying to make fun of him on British TV.  Ian Hislop certainly got what he deserved that day because Tom Waits gave him a terrible verbal going over. Now that Ian Hislop is a big TV star himself, I’m rather surprised they don’t show that clip more in the before-they-were-famous shows. Maybe Ian Hislop's had it destroyed?

Apparently Charles Bukowski once said of Tom Waits that "the guy doesn't have an original bone in his body."  Coming from someone who owed quite a bit to John Fante, I don't think this is entirely fair.  Plus it’s not quite the point.  Tom Waits may never have really lived the life quite like Bukowski did but they both wrote equally brilliantly about a certain milieu.  One that I suspect is far better to hear or read about than actually live within.

Ayrton Senna, Brands Hatch 1986.

Thursday, 9 June 2011

To coincide with the recent feature film about the great man, here is a previously unseen photograph of a very young looking Ayrton Senna, taken during a practise day for the British Grand Prix in 1986.

There is another entry about him here -

http://www.derekridgers.com/homepage/Blog/Entries/2010/5/3_Ayrton_Senna%2C_Silverstone_1987..html

Siouxsie Sioux, The Roxy, London 1977.

Friday, 27 May 2011

This previously unseen photograph was taken in January 1977, at London’s first punk club - The Roxy in Covent Garden.  It was whilst Pete Fenton was still the guitarist in the Banshees.

At Taboo, Leicester Square 1986.

Saturday, 21 May 2011

Following on from my posting yesterday, I think I should explain how I came to be in Xenon nightclub that night.

I'd been working for about a year for the Sunday Telegraph. Being way right of centre, the Telegraph had never been a paper I'd read but the people working there were nice and I enjoyed the opportunity it afforded me to shoot portraits of people other than rock stars and actors. Unfortunately, whenever they commissioned me to shoot photographs other than portraits, they almost always had a very fixed, preconceived idea about what they wanted. Irrespective of whatever I may or may not have found when I arrived to that the photos, they always wanted them to precisely illustrate a particular point. And very often the story had already been written.

George Harrison and Madonna, Kensington 1986.

Friday, 20 May 2011

Recently the actor Hugh Grant has been on the radio and TV speaking in support of High Court 'super' injunctions and moaning about how the British tabloids have tried to “steal the privacy” of famous celebrities like himself.

If he'd decided to do whatever he did that time with Divine Brown in private, instead of in a car parked just off Sunset Boulevard, maybe he'd have a point.

I do happen to think the British tabloids are far too intrusive but, most famously in the case of the late Princess of Wales, there is often a element of covert collusion.

And sometimes it's hard to know exactly what celebrities do really want.

In 1987 I got commissioned by The Sunday Telegraph to take photographs of young people having fun in various London nightclubs.  I walked into Xenon nightclub in Piccadilly (which was a notorious celeb hangout) with a camera over my shoulder and almost as soon as got through the door a guy came running over.  He said he was with "Frida from Abba", he was her manager and she was having a quiet night out with friends.  "Under no circumstances", he told me, should I take her photograph.  He said I should make sure that she wasn't even in the background of any of my photos.

I told him I wasn't a member of the paparazzi and I promised him that he need not worry.  I said I wouldn't come anywhere near either of them.

This seemed to satisfy him but about ten minutes later he came over to me again.  This time he told me that he'd had a word with Frida and that, if I was really quick, she'd consent to having her photograph taken.  "But just the one mind."   I thanked him and again tried to explain that it wasn't the type of photograph I was after anyway and, if he didn't mind, I'd really rather not.  On hearing this he offered to buy me a drink if I came over and took a few photos of her.  I still declined.

I left the club soon after that to avoid being further bothered by the fellow.

I honestly have no idea if it really was Frida or whether the guy really was her manager.  Xenon was an awful nightclub.  I think it was the only time I ever went there.

But it does rather remind one of Oscar Wilde's maxim that "the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about" - in this case, extrapolating the notion to photography.

I've never been a member of the paparazzi myself but I've known a couple (including Nick Elgar, the grandson of Edward) and they always struck me as decent, hardworking guys just trying to make a crust.  But standing outside in the cold waiting to photograph someone who may or may not want to be photographed never really appealed to me much.

The photograph above is from one of the few times I came closest to acting like a paparazzi.  It's from a photo call in 1986 for the film Shanghai Surprise and it took place in the famous Roof Garden club above Barkers in Kensington.  Afterwards, I ran after Madonna's car as she left and took a few more photos. Trying to avoid being pushed over or attacked by her security guards, which only a few minutes before had been helping me, was a strange but oddly exhilarating experience.  But not one I ever wanted to repeat.

The above photograph isn't very good, I know.  All the rest were even worse.  Maybe it's just as well I never became a member of the paparazzi.  I'm just not an in-your-face type photographer.  I'm sure I'd have been no good at it.

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.