Roman Candle Magazine

An Interview with John Lurie

Whilst most humanoids struggle to master even one useful skill in life, John Lurie is one of those adept rapscallions who can seemingly turn their hand to pretty much anything — from acting to angling.

This knack has led to a fairly stacked C.V. which involves such notable achievements as forming a rule-flouting jazz band called The Lounge Lizards, appearing in films like Down by Law, Paris, Texas and Wild at Heart and showing his paintings in exhibitions all over the planet.

And if all that wasn’t enough, he’s also hosted his own fishing show, and, with the help of Dennis Hopper, once came particularly close to snagging the elusive giant squid.

Here’s what he had to say about fishing, New York in the ‘70s and the importance of humour in the world…

First question… your television programme Fishing with John is mint. How did that come about?

I was threatening to do it for a long time, but wasn’t really serious. I would go fishing with Willem and we would video tape it. I flew out one New Year’s Eve to play with Tom Waits and the next day we went and fished with Stephen Torton video taping it.

This woman, Debra Brown, saw the tapes, home movies actually, and brought them to a Japanese company that was looking to get involved in things in New York.

She came back to me and said they wanted to make a pilot. I believe my response was, “Are you kidding?”

When you watch a film or television program, you only see the end result. What was it like filming that thing? Were there any mad struggles?

If you see something good, you can just assume there were mad struggles. If you see something bad, you can assume that people were too lazy to take on the mad struggles.

If I am flicking through the channels looking for a movie, I can tell you in five seconds if a movie is going to be any good by the sound of the door closing or the light or the music or whatever.

Why do you think people love fishing so much?

First off, so we can go to these beautiful places and pretend to be doing something. We wouldn’t go if there were nothing to do. And there is that visceral thing. A big fish on the line is like that exhilarating sports thing, like hitting a baseball perfectly or shooting a basket and the net just goes swish.

And then there is that thing of the world of mystery, right next to the world we are living in. What is in there? We are only going to be aware of what is there with a hook and a nylon string.

So of course we have to drag this amazing creature out of the water and kill it because human beings are pretty much ridiculous. The last bit is not why we love fishing, it’s just an observation.

I’d say it’s a pretty sharp observation. Did you ever face anger from the fishing community due to the lack of more conventional fishing?

Yes.

Why isn’t more television like Fishing with John? I hear we’re supposedly in the age of ‘peak TV’ or whatever, but why is there so much boring stuff out there?

The great thing about this, and a big shout out to Kenji Okabe from Telecom Japan, was they left me alone. I am fairly certain that the reason Breaking Bad was so great was because they left Vince Gilligan alone.

With most projects there are all these people meddling with what you do, to ruin it. The Gatekeepers. It is almost like there is a conspiracy to maintain mediocrity.

Going back a bit now, am I right in saying you’re from Minneapolis originally. What were you into as a child?

At first, dinosaurs and archeology. Then reptiles, particularly snakes after we moved to New Orleans. I was going to open my own snake farm. Then I was pretty sure one day, I would play center field for the Yankees.

An attainable dream. You moved to New York in the late 70s, and not long after, you started The Lounge Lizards. It seems like New York at that time is glamourized a bit now, but what was it like for you? What food did you eat? Where did you go at night? What streets were good to walk down? What did it smell like?

I was trying to remember the food I ate back then and couldn’t remember. I was pretty broke most of the time. They used to serve hors d’oevres at gallery openings and cheese became a large part of my regular diet.

Almost every night, or maybe not even “almost” — more like every night — we went to the Mudd Club. More than what streets were “good” to walk down, I can tell you which streets were bad to go down. I lived on East Third St across from the Men’s Shelter, so my block smelled of rotting garbage and urine.

What are some bits that people don’t talk about from that time? What sucked about back then?

It went fairly quickly from people having more relentless fun than any period in human history to a fairly grim time, a year or two later. There was the beginning of AIDs. I had many friends who were dying or horrifyingly sick. People were getting strung out. There were many deaths. Car accidents. People fell out of windows.

Also, with the artistic promise that was there, the output is disappointing. I suppose the wildness led to a lack of discipline and the work wasn’t nearly as good as it should have been.

I might be wrong, but it seems like at that time people just did what they felt like doing… people made films, music or anything else, with no regard for budget. I suppose for example, you made a film called Men in Orbit in your apartment for $500. Where did this freedom come from?

The freedom came from a ferocious demand to have that freedom at any cost. But it is odd or sad, because the more talented of those people seem to have gone unknown and the people who are now household names are, mostly, the ones who played the game by the rules from the beginning.

Do you think people nowadays get too hung up on money? Or perhaps too hung up on success?

I think people nowadays for the most part are quite lost and afraid. So they do whatever they think they must do to have a successful career, even if it means that they are making shit — and it usually does mean they are making shit.

The Lounge Lizard’s album, Voice of Chunk is an amazing record. What sort of stuff were you listening to when you made that? And who is Bob the Bob?

The listening came from earlier in my life. Evan and I would devour everything. From Stravinsky to Monk to Little Walter to Coltrane to Tibetan music to Ellington to Dolphy to Pigmy music (you get the idea).

Later, when working on my own stuff, I stopped listening to pretty much everything. Though when I was in Morocco doing Last Temptation, I played a lot with Gnawa musicians that shifted me a bit. And around that time Evan discovered Piazzolla.

Bob the Bob is Kazu from Blonde Redhead. That is her mouth on the cover of the record. I still call her Bob.

You’re a prolific painter. Are there certain things that you notice recurring in your paintings?

I live on a small Caribbean island. There are flowers everywhere. I don’t like to think that they influence what I paint but they do. Fucking flowers.

A lot of people paint when they’re young, then stop. Why do you think that is? How come you didn’t stop?

The best paintings I have seen in the last 30 years or so are the ones taped to refrigerators. I don’t know why people stop painting or when they don’t stop, why the painting gets so stiff.

I am sure my mother, who painted herself and taught art in Liverpool where the Beatles went, but not at the same time, had something to do with me keeping a freedom in my work. To not be afraid of that childlike dream thing.

Though it has been suggested that it may be time for me to get in touch with my “inner adult.”

How do you know when a painting is finished?

I ask Nesrin. If she says it is finished, I know it isn’t.

You seem like a pretty funny guy. Do you think humour is sometimes underrated? Do people take stuff too seriously sometime?

I think humor is immensely important. I think humor can shift society’s consciousness in a better way than almost anything else. So from Shakespeare to Mark Twain to Lenny Bruce to Richard Pryor and many more – these people shifted things for the better.

Do you know who was president when Mark Twain was at his peak? Benjamin Harrison. Who the fuck was Benjamin Harrison?

What are your thoughts on the internet? It seems like it’s a big thing these days.

I get so disappointed with people because I feel like social media could be an enormously positive thing for the world. And I certainly don’t mean to exclude humor, just I have heard enough fart jokes for one lifetime…

Something that bothers me quite a bit, is a star athlete gets hurt and then the response on places like twitter is close to joy. What kind of bitterness about your own life would make you behave like that?

You’ve just recently released a new Marvin Pontiac album after 17 years. This one is called The Asylum Tapes, and was reportedly made on a four track recorder in a mental institution. Back story aside, what made you want to make an album again?

I have Advanced Lyme, so I was unable to play anything for a long time. Actually because of what was happening to me neurologically, I couldn’t even hear music for the first few years — it was more like fingernails on a blackboard.

As I slowly got better, I was able to play guitar and harmonica again, though playing saxophone would seem to be done for me in this life.

But I am very proud of this album and hope people get a chance to hear it. I made it to cheer people up.

Are people still confused about who Marvin Pontiac is?

I suppose so. He is a character I created to make this music. I suppose that is bad marketing, but fuck it.

Would the album be different if it was a John Lurie album? Do you feel like you can get away with more stuff as Marvin Pontiac? Or maybe what I mean is, is it easier to say some things as Marvin Pontiac?

Yes, absolutely. Marvin gives me a certain freedom. I doubt I would put out a record where I sing about a bear saying, “Smell my sandwich.” But I’m happy that I get a chance to do that.

The lyrics are pretty straight up and direct. Do you sit and stew on songs and ideas for long, or do you just get it out?

Often they just come straight up. Like ‘My Bear To Cross’ I pretty much just came up with it live in the studio. Some took quite a while. And there are a couple where I never found the right lyrics to finish off a song and put them aside.

Okay, last question… do you think a lot of stuff is too over-thought and over-prepared? Does thinking sometimes get in the way?

Let me think about that.
An Interview with Peter Saville

Peter Saville doesn’t need much of an introduction. Not only was he the man responsible for what might be called the ‘visual language’ of Factory Records, designing record covers for the likes of Joy Division, New Order and A Certain Ratio, but he’s also produced powerful imagery for David Byrne, Suede, Pulp, George Michael and countless other icons of audio.

And, if all that wasn’t enough, he came up with that dynamic logo that’s on the side of those yellow trams that roll through Piccadilly Gardens every few minutes.

I called him up to talk about his work today, Manchester in the 70s and his idea of ‘the interzone’.

Are you busy at the moment, have you got a lot on?

Yes, even when I think I’m not busy, things just seem to come up. As you get older you tend to think things will change, but actually, they don’t change at all. Anyway, it’s better to have something to do than nothing, so I’m not going to complain.

What have you been up to lately?

The highest profile project over the last 12 months has been Calvin Klein — the redesign of the Calvin Klein identity for Raf Simons.

What does that involve then? What would you call that? Is it ‘branding’?

I try to avoid the term ‘branding’. It’s a useful word to understand the context of the work, but it’s not a process that I wish to perform. It’s a strange hybrid between design, advertising and PR. It’s almost entirely commercial, and therefore, it’s not something I want to be involved with.

So you’re not getting bogged down with the commercial stuff?

The capturing of markets and controlling of markets is not something that I wish to be associated with. My work, and any reputation I have, is based on giving something to people, not leading them to a market.

The Factory Records covers were not about making people buy the records. They didn’t even try to make people buy the record. They existed independently to the music, and therefore people’s relationships with them were quite different. The people who liked the covers or became interested in the covers saw them as possessions – they learnt through them, things they maybe didn’t know before.

Was that the intention of those covers? To show people the things you were into?

That was my intention. I was learning and so, I was sharing. The nature of Factory Records was that I had complete autonomy to do that. There was no marketing and no one was trying trying to sell records. Factory was a situation that allowed a group of individuals to do what they wanted to do. If other people liked it and supported it, then fine.

That was what Factory was about. And it was the same with The Haçienda. It wasn’t run as a business, trying to take money off the kids of Manchester, it was a gift to the kids of Manchester.

Something separate from money and business?

Yes, you did it because you could. But you’ll know very well that in the contemporary market place, there are very few companies who are doing things just because they can. They do things to make money. That’s business.

For a period of time in my career, I needed to engage with business. I was not an up-and-coming young designer, nor was I a ‘statesman’ of popular culture — it was an in-between period – in the ‘90s I needed to have a relationship with business.

Everyone’s got to eat.

Yes exactly, you’ve got to make a living. I had this uneasy relationship with different sectors, but I didn’t find a comfort zone for myself.

So at the end of the 90s, I stopped looking. I did a retrospective book and a show, and I closed the studio. I didn’t want to go into fashion marketing or branding or retail. I didn’t really want to do that. So I just had to be on my own. Since the early 2000s, I’ve operated independently.

I suppose you’re maybe in a comfortable position where you can pick and choose a bit, thanks to all the things you’ve done in the past.

I’m fortunate that just enough people engage me with work and commissions that I can address on my terms.

When Raf Simons phoned and asked me to look at the issue of the Calvin Klein identity – I was able to identify with his position. He is not Calvin Klein — Calvin Klein is Calvin Klein, and Raf is someone else. So I had to say to myself, “If I was in Raf’s position, what would I do?” So I changed the original Calvin Klein lettering from upper and lower case to upper case – it became capitals. It’s evolved from the subjective to the objective, but it still looks like Calvin Klein.

When you’re asked to intervene in aspects of cultural history, it’s quite an honour. You feel a sense of responsibility in responding to the challenge.

To respect what’s gone before?

Exactly. So in certain situations, I’m really happy to do that. But when someone is approaching me with something that has absolutely no virtue other than profit, because I don’t have a company to carry, I don’t have to do it.

When I first started to learn about art and design history, I was frustrated. Going right back to the ‘70s in Manchester, I would sit in the library at what was then Manchester Polytechnic, looking at the history of art and design, and simultaneously looking out of the window at Oxford Road, and feeling an enormous disconnect, and a sense of frustration. I was angry.

Because you were so far away from the things you were reading about?

Yes, because the everyday world wasn’t the way it could be.

What was it like back then?

It was terrible. When I was 20, in 1975, buses, cinemas, bus stops, railway stations, department stores, taxis, packaging, signs, logos… they were appalling. There wasn’t any awareness of contemporary design — of how design led thinking could make things better. That frustrated and upset me. And I felt very strongly then, as I do know, that our everyday world can be better.

Now what ‘better’ is, is a kind of variable. We saw a lot of ‘design’ begin to get rolled out in the 80s and 90s, but then it got rolled out to the point of ad infinitum, and lost its significance.

Things merely only looking good is not necessarily better, and an awful lot of art and design has been co-opted to camouflage the intent of things. And that’s not better. Using our cultural heritage, our civilisation, to sell mobile phone minutes or cheap holidays or gratuitous fashion — using it as merely packaging for the unnecessary — isn’t good.

And a lot of that started to happen. Business, as ever, takes a lead from the avant-garde, and begins to copy it, but without values. I try to do things well, and to improve the look of things that have values. But if it’s something with no values, it’s kind of wrong to wrap it up as something important.

There’s a lot of that these days… a lot of things look pretty slick, but beyond the fancy shell, there’s not much to them.

The one thing that has upset me over the last 20 years is the way that the canon of culture has been used in ways that we no longer trust. 30 years ago if you did something better, it meant it was better… someone was trying to make a better pair of jeans or a better car. But now, it’s just a look.

I suppose it’s hard to put effort and thought into something you’ve got no belief in.

Exactly. As you grow up and get to understand the world better, you question things. Some of the things I used to take for granted when I was 25 or 30 — I now look at in a completely different way. Once upon a time I might have thought it was nice to do the identity for something like a bank. But who wants to work for a bank now? They’ve shown themselves to be utterly disreputable.

So the understanding of the work and the world and the people who approach is constantly changing. You have to try to hold on to your own values. My reputation, the fact that some people have some admiration for me, is because my work meant something to them.

But if you suddenly starting doing some naff work for a bank, it’d discount all that.

Exactly. I became more concerned with my own identity than in just being prepared to work for people who’d pay me money. And I’m quite happy being me, trying as much as I can to be genuine about the things I do. It’s not easy. We have to earn a living, so it’s not all spiritual… we have to engage with reality.

Going back to what you were saying about looking after Oxford Road and feeling distanced and frustrated. Was that what spurred you on to do those first designs for Factory?

In 1978, the year I graduated from college, I wasn’t being asked to do anything for the infrastructure of the country. But someone did ask me to do a poster. There were things happening – the whole post-punk scene and the notion of independence in music. All of the venues that Manchester had for punk and new wave bands were being closed for one reason or another, and on behalf of the youth culture of the city, Tony Wilson took it upon himself to organise a venue.

Factory was nothing more than what is referred to these days as ‘a night’. It was Friday night every two weeks for two months, and that was it. I knew he was doing this, so I went to see him and said, “Can I do something.” And he said, “Do a poster.”

In doing that poster, I tried to put a better poster, a more intelligent and more beautiful poster, on the walls of Manchester than the ones that were already there. And that led to Factory records where I was given the freedom to express my will and my wish for how things should be,

It was an autonomous situation; it was not a proper company and everybody what they did in the way they wanted to do it. Nobody had any former experience, no one told anyone else how they should do what they were doing, we all performed autonomously. It shouldn’t have worked, but it did.

Were you ever questioned or disputed at all?

Not really no. Famously, ‘Blue Monday’ went straight from me to the printers. No one saw it.

Did you listen to the music when you were designing the covers?

If I could, but very often that wasn’t possible. But the covers weren’t about the music, they were about the moment. But then the bands were making music about the moment too.

There was always accidental parallels. I was into the aesthetics of computer systems that people were talking about a lot in the 70s and 80s. I didn’t have a computer – it wasn’t a part of everyday life, but people talked about them in the way that people talk about artificial intelligence now. You haven’t met a robot, but you know they’re coming.

So in the late 70s and 80s, computers were on my mind, and I was thinking about the visual side of it. And at the same time, New Order were looking at the significance of computers in making music. So what I did on the cover of Blue Monday had a parallel to what they did. In fact, the floppy disk was the common factor between the two. The first time I saw a floppy disk was the day Stephen Morris gave me one, and that became the basis for the cover.

It wasn’t about the music; it was about music as part of our culture. We were interested in the now. They expressed it musically, I expressed it visually.

The significant word to mention in any kind of understanding of me is the word ‘interzone’.

What do you mean by that? What is the ‘interzone’?

The interzone is the space between design, art, fashion, music, movies, photography, architecture, interior… it’s what people talk about now as convergence. And that was what interested me, even as a teenager. I was interested in the leading edge of mass culture, and how the new ideas would define themselves in different ways.

The feeling of the now is the feeling of the now. Musicians express it one way, film-makers express it another way and photographers express it in yet another way – but it’s all the same spirit. We know that now.

It’s all the same thing.

It’s all the same thing. That was my view 40 years ago in college, it’s just that I happened to want make art, which I saw as record covers, so I went to study graphic design. But what I found there was a closed mind-set — graphic people were into graphics, and weren’t very aware of what fashion or music was doing. This notion of the interzone wasn’t really appreciated.

I was never particularly interested in graphics or typography, I was interested in how two dimensional culture could capture the mood of the moment — the feeling of the now. So I studied graphics, but I spent more time in the fashion department than the graphics department.

If you just started pasting posters up yourself, but they weren’t linked with music or an event, they would just be a bit of paper on a wall. They might be interesting, but they wouldn’t be tied in with anything.

If you just make work that is not applied to any situation, then it’s art. These days art is quite a credible thing to do, but in the mid-70s in the North of England, you were more likely to become an astronaut then be an artist.

The only art that I saw was on record covers, so I wanted to do record covers. The record cover was the only place where you could see freeform visual thinking.

So Malcolm Garrett and I both wanted to do that. In a way we both wanted to be artists, but we didn’t know anything about art. So what was important to me was this broader feeling of the now.

As someone who is so into ‘the now’, what are your thoughts on the nostalgia that surrounds Factory? Why do you think people look back at that stuff so fondly?

I think there’s nostalgia about things that seem to have values. People are seeking authenticity and meaning. So things that have authenticity and meaning never die, because they’re more than just surface.

People still talk about Coco Chanel because she changed the way women could be in the world. She didn’t found Chanel to make money, she found Chanel to express herself and what she cared about.

Companies exploit these values — they continuously harvest them like GM crops, to the point that the market and the audience become tired of it. But they’ll carry on wringing it out until there’s nothing left. It’s desperate and it’s tedious to see the way the world operates.

In regards to the nostalgia thing, do you think people often take the wrong things from history? Instead of being inspired by the free way you lot worked at Factory, people just rip off your graphics.

Yes, unfortunately the mass market can be rather superficial. They get the look more than the attitude. But it’s a long process of familiarisation. We are living in an era of the dissemination of privilege, it is really only in the last 50 to 100 years that ordinary people have actually been allowed to share in privilege.

Do you think the internet has had an effect on that?

It’s one step forward, one step back. The internet allows for the unfettered distribution of a message, and at the same time it allows for confusion and fake news. The problem with the internet is trying to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not.

Almost everything that we invent which is a benefit to society just becomes a problem sooner or later. The motorcar was brilliant – now it’s a problem. That’s just life.

Where do you see things going?

I don’t know. I don’t care anymore. Next month I’m 62. It is other people’s responsibility now. I don’t have any children, but if I did, I would be very concerned. I’m passing the baton of the ones coming up.

What would you say to them as you pass the proverbial baton?

Do things you believe in. There’s a constant battle between good and bad, but as least if you do things you believe in, you’re trying to keep it on the right side of good.

It’s very difficult for every new generation, as they face a new set of challenges that the generation before didn’t even dream of. I thought I had a lot of people to compete with in the 80s, but now there is a 1000 times more. It’s really difficult.

It’s not even easy to find somewhere to live, or to find a job of any kind. The safety net that I sensed as a young person in the UK in the 70s – how the state would stop you from falling – is not there anymore. I think it’s increasingly difficult for every next generation.

As far as you can, try to do what you believe in, because then you hold on to yourself. I don’t really have much money – I don’t own my home, but I’m happy with what I’ve done. I might regret some mistakes I made, but I don’t regret the work I made.

Interview originally published in 2018.
An Interview with Mark McNulty

Whilst the birth of modern-day club culture is much chatted about, very few people took the time to document it. Mark McNulty is a rare exception.

From the early days of warehouse raves to the age of the super-club, he candidly captured ‘going out’ at a level usually reserved for hard-hitting documentary photography.

Here’s an interview with him conducted on a Monday afternoon in the centre of Liverpool. I think it’s important to state here that club photography is only a small part of Mark’s repertoire — it’s just what we happened to talk about at the time.

Maybe an obvious first question, but when did you get into photography?

I don’t know if I’d taken pictures on someone else’s camera or something, but I just wanted a camera. And when I was 14, my mum and dad got me one. I think it was a Praktica — it was a really basic camera.

I can remember saying to my mum and dad that I wanted to be a photographer, but I can’t remember ever thinking too much about it as a career. When I had film, I’d take pictures. They were probably mostly rubbish.

But then there came a point where the stuff around me got more interesting. I started seeing bands and going to clubs. Before that I’d just take pictures of my nan.

A Guy Called Gerald – Liverpool

How did the club photography come about?

There was a club in Liverpool called The State, and that was the club I’d go to with my mates. We’d go on a Thursday night, and it was a penny to get in. They’d play things like The Smiths, but then they’d also play old 60s records and old Northern Soul records. It would play everything.

It was an old 1920s ballroom, with a tiled floor, and was actually the venue that Franky Goes to Hollywood played on their first appearance on The Tube. It was in that film Letter to Brezhnev too. And that club started playing a couple of those early house records.

Around that time, I’d started getting in with various musicians, and there was a man called Peter Coyle who was in a band called The Lotus Eaters. He put on night called 8 Orgasms where there’d be all kinds of mad shit.

There’d be arty bands, performance artists and a karaoke machine. And he brought in a DJ called John Maccready who’d play house records. And that was the first place that did dance music that I took pictures of.

8 Orgasms – Liverpool

At The State I’d take pictures of bands who were up on stage, but taking a camera out and photographing people dancing, before the rave scene, didn’t feel like the obvious thing to do.

When did things change?

I got asked by a Manchester magazine called Avant to go and photograph a club called Quadrant Park. It was in some sort of warehouse up in Bootle, and it was massive.

People had come from all over the North. I hated it, but I loved it. There was no dancefloor because the whole place was the dancefloor.

Quadrant Park – Liverpool

How did you go about taking pictures in there?

There was no benchmark, because I’d never really seen any pictures like that. That first night, I didn’t take a lot of photographs, I just got these mad crowd scenes of people with their hands in the air and people on speakers.

Before that, people were just going to nightclubs to cop-off — that old fashioned night club thing where the people would stand around the edges watching girls to move in on. But suddenly, everybody was dancing together and nobody was taking any notice of the oddball with the camera.

After that I started going to more and more clubs that started opening up in town.

When you’re going there were you going there to take pictures, or could you enjoy it like everyone else?

At first I was there to take pictures. I’m terrible at hearing in loud places as I can’t differentiate between sounds, so once I’d taken a few pictures in a club, that just made me want to do more. I can never talk to people in clubs because I can never hear them, so taking photographs was my way of dealing with being in places like that.

When I look back, I sometimes I haven’t got pictures of my favourite clubs. The ones I really enjoyed, I didn’t really take pictures at.

How did you get involved with the club magazines?

I just thought that what was going on around me was cool so I started to send in photographs to the magazines. These were the nationals like I-D, The Face, Mixmag and DJ Mag. They liked what I sent in from Liverpool, so they started to send me to places out of town and then further afield.

Suddenly everybody was dancing together and nobody was taking any notice of the oddball with the camera.

In 1992 I went off to Rimini to photograph a week of clubbing and, after getting a bit wobbly and running into a glass door, I came home with loads of boss photos (and a black eye), and they started to send me all over the place. So I did loads of trips to different places in the UK as well as documenting the scene in places like Ibiza, Tokyo, Detroit and Berlin.

Kaos – Leeds

How did ‘going out’ differ from city to city?

Well, the further north you go the madder it gets. That’s still a good general benchmark for going out around the country on a Saturday night, though I’d say regional differences are more subtle these days.

Glasgow and Newcastle were always insane, Leeds often felt better dressed than a lot of other northern cities and the spirit of the northern soul scene felt like it lived on in a club like Golden down in Stoke.

In Bristol the club scene was heavily influenced by the music the city was producing and that affected a lot of the clubs. I did actually spend a lot of time in Bristol clubs in the 90s and whilst clubs like the Thekla and some of the other smaller clubs really took influence from the music that was being produced, there were also the big house and rave clubs that every other city had.

Revolution – Bristol

There used to be a great night called Revolution at The Lakota which was a big name DJ house club with a great music policy and a well-dressed crowd who were up for it. But then once a month they’d run an all-nighter and loads of people used to come in from South Wales, and you really noticed the difference.

They didn’t get as many chances to party so they made the most of it and the whole thing just went up a level and suddenly Bristol didn’t seem so laid back as it usually was.

What were people wearing in the different cities? Were there regional outfits?

I think the main differences were in the different scenes within the bigger club scene. Everywhere had their full-on rave clubs which meant white gloves and glow sticks and then the cooler raves were more into the whole baggy look.

It was all about the practicalities of dancing for six hours, so things got looser with sportswear, or tighter with Lycra. Then as the club scene moved into the older clubs that had existed for years, some of them got a bit better dressed.

So in Manchester, somewhere like The Hacienda would be baggy, but somewhere like Most Excellent had a smarter crowd. So there were these clubs around the country opening that were maybe a bit more discerning than the initial raves — clubs like Back II Basics in Leeds, Smile in Liverpool and Venus in Nottingham. Smaller and a bit more perfectly formed if you like, but still very much big party places.

Rezerection – Edinburgh

You mentioned before about a mad night at a club called Rezerection in Edinburgh. What was going on there?

That place was insane. It was on the edge of Edinburgh in some sort of showground and it was a big fenced off marquee affair with no alcohol on site, and I’ve never seen such a deranged crowd in all my life.

It was mostly a young crowd — too young at times. It was all white gloves and whistles with random folk in fancy dress — like a fella dressed up in a wetsuit with an inflatable shark under his arm.

Rezerection – Edinburgh

Where else stood out?

Judgement Day in Newcastle, in a hard-core ravers kind of way, and likewise, Bowlers in Manchester or the Hard Dock in Liverpool — not for the feint hearted by any means.

But my favourite clubs were smaller, better dressed and with a better music policy. I’d say one that got it all right was Back II Basics up in Leeds, though I’d say my favourite club of all time, in the UK anyway, was Voodoo in Liverpool.

This was at the time of the super-clubs, when Liverpool had Cream, one of the most important clubs of all time. And whilst I loved how Cream was putting Liverpool back on the map, in popular culture terms anyway, there was nothing better than finishing a shoot at Cream and then heading around the corner to Voodoo.

Voodoo – Liverpool

It was as much of a family vibe as you could get out of a techno club, ran by an amazing couple called Sam and Claire with incredible residents, ace guests and an understanding management. It was the complete opposite to what was going on at the time with the emergence of clubs as brands. There’s nothing wrong with the big clubs, and it’s great to be lost in a big crowd with a camera, but I always preferred the smaller affairs.

How did you go about actually taking the photos? Were you tactical with how you shot the clubs?

It was all about finding the right place. Using the flash, you didn’t just want to photograph someone against a wall, because it didn’t look very interesting. You had to be in the middle to get all the flashing lights and everything.

The people at the edge are usually just standing around, so you had to get involved. If you just walk into somewhere with a camera bag, people are going to notice you, but if you’re somewhere for a while, you can be part of it.

Later on in the early 90s there was a point when things got very much about stopping people and asking to take their photograph, and asking them what clothes they had on. They had a thing in MixMag where they’d be some question of the month, and I thought that was shit – I didn’t like doing that. At the time, I wanted to document things, I wanted to be a fly on the wall – I didn’t want to stop people.

Yeah, as soon as you ask someone to pose, you lose that candid thing. What sort of cameras were you using?

Most of the time it was a 35mm Nikon with some pretty cheap lenses. We’d use these flashes called Vivitar 283s which had three zones you could set depending on the distance you wanted to shoot.

A bit later, I started taking photos on a twin-lens medium format cameras with slide film and an off-camera flash.

At the time it seemed easy, as it was all I knew, but I’ve been back to nightclubs in recent years, and I just think, how did I do this?

Herbal Tea Party – Manchester

How long would you be there? Would you take photos all night?

It gets to the point where it gets too messy.

Was that a conscious decision – to show people in a decent light?

I wanted to show it for how it was, which is why I got fed up with it when it became people posing and wanting their picture taken in nightclubs. I wanted it to be real. I wasn’t trying to make anyone look great – but they were great. And also, I didn’t want to make people look horrible.

I like that whole thing of people being stars for the night. What I didn’t like was that cult of the DJ. You’d start going to nights, and everybody would be facing the DJ, but earlier on, it never felt like that. People were dancing everywhere you looked — everybody was the star for the night.

Heavenly Social – Nottingham

Were there other photographers around back then?

In the mid-90s there was suddenly a lot, but before then, I don’t remember anyone else doing it in Liverpool. I mean places like Erics were documented by Francesco Mellina and you had Tom Wood, shooting his Looking for Love photographs at the Chelsea Reach, but not so much on the rave scene.

Everything is constantly documented now. The late 80s and early 90s are probably the last period of time before everything was documented.

Every now and again an old photographer will find their pictures from 40 years ago, and everyone will be like, “Wow, look at these old pictures!” But I don’t think that will happen in the future. There’s just so much imagery of everything.

G-Love – Liverpool

I wonder with the states that people get in now, what it’s like with phones. Do people get up the next day to loads of photos of them from the night before? I do think sometimes, if there was camera phones in the 90s, would people have been more reserved?

Haha, good point. When did you stop photographing clubs?

When I got bored. And I guess I got bored when people started stopping me to ask for a photo. When they started to become conscious of the fact that they could appear in Mixmag and be famous for five minutes and it became more about that than being caught in the moment.

Cream – Liverpool

I also got older and moved away from the scene and my own music interests changed, so I moved on and I photographed different scenes.

At the time you were going out a lot shooting photos, did you think people would look back on it, or were you just doing it?

I don’t think at the age of 20 you ever think that you’re documenting stuff from the future. Those times were pretty amazing, and everything was new. It was something which had never happened before. Now we can look back and say that.

Universe – Bath

What are your thoughts on the nostalgia that surrounds that era?

Good luck to them, but it’s not for me. It’s weird really as the whole dance thing has never stopped, so it’s odd that people are doing all this revival thing for something that’s never needed to be rediscovered, because it never really went away.

Quadrant Park – Liverpool

You’re still very busy with photography stuff now, what are you up to at the moment?

Photographing and filming with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, doing commercial work with all kinds of organisations and documenting arts festivals and music festivals in all kinds of places. So I’m still documenting music and the scenes around it, it’s just a little bit more polite and with better hours.

Sounds good. As someone who’s worked doing photography for a while now, have you got any wise words you’d like to add here?

Well, if it’s music photography we’re talking about, don’t hang about with shit bands. Although these days with digital cameras, I’d say just photograph absolutely everybody.

With film, I used to have to choose what bands to shoot. Looking back on the first musical festival I shot in Liverpool, I just photographed the bands I thought sounded alright. I photographed The La’s, but I didn’t bother with The Stone Roses or Pulp. But now, there’s no excuse.

See more of Mark’s photos here. Interview originally published in 2018.
An Interview with Rack Lo

Ralph Lauren has always been a master of appropriation — from hunting jackets to polo shirts, the great man’s finest designs are heavily indebted to the world of functional clobber. But what happens when the appropriator is… er… appropriated?

In the late 80s, at a time when Ralph’s American dream was aimed squarely at the minted elite, a crew of working-class kids from New York known as the Lo Lifes took to nabbing his most audacious creations from the racks as a way to stand out on the streets of Brooklyn.

And whilst most would look daft in head-to-toe Polo ski attire, this lot managed to pull it off, helping to take hip-hop style beyond fat laces and leather tracksuits.

Rack Lo was one of the original Lo Lifes, and is still heavily involved today, running his own brand dedicated to Polo-inspired paraphernalia, and helping to organise the various Lo Life gatherings that take place throughout the year.

I sent him a barrage of questions via trans-Atlantic e-mail, and thankfully, he replied…

Do you remember being into clothes as a kid?

Oh man, I remember well. As a kid, my brother was more into materialism and brand names, and I was satisfied with whatever my mother and father were able to provide for me, but as I got older things changed and I became very materialistic.

Growing up I remember wearing Lee jeans, Pro Keds and Converse. Back then it was more about your style as oppose to what brand you was wearing — people cherished the look more than the name.

Growing up in Brooklyn in the 80s, how important was it to wear the right stuff?

It was very important because what you wore told a story in itself — what you wore pretty much separated you from the others. For instance, if you didn’t have street respect or a reputation, there were some things you just couldn’t wear, and it would be very dangerous to do so.

So in Brooklyn before you wanted to get fly and fresh, you had to know how to fight and defend yourself. If you didn’t have a reputation for defending yourself, you became what we called ‘The Herb’, and people would take advantage of you anytime you were seen.

In Brooklyn getting fresh was a part of the street life for many of the street legends.

When did the Lo Life Crew start? When did it go from being a few people wearing Polo stuff, to a full crew?

It started in 1988. The crew got bigger and gained more members once I decided to unite both parties, Marcus Garvey Village and St Johns. Then some time later, the late, great Boostin Billy started a chapter in Philadelphia, and it started to pick up from there.

Why Polo? What was the appeal of this stuff?

Polo just stood out the most. For some reason we were just attracted to it. First, it had amazing color ways and wasn’t prevalent in the United States ghettos. Polo wasn’t designed for poor urban kids; it was made for the upper class, waspy and collegiate kids. So when we started wearing we took it to a whole different level.

The Lo Lifes made Polo popular in the ghetto. We took what Ralph Lauren designed and created new looks and styles based around our concept of ‘Lo Down’. Lo Down is a term used when a person is wearing Polo Ralph Lauren from head to toe.

I was going to ask you about that. Could someone ever go too far and wear too much Polo stuff?

Many of the times we dressed in what we called ‘layers’ — layers of nothing but the finest Ralph Lauren Polo on the market. From head to toe all of our clothing was Polo Ralph Lauren. This particular dress code shocked a lot of people, and even Ralph Lauren was amazed.

For us it was never about just having Polo, but more about how you wore and coordinated the Polo — that is what made you special.

Do you remember the first Polo item you got?

The first Polo item I remember shoplifting was the Anniversary Cross Flags Sweater in 1987. An OG named Mike-Lo (cousin of Friz-Lo) had taken us to Riverside Square Mall out in Bergen County, New Jersey. We had taken the sweaters from a major department named Saks Fifth Avenue.

What was New York like in the late 80s and early 90s? What was a normal day like back then?

New York was very violent and filled with a lot of criminals from all communities. At any time you could have lost your life for the pettiest things — people just didn’t see the value in life back in those times.

A normal day for me was doing crime, and by me engaging in criminal activities I was able to sustain who I was and my lavish lifestyle.

I suppose it’s probably pointless talking about the Lo Life Crew without talking about boosting or racking. Wearing all that bright gear, you lot were hardly inconspicuous – so what were your tactics for getting your hands on Polo gear?

Our first tactic was called ‘geeing’ or ‘city slicking’. Using this strategy was more of a calm approach. Even though we wore bright colors, we were still clever in the stores.

Then I coined the term ‘million man rush’ as I helped usher in our newest strategy called ‘steaming’. This is where we just entered the store with a mob of like 50 heads and would just snatch what we wanted and headed to the door. I would say the ‘Million Man Rush’ tactic was the more dangerous. And further that act brought you a heavier jail/prison sentence if you were apprehended.

Did you ever get caught?

Yes, I have been caught on many occasions. As a result I was locked up in juvenile detention and I was an inmate on the infamous ‘Riker’s Island’. But in my case I was still fortunate because I never spent time in prison — only in city jails for very short time periods. The longest I spent incarcerated was four months.

The whole thing of nabbing and wearing aspirational clothing wasn’t too different to what casuals were doing in England and the Paninaro were doing in Italy around a similar time. Were you aware of any of those subcultures?

No, I never heard of those, sounds interesting out in England though. Dope!

Why do you think people gravitate to this high-class functional stuff? A lot of people wear hunting jackets or skiing coats, but they’ll never go hunting or skiing.

That’s just how the ghetto operates. Although the clothes were made for those occasions and atmospheres we simply turned those wears into hood fashion artefacts. We never played by the rules, we made our own rules.

The Polo stuff at that time seemed to be particularly intense. Lots of bright colours and big logos — what were the main items you’d go for?

My favorite polo pieces are the Crest, the Yacht, the Anniversary Cross Flags and the Cookie.

Was there a competitive element to all this? Were you trying to one-up your friends by finding rarer stuff?

Yes, every day each Lo Life’s intension was to out-dress the next. The competition was high amongst individuals in the crew and we also competed against other crews as well. Some of the greatest show downs took place at Empire Skating Rink’.

What else were you lot wearing back then? What else was in the mix?

Besides Polo, I wore Guess, Tommy Hilfiger, DKNY, Nautica, Gucci, Descente, Head, Prince, Sergio Tacchini and Coca-Cola. There was a lot of fresh brands we rocked.

Obviously the clothes were a big part of it, but what else was Lo Life about? What else was going on?

Everything that was a part of hip hop was happening. Remember this was 1988 the golden era of hip hop. But besides the clothes we did a lot of crime, partying and just running the streets. It was all about survival. So either you were a street kid or you played it safe and stayed out of trouble. But for us, we always found trouble, because most of the times we initiated it.

How has New York changed since the late 80s? Do you think you lot could get away with the same stuff if you were growing up now?

New York has definitely changed. The time I’m reflecting on is considered ‘The Old New York’. Nowadays, there are cameras everywhere. The city is filled with surveillance, so yes in the current times getting caught would be a realistic matter. Plus there are a lot more cops on the streets now. In the 1980s you had cops, but you also had crime fighters like ‘The Guardian Angels’ who also tried to prevent a lot of the madness from happening on the New York City streets. It worked sometimes, but for the most part, the criminals prevailed.

But I know for a fact, if the Lo Life’s were committing the same acts in the 1980s in the new millennium a lot of us would be in jail for decades and life on the back of the sentence. Because a lot of Lo-Life’s are three time losers meaning they already have three felony convictions. So a fourth one will keep them incarcerated for life. 2018 is not the time to being doing anything stupid.

What are your thoughts on streetwear today? Now that kids can just sit on a computer and buy whatever they want, is it still ‘street’?

No, it’s not street. I’m not into the new fashion and styles — I like gear that stands the test of time. Nowadays, a lot of the brands don’t have staying power. Polo has been here since 1967 and it’s still so relevant — it’s timeless and will never go out of style.

This staying power is what all of the other brands fight and struggle for. Will they last for the next 10 or 20 years? I see clothing brands come and go so often.

Have you ever heard what Ralph thinks of all this?

Yes, Ralph had no choice but to acknowledge our movement. I never cared about meeting Ralph or none of that. He was a non-factor in my life as far as my aspirations are concerned. I’m a realist.

The Lo-Lifes go hand in hand with Ralph. In the same way he created a brand, so did the Lo-Lifes. We have come a long way and we are still on the front lines doing it big.

What do you get up to these days? What’s an average day like for you now?

Nowadays, I’m all about business, traveling, family, being a great husband and father and truly helping other people realize and pursue their dreams. I view myself as the Creative Director and Visionary in all that I engage in. I have a lot of great things coming down the pipeline.

Sounds good. Any wise words you’d like to add?

Yes, check out my book Lo Life: An American Classic. It feels great to be a published author, and this is just my first book, I have plenty of stories to tell.

Thank You! 2L’s Up and SaLLute!

Lo Life: An American Classic is available now. Get it here. Interview originally published in 2018.
An Interview with Windy Osborn

Shooting BMXers in the 70s and 80s, Windy Osborn’s up-close, high-zoot shots captured BMX with a dose of straight-up rawness rarely seen in ‘action-sports photography’. Here she discusses how she got started, her own attempts at riding and her time working with a young Spike Jonze.

First of all, how’s it going?

Great, thanks for asking. I’ve finally had a chance, this last year, to focus on converting the best of the classic shots of mine from back in the 80’s to digital, and uploading them to my website. I still have some stragglers, but the best of the best are now up and purchasable, for the serious collectors.

How did you get started taking BMX photos?

When we first began going to the BMX races in like 1973, my father would be the race starter and RL would race (Editor’s note: Windy’s brother and freestyle pioneer). My father lent me his Minolta SLR to take pictures, so I would have something to do for fun. Because my father was a photography enthusiast he had his own darkroom set up at home. He processed my first roll, shot at 13, and said that I had a good eye. I thought he was just being the encouraging father he was supposed to be. As we became active deeper in BMX, we came across a newspaper, Bicycle Motocross News, published by Elaine Holt. My father became a contributing writer/photographer, reporting on California BMX racing, and eventually I contributed my works and ended up being a staff photographer for the paper, first published at 14.

Your brother R.L. was one of the first people to really push ‘freestyle’ riding in the 80s. Did you ever ride yourself?

No, no, no — my only attempt behind the bars was way back in 73, when I entered a side-hack race with my trusty girlfriend, Theresa Grenke, as my monkey. This was at the Redondo Beach track, which was actually a great little local track, built on the side of a hill. So… nice downhill from the start, big jump and then into a berm — scared the s#@t out of me! And I realized at that point it was a lot safer behind the camera than the bars! Besides, being the photog’ had its advantages for being able to meet boys. Where I was shy normally, the camera was a handy tool in many ways.

You shot the cover of the first issue of BMX Action when you were sixteen, did you think anything of it at the time?

It was cool. I know my dad and I used to kinda compete for the cover, so there was always this friendly rivalry between us. He didn’t like that I could take such good pics with such ease. He said he had to work at it, whereas it was natural for me.

Even nowadays, BMX is fairly male-orientated; did you feel any sort of animosity being a girl taking photos at BMX competitions, or do you think it helped you get the shots?

There’s something very self-driving when you find yourself in a situation where the odds appear to be stacked against oneself, so I enjoyed being in the “what’s a girl doing that for?” situation. All I wanted to do was show them I could, and better than anyone else. More than anything, I was into shooting for the art and the opportunity to speak loudly and communicate my vision, of what I was experiencing. Men look at things very differently than a woman. The men who shot, looked at it as journalism and documenting, I looked at it as “OMG!!! Look at what these kids are doing!” I was so blown away and impressed; I wanted to make them bigger than life, through my vision.

Shot with a fish-eye lens and often with a lot of motion blur, your photos weren’t really like anyone else’s. What were you looking at for inspiration back then?

I wanted to show the insides of their heart and souls, I wanted people to be able to taste the excitement. That’s why I got so close, and closer and closer…and I found that when you crop in, you change the perspective of viewing to being more involved in the action, rather than standing back safely and viewing from a distance.

You took Spike Jonze under your wing when he was a teenager. What was it like working with him?

Comical. His advantage was hanging with the guys, as to where I didn’t necessarily fit in to hang with them… so I wanted to make my art and then get out of their way. Remember, I WAS shy at heart.

When was the last time you shot a BMX photo? Is it something you’d like to come back to?

‘89, I believe at the Oklahoma Grand Nationals… and YES! I’ve been wanting to get my hands on the 14-24 Nikon lens and then go up to Santa Cruz and shoot Wilkerson… we have a standing date. I’m anxious to find out how the digital camera works with my style of shooting. Digital is so awesome because of its instantaneousness and convenience, even though I use it old school style. I am looking forward to that moment…soon.

See more of Windy’s photographs here. Interview originally published in 2013.
An Interview with David Uzzardi

David Uzzardi is an American photographer.

Without going too overboard, he takes the kind of pictures
that more idealistic types might call ‘timeless’.

From candid snaps of back-street brawlers to straight-up
portraits of the man on the street, his black and white photos have a certain classic
quality seldom seen in modern times – a long way from the brash and bratty
hyper-action of Instagram-friendly street photography.

Here’s an interview with him about his photos…

Starting at the top, how did you get into photography? What
made you want to start taking pictures?

My high
school had a photo class which I took. I was lucky enough to have a really good
teacher. I always shot Polaroids growing up, but this class inspired me to take
photography more seriously and consider it for a career.

Nowadays it’s a lot easier to get ‘into
stuff’, due to the internet and the endless information on there – but how did
you find out about photography and stuff back when you were starting out?

Mostly
indie book shops and libraries. I grew up very close to Manhattan, so I would
go into the city and spend days in vintage book shops discovering
photographers.

Is it almost too easy now?

Yes,
it’s crazy. While everything was much harder when you couldn’t just google, I
am happy I grew up in a more analogue time. I think my photos are better
because of it. Not to say there aren’t amazing younger photographers coming up
now, because there are.

Do you go out specifically to take photographs,
or are they just products of you already being out and about?

It’s a
bit of a mix. There are trips I take specifically to shoot, but then some of my
favorite photos were taken when I wasn’t expecting it. I
basically lurk around. Nothing specific, I just venture out and observe. Some
people probably think I’m a creepy dude checking them out, but that’s just me
finding my next photo.

Are there certain things you look for?

Yes,
definitely. The ordinary, everyday moments. Moments I think other people miss,
but there is so much beauty in the classic, mundane moments. Also, I’m big on
composition so everything needs to line up perfectly.

Are there things you try to avoid shooting
too?

Drugs.
Posers. Nothing to put down street photographers that shoot more of the raw
back alley content, it’s just not my thing.

You shoot a lot of people – and a lot of
actual portraits rather than just spy shots. What’s your techniques for getting
these type of shots?

Lurking.
Haha kidding, sort of. I must have a friendly face, or disposition, but people
seem safe around me, and inviting.

A lot of people out there are perfectly
content just shooting endless photos of the backs of peoples’ heads and spy
shots from miles away – do you think they should try a bit harder?

If you
can’t see a face, there must be something else about a photo that makes it
special, otherwise it’s a worthless picture. I would suggest editing your
content more and waiting for a better moment to capture that same pic. Or just
getting closer. So yes, put more effort into it

You live in Los Angeles now, but you spent a
long time in San Francisco. A lot of people talk about how San Francisco has
changed over the last 20 years due to the influx of tech companies – what are
your thoughts on it? Did you see a noticeable change?

Yes,
it’s completely different now. I left at the right time, right before the
shift, so I didn’t stick around to see the city lose some of its magic. I still
love San Francisco and it holds such a special place for me, but I’m happy I
made the transition when i did.

How does Los Angeles differ to San Francisco?

L.A.
gave me the chance to make a living shooting photos. There is much more
opportunity here. I worked at a photo lab in San Francisco, and I work behind
the camera now. Also, I drive a lot more now.

Does location influence the photos you take?
I’ve noticed that no matter where I go, my photos always look pretty much the
same.

I don’t
think so. In San Francisco, with it being such a small city geographically, I
found myself shooting the same content — it got stale. So L.A. was a blank
canvas for me. My photos look the same, just with different people and
backdrops.

Do you think going out and taking photos has
changed over the years? It seems like there’s a lot more people snooping around
with little cameras nowadays.

Yes,
definitely. There is such a larger community now, I think it must be the
digital aspect making it easier to shoot. I love it, there is much more of a
community.

Unlike a lot of so called ‘street
photography’ that’s around now, your photos have a very classic style. Is this
a conscious thing? I might be wrong, but to me they’re not tied to any
particular age or era like a lot of photos are.

Thank
you very much for that. Norman Rockwell’s paintings are definitely an
inspiration. As is the music of George Jones. I am drawn towards those
‘timeless’ moments.

Do you still mess with the dark-room?

I
actually don’t process at the volume or even near the volume I used to. I went
digital when I moved to L.A. for my commercial work, and started shooting more
digital street stuff. I’ll never give up film, but you cannot beat the
convenience and speed at which digital photography provides. The chemicals were
literally destroying my hands, and who knows what else. I had to take it easy,
as I’m still feeling the effects of the 15 years I processed film
professionally.

You used to work in a photo lab. What was that like?

Very fun and easy-going.
I learned more working in a lab than I did in four years of art school. You
basically get to learn directly from some of the best artists in the world,
seeing how they shoot. I
personally developed film for some of the world’s best photographers like Bruce
Weber, Sante D’orzino, Duane Michals and many more.

Have you got any tips for success under the
red bulb? What makes a good print?

I tend
to overexpose, which makes my film denser and gives it more detail. I also pull
most of my film a stop to build up my mid-tones and then pump the contrast
while printing.

I often think that with photography, the pool
of influence is relatively small – most people out there are into Robert Frank
and Walker Evans. Have you got any names for people to look into that they
might not have heard of? Who else deserves some recognition?

Danny
Lyons is famous, but I feel like he still isn’t as well-known as he should be.
Bill Owens and WeeGee of course. Working with Bruce Weber’s negatives over the
years, his photos were the most well-composed, perfect exposed pics I’ve ever
worked with. I am still blown away by that, nothing compares, he’s a technical
genius.

What sort of work do you do now with photography?

While I still shoot
street photos, professionally I’m actually a product photographer. Which is
kind of crazy seeing as some of my best work is of living people, but I also
love working with objects. They balance each other out.

Do you ever get burned out on taking pictures? What
with working as a commercial photographer, and then taking you own personal
shots – does it ever get a bit much?

No, never.
Professionally I shoot on average over 1,000 a day and it never gets old. I
sometimes can’t believe i found a way to make a healthy living shooting
photos.

What keeps you out there taking pictures?

Fear of missing the
shot.

Do you keep in touch with the people in your photos?
Or are there regular people who you bump into often on the street?

Funny enough, when
Hamburger Eyes’ SF Eyes came out recently, one of the guys I shot over 15 years
ago as a young punk emailed me. He asked if I would send him an autographed
photo. So crazy, and of course I sent it to him. I do wonder though what
everyone is up to now.

What are your thoughts on how people view photos these
days? Is there a perfect way to present a photo?

It’s definitely
different than what I grew up with, but as long as people are enjoying photos
it really doesn’t matter to me.

Following on from that, do you think Instagram
algorithms and the allure of the shock image can sometimes mean that a lot of
good photography is now ignored or under-appreciated?

It’s pretty gross to me that shock images
and a horrible picture of a boob or a pic of someone smoking weed for example,
will get someone a huge art show or recognition just because it’s hyped. I
don’t get it nor will I ever.

Vague question, but what makes a good photograph?

The subject.

Very true. Have you got any words of wisdom to end this with?

Don’t leave home
without your camera. I guess no one does now since we all have smart phones,
but if that’s what you use, then always have it handy as you’ll forever regret
the photo you didn’t take.

See more of David’s shots here.
An Interview with Brian Cannon

This is probably a pretty obvious statement to make, but there’s more to music than just the music. Things like melody and chords and all that are fairly important, but there are a thousand other factors that help turn a song, track or album into something more than just a bunch of sound waves smacking into your ear drums.

Record sleeves are one such factor — and not many have created quite as many stone cold classics as Brian Cannon.

As the man behind the infamous Microdot agency, Brian was responsible for looking after the visual side of both Oasis and The Verve, as well as designing covers for bands like Suede, Cast and Inspiral Carpets.

Here’s an interview with him about doing graffiti in Wigan, his trademark ‘in-camera’ style and the logistics of putting a Rolls Royce in a swimming pool…

Maybe an obvious first question – but how did you get into designing record covers? What were you into when you were growing up in Wigan.

I specifically set out to design record sleeves, because I was a fan of punk rock. I was 11 in 1977, when I first got into it all.

Do you remember the first time you saw ‘punk’?

I’m the eldest in my family, so I didn’t have the influence of an older brother – but I did have an older cousin called Tony who was 15 at the time — and when you’re 11, that’s a massive difference. I’d heard about this phenomenon from Tony, and then I saw the Buzzcocks on Top of the Pops — and to actually see it in the flesh — it blew me away.

Why do you think it had such an impact on so many people? Was it because it was so different.

Exactly, it was totally different. At that time, Top of the Pops was your barometer, and glam rock was pretty much all you had — things like Sweet and Mud — long hair, flares, platforms and mad outfits. But then all of a sudden you had these lads who looked like your mates, with short hair and tight pants, making this fast, aggressive music. And I loved it.

How did this lead into doing design?

Me and my mates thought, “We’ve got to get a band together.” So we met up at my mum’s house in Wigan, and I realised instantly that I couldn’t play guitar. I just couldn’t get my head around chords.

But I’d always been good at drawing. My dad was a fantastic illustrator, far better than me, but the opportunities for illustrators in Wigan in the 1940s were zero – so he worked as a coal miner and never did anything with it. But he was very much in favour of me doing drawing, and he always encouraged me.

And with punk, if you looked at the graphics and the visual identity, it felt like it was in reach. I think that was the point of it. Before punk, bands were like creatures from another planet — but with punk, the whole process was demystified – the man in the street could get involved. That was a massive inspiration to me.

So I married my love of the music with my talent for art, and thought that I’d become a sleeve designer instead.

It’s interesting how even in your early teens you knew exactly what you wanted to do.

I remember doing this art foundation course, and the tutor was going around, asking us what we wanted to do when we finished our education. He came to me and I said, “I want to design record sleeves.” But straight away he said, “No, no, no – you can’t be so specific, you need to get a job in graphics and learn your way.”

I was almost derided for it – because not only was I going to do record sleeves, but I was going to go freelance from the get go. I think anyone can do it these days, because you just get a laptop and then you’re a graphic designer all of a sudden. But back then, not only was there no social media and no internet, but the equipment required to do the job of a graphic designer, the forerunner to Photoshop, cost £300,000. It was this machine called Quantel Paintbox.

What was that?

It was a computer, about the size of your house, with less power than your mobile phone. It was way out of my reach — I could hardly afford a paper and pencil.

What did you do then?

This punk style was really stark, with high contrast black and white, degraded imagery, and it just so happened that if you photocopied an image over and over, it went like that. And that was handy, because all I could afford to use was a photocopier.

There was a little print shop at the bottom of Library Street in Wigan, and I’d be in there all day, with a scalpel and a tin of glue, putting these things together in the shop – and that’s how it all started.

How did your first sleeve come about? Was that the Ruthless Rap Assassins one?

Yeah — I did a graffiti mural on the side of a warehouse in 1984, and it was noticed by a guy called Greg Wilson, who was a very influential DJ at that time. He’d thought to himself, I’m going to see this New York style graffiti in London or Manchester or Birmingham at some point, but he couldn’t believe it that he’d seen it in Wigan. He sent word out on the street that he wanted to meet whoever had done it, and I was summoned to his house. We ended up becoming friends and I did this sleeve. And then off it went from there.

What happened next then?

I then met Richard Ashcroft at a party and got chatting, but then The Verve got signed and I didn’t see him for another two years. I ended up bumping into him in a petrol station at six o’ clock in the morning. He said, “Wow, you’re that sleeve guy. We’ve just been signed – do you want the gig?”

So I went to London to have a meeting with Virgin, who The Verve were signed to. Vigin obviously had some big London agency lined up to do this work for The Verve, so they were horrified when Richard Ashcroft said he wanted this unknown student he’d met at a party in Wigan to do the artwork. But they were cool enough to think, “Well, this is what the band wanted.” And then after the first single came about, they were like, “Sorry we doubted you.”

What else were you doing at that time?

On the back of doing the stuff for The Verve, Suede got in touch. And then I met Noel Gallagher. I used to have an office in Manchester on New Mount Street in the same building as the Inspiral Carpets office, and I got chatting to him in the lift about trainers.

What were they?

They were a pair of adidas Indoor Super. I took my mother to Rome for her 60^th birthday, and I found these trainers in some tiny backstreet shop.

Wasn’t the Oasis logo based roughly on the adidas logo?

The original was kind of the adidas font – but we binned it, because with the adidas font, the ‘A’ is just like an ‘o’ with a line on the side, so it just looked like ‘oosis’.

I did the logo in ’93, and then their first album came out in ’94. After Oasis it went buck-wild… Ash, Cast, even Atomic Kitten… it was mental.

Was it hard to keep up with it all?

No, because if you think about it, even a busy band back then would only put out three singles and an album out per year – so even if you’ve got five bands a year, that’s only twenty jobs a year. Mind you, it was labour intensive as there was no Photoshop.

I was going to ask you about that. As a lot of your images were done without Photoshop, ‘in camera’, how did you go about getting them? Creating an image like the Oasis Be Here Now cover doesn’t look easy.

This is a very important point to make. Because it was all shot on film – we didn’t have the luxury of looking at the back of the camera and seeing what we’d got. We had no idea what we’d got until we got the photos back from the lab. Imagine putting a Rolls Royce in a swimming pool and realising the photos weren’t exposed correctly.

Before the shoot, there’d be a massive process of research and preparation, so when the day comes, nothing was left to chance.

Were you given free reign with all this?

Yeah, it was a beautiful situation. With both The Verve and Oasis, the record companies just let us get on with it. All they did was pay for the bills. And that was great, because we knew what we were doing.

A lot of the Oasis ones are particularly complicated. What was the hardest one to pull off?

Putting a Rolls Royce in a pool was pretty tough. Finding a pool that someone’s going to let you put a Rolls Royce into was the hardest part. And then we had to find a Rolls Royce that wasn’t worth £50,000 – because Oasis weren’t that rich. It was a scrap Rolls Royce, with no engine in it, but it still cost us £1,000 to hire it. And then we had to get a crane and dangle it in.

How many shots did you take of that one?

That one was ridiculous, because like I said, we didn’t have the luxury of seeing what we’d shot. For that shoot there was something like 30 odd rolls of film, with 36 exposures on each roll – so it was almost a thousand frames of something that’s really just a still life. That’s excessive.

We stayed there that night, and then we got the films processed in London. Then there was the wait, like an expectant father.

How did you work out which was the best one, when you had a thousand pretty much identical photos to look at?

It was like snow blindness. We’d start with the obvious non-starters, and whittle it down and down. It was a very laborious process of elimination, but we didn’t know any other way.

Do you think this real life, ‘in camera’ method of creating these really detailed images helped elevate them a bit?

By that point we could have easily Photoshopped it, but we just did things for real because it was our trademark, and I enjoyed doing things that way. We started doing it that way out of necessity, because we couldn’t afford computers – but even when we could afford them, we still did things the real way as we preferred it.

And it must have been more fun that sitting around staring at a computer.

Yeah – I loved it. Just to see a Rolls Royce in a swimming pool – it looked amazing.

What about the Definitely Maybe cover? Obviously now that’s talked about as being one of the best record covers of all time, but were people saying that when it was released?

No, they weren’t. It’s all very well saying things with the benefit of hindsight. It’s just been voted as one of the top 70 record sleeves of all time – and do you know what? I’m not going to rain on my own parade, because I think it’s a great sleeve — but had that been for a band you’d never heard of, it wouldn’t be in the top 70.

I suppose there’s a lot that’s tied in with that. The memories that come with it and everything else – it’s a full package. What was the story behind the Definitely Maybe cover?

It’s an anti-band shot. That was the idea. There’s a Beatles album called A Collection of Beatles Oldies (but Goldies!), and on the back there’s this shot of them in this dressing room in Japan. And I just loved the fly on the wall nature of it – none of them were looking at the camera. And whilst it looks nothing like Definitely Maybe, that’s where the inspiration came from.

That documentary style?

Precisely. The band are having their picture took, and they’re all watching the telly.

It’s designed to look candid, but what was the reality of it?

It was incredibly staged. It’s too perfect of a composition to just happen. We positioned everyone very carefully. Even the still on the television was specifically chosen – it’s the shot in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly where he’s got him by the face. It was paused on VHS. That’s how meticulous it was.

A lot of your sleeves are photography-based. Was there a particular reason for this?

My favourite record sleeves, with the exceptions of Never Mind the Bollocks, are photographically based. I just think it’s the best way of doing it. And that’s why, in the cases of both The Verve and Oasis, there’s very little intrusion with type or logos.

With The Verve, the logo would be in the shot, and with Oasis, the logo would be in the top corner. We’d spend ages coming up for the idea and staging the shoot, we didn’t want to ruin it by plastering a logo in front of it.

It seemed like there was definite styles for each band you worked with. Your covers for The Verve always had real text in the photo. Was that a faff to do that? Setting the letters on fire on the Storm in Heaven cover looked tough.

Yes, it was. I had the letters made by a steel fabricator in Oldham, and covered them with this cladding that street jugglers use when they’re juggling fire, and then poured paraffin onto it. The only downside was that the letters gave off loads of smoke – and because we were in a cave, it just wouldn’t clear. We were having to wait about half an hour in-between each shot for the smoke to clear.

Where did the idea for that one come from?

I’d never seen letters set on fire and photographed before, but I just thought it’d look good. I do a lot of lecturing at colleges, and I always say, much to the chagrin of the lecturers, that you don’t have to explain everything away. Some things you just do because they look good – there’s no further explanation required.

Very true. Maybe a tough question, especially considering what you’ve just said… but what makes a good record cover?

What makes a good record? You just know, don’t you? There can be a thousand reasons why one might be bad, but I can’t think of one reason why one will be good. There’s no formula to it. It’s down to the individual too – it’s all opinion.

What do you think the purpose of a record cover is? Is it marketing, or is it art?

I don’t think it’s a marketing tool — I’d regard it as a bonus for the fans. I don’t think it sells records. I’ve bought the odd record because of the sleeve, but then again, I’m a sleeve designer.

Were the covers always influenced by the music – or sometimes did you just have an idea you wanted to use on something?

No — that never happened. We were quite vehement about that. Every sleeve was like a bespoke suit, cut for that particular piece of music.

From what I’ve read, you weren’t just some guy in an office sending off designs to the bands – you were involved with the bands a lot more, going on tours and things like that.

I was of the opinion that the more I got my head around what the band were into and how they thought, the better the visuals could be… and hanging around with a rock and roll band is good fun. I toured American with both Oasis and The Verve, but it was mad, because I was the only person on the tour-bus who had nothing to do.

What was it like being around those bands when they suddenly became massive?

It was all a bit weird really. Anybody will tell you this – the best bit of any band is that bit when they just start taking off. The best bits are when it’s still pretty innocent.

Did you have a few people working for you by that point?

Yeah – but it was never massive. At Microdot’s peak, there was five or six of us. In the late 90s we started branching out into all sorts of mad stuff. We were running night-clubs, we were publishing magazines, we were managing bands… at one point there was talk of importing Volkswagen Beetles from Mexico.

A brilliant idea.

I’d gone to Mexico on holiday, and I kept seeing these old Beetles. They were still making them there, and we’d worked out that if we shipped them back to England, and even if we turned them right hand drive, we could still make £2,000 on every one we sold. If we sold 500 of them, we’d make a million quid.

We were all set to go, but Volkswagen head office in Germany had told the Mexicans they couldn’t sell us the cars, as they reckoned it’d harm the Golf market in the UK.

But it would have been mint.

I know. So we then tried the Brazilians as they were making them there too – and this was so Microdot it was untrue. On the street in Shoreditch where we had our studio, there was a little café called Franco’s that was run by a Portuguese family. Now they don’t speak Spanish in Brazil – they speak Portuguese, so I went in to Franco’s one day and I said I’d give the man who worked behind the counter a tenner if he’d come to the office, and speak down the phone to Volkswagen HQ in Sao Paulo. He did it, but it still didn’t happen.

What do you mean by things being, “so Microdot.” Was there a certain attitude there?

Absolutely. The reason why it was like that was because I didn’t have any experience of working in an agency. I had no idea how things should be done — we were just making things up as we were going along.

It was bonkers. When we moved to London, we had enough money from Alan McGee to buy this computer, and to set up a studio in Shoreditch. But in this mad rush to move to London, I’d forgotten that we needed somewhere to live, so me and Matt, the lad who worked with me, had to live in the studio. There was one room, and a toilet, and we lived in there for four months. We had a couch that you could take the cushions off, and we’d take it in turns every night – one of us sleeping on the couch, one of us sleeping on the cushions on the floor.

And we could party hard, because we knew that the only person we had to answer to the following day had been out with us previous night – there was no way Noel Gallagher was going to ring us at nine in the morning, because we’d just left him at seven in the morning. There’d be occasions when a client would turn up, and there’d be somebody asleep on the floor in the studio.

Nowadays you do all sorts of stuff – and amongst various design bits, you’ve been photographing northern soul nights. How did this come about?

That was a massive project for me. It started in 2012, when the renaissance was under way. A friend of mine from Wigan said that I should go along to this club run by these kids who were into northern soul.

I was very aware that when you take photographs of people dancing in dark rooms, they just look like statues at a wedding, but I wanted to get some soul or some atmosphere into the shot, so I thought I’ll use an off-camera flash.

I went to this club-night with my mate John, who was going to be my lighting guy, holding my flash in his hand, at a 45 degree angle to me. But when we get there, his phone rings — his wife was pregnant and her car had got a puncture — so that was my lighting gone. So I just put the light on the stage or on the floor, and worked around that, and the results I got were astonishing, purely by accident – I got these massive long shadows, cast from behind.

I suppose that comes from the same place as your record covers – you’re a fan.

Absolutely. Growing up in Wigan in the 1970s made it kind of inevitable to be a northern soul fan.

Alright, I think I’ve pretty much ran out of questions now. Have you got any wise words or anything to finish this off?

Never give in.
An Interview with Tony Pikes

This interview was first published in 2014. R.I.P. Tony Pikes.

You may know Tony Pikes as the moustachioed bartender in the video for Wham’s 1983 smash hit, Club Tropicana. But not only is he a great dancer with a penchant for neckerchiefs, he’s also the founder of Ibiza’s real life Club Tropicana, Pike’s Hotel. Famously the location for Freddy Mercury’s 41st birthday blow-out, this place has long been associated with decadence, hedonism and downright sleazy behaviour. By some bizarre turn of events I found myself sat with Tony. It would have been rude not to ask him a few questions.

Here’s the context — we’re sat next to his purple tennis court, it’s two in the afternoon and Tony, who has just celebrated his 80th birthday, is still up from the night before. He has a habit of deviating from the questions I ask him and going off on long-winded tangents, but seeing as he’s been up all night, I suppose I could hardly expect concise answers. I start by asking what brought him to Ibiza…

What makes you go anywhere in life? Fate — complete fate. I don’t believe in God, I believe in destiny, that’s two different things. I’ve always chased the rainbow. I’m not stupid. I work hard and I play hard. I learnt at a very early age that you can’t play hard if you don’t work hard. I started without a penny, I had an inferiority complex, I couldn’t speak to people, I was nervous because of my childhood. I was bullied by my older brother. I’ve moved on from there.

Now I meet with the best people in the world. It’s just worked out very well. These are people from all stretches of life. I sit up there every morning and have breakfast and I see a new customer coming in like a bantam cockerel with his chest out.

“Are you Tony Pikes? What’s all the hype about, it’s a fucking farmhouse,” he’ll say.

“Can you ask me that question in 24 hours?” I’ll say.

22 hours lately he’ll come up to me and say, “Tony, forgive me, I didn’t realise. I thought I was a really important man and now I realise I’m just part of the team.” And that’s what I want, for everybody to be equal.

The sign at the bottom of the road that lead’s to Pike’s Hotel

You were exiled from Australia, you worked selling yachts and you had been shipwrecked in the Caribbean. Then you landed up here. What was your plan? Did you always want to open a hotel?

No, not at all — it was destiny. I had a house in the Côte d’Azur that was apparently owned by Napoléon’s sister. It was a picturesque little house. I held a dinner party and one of the guests stood up with a fork and started scratching away at all the plaster. I said, “What the fuck are you doing?”

He said, “Tony, when these houses were built they were constructed with timber. I’m sure there will be timber underneath this thing. So he carried on, and there was a beam. He said if you strip all of this off it will be beautiful.

I took his advice and the next day I brought builders in and they stripped it all off so it was all beams. So I oiled them with linseed and they were beautiful. I stayed there for three years. Then things went wrong so I moved on.

A friend of mine had moved to a place I’d never heard of called Ibiza and when he came back, he said, “Mate, you must go to Ibiza.”

What year’s this?

I came here on the first of June 1978, so this must have been in ’76. If anyone had said that to me I wouldn’t believe it, but we used to hold parties together in Bangkok. So when he said to me to come here, I believed him. I came over here in March for ten days and there was nobody here because it was winter time. But I had a feeling for it. So I came back in June.

Now Spanish people are fairly short. I’m not really a big man, but in Japan I am. When I’m there I wear a kimono, but I have to have one made for me as I’m too tall. And so when I looked over the side of the boat there was a guy standing head and shoulders above the rest. It was a mate of mine from Sydney called Pete Middleton. He was a typical Australian, always swearing. I had a Méhari (editors note: a Méhari is a small off-road Citroën) at the time and Pete, who was very athletic, leapt over the windscreen and landed in the seat next to me.

“Come on Pikey I’ll show you the island, I’ve been here for a week, I’ll get a Sheila for you,” he said.

I said, “Look Pete, all I want is a bed. I was at a party for 48 hours in Antibes, I’ve had a day’s drive to Barcelona in this Méhari that won’t go over 60kmh with so much wind-force that I’m going backwards. I’ve been to Majorca and now I’m here five days without sleeping. I’ve got to have some sleep. I’m a human; I’m not a machine.

He said, “You’re bloody senile, you used to be good fun Pikey, how old are you now?

“I’m nearly fifty,” I said.

“Nearly fifty? You’re a fucking child, what’s your problem?”

I said, “Mate, I just told you I’m shot. I’m a mere mortal, I need rest.” Then all of a sudden this Seat Panda drives past with a woman in. I honked the horn, but this was no a klaxon — it was a wounded cat with no guts. I got behind her but I couldn’t overtake her as it was a narrow road with one lane, just like it is now. So I got two wheels on the soft shoulder, which is very dangerous, and I’m going by and I look up and she’s a nice, pretty girl. I eventually managed to get in front of her but she smashed in to me.

“What’s the problem?” she said.

“There’s no problem, what are you doing for dinner tonight?” I said.

“Is that all?” she said.

“What do you mean is that all? I’m going to change your life.” And I did — I changed her life. We started this place together. We bought an apartment that was being built in the island’s first high rise, but when we came back there were just mounds of gravel and sand and nothing had been done. It was blacklisted by the authorities. It was all unsafe. The builder had put gas pipes, water pipes and electricity all in the same conduit. It was disastrous.

So we had a coffee, feeling a bit miserable and then walked up the road, just past an estate agent’s window. And in that window was a five hundred year old finca in San Antonio. I said, “That’ll be fresh air sweetheart, let’s go there.”

So we came here and it just had a feel about it, I don’t know what, but we both felt something. We got a bottle of wine, put a rope on the neck and swung it down. We got pissed too as it was hot.
She said, “Wouldn’t it be lovely if we could forget husbands and wives and divorces and stay here together.

I said, “Why can’t we?”

“Well, you haven’t got any money.”

I said, “Don’t mind that, if I want to do something I put my mind to it then I’ll do it.”

So I got this idea of not making a hotel, but a house. And it just started from there.

How long was it until word got out?

From the word go. I sold boats from a marina in France to Peter Sellers, Roger Moore and Shirley Bassey, so I was used to those sort of people. I’ve always been a yachtsman and a businessman. I didn’t have a childhood and I had a tough life, but I started to get the feeling for a good life. I thought if I work hard I can get it, and I have — I’ve got a world-wide reputation. It’s been a long, long road and it hasn’t been easy. People say I’m lucky, but I’m not lucky, I’m fortunate and I’ve worked my arse off.

A washed-up speedboat found a few metres from Pike’s Hotel

You said you were very introverted when you were young, what changed you?

I felt success. The island is kind. If you work hard you can make it. This is the countryside, there’s no water, no electricity, no road and no facilities but I had this vision that one day I’d make it like it is now. This took me twenty years. But I wasn’t in a hurry because when you’re young, then you don’t feel you’re ever going to get old. But you do get old.

How old are you now?

I’m 80.

You look well for 80.

I feel very well. My doctor said I’m a walking medical miracle. He said, “I know you take a lot of blow up the nose and copious quantities of alcohol but I’d trade my internal organs for yours tomorrow — you should be dead.

I’m doing everything I shouldn’t do but I’m 80 and I feel great. I’ve been married five times and I’m engaged to my sixth wife. We were going to get married last year on the 35th anniversary of the hotel, but she rang me up from Vienna and said, “Tony why did you lie to me?”

She said, “I’ve been speaking to two friends of yours and they said she couldn’t marry me because I was already married.”

I said, “Oh bullshit, what would they know about it?”

So I phoned my wife in Dubai and said, “Are we still married?”

“Baby, you know we are. We went to get divorced, we got everything ready for it but when we got to the bank you didn’t have any money and I wanted two and a half million euros.”

I said, “You’re worth every penny.” I was with her for 14 years — she was a good wife. So I sold the hotel to get the money, which is a shame. But now they’re saying they want me to say. I’ve got a room for life here.

After all these years is there any night here that particularly stands out?

There are a lot of them. I guess Freddie Mercury’s party. He called me into his room one day that used to be called Julio’s room. He said, “Why’s it called Julio’s room?”

I said, “It’s named after Julio Iglesias, the international singer.”

“What about me?” he said. “Where’s the Freddie room?”

I said, “You keep singing and one day maybe you’ll get your room.”
I was being facetious but I had a great rapport with him.

His birthday was the biggest private party on the island. But all the parties have been good. This life is different. I live in utopia.

What about the days when you need to go to the supermarket or sort your bills out?

No, I don’t do that. That’s mundane stuff. I live life to the full every day. It’s what keeps me young.

Have you got any regrets in life?

Nope, no regrets.

Being an 80 years old man living in utopia, what would your advice be to someone slightly younger?

In my opinion the only way you can make it is to work your arse off. I started without a penny and no education but I know how to work. When I started this place with my girlfriend we used to go down to San Antonio early in the morning, pick up all the derelicts sleeping on the beach and I’d line them up like Lee Marvin in the Dirty Dozen and say, “Listen, you’ve got the job. I’ll pay you 150 pesetas an hour and if you do your work you’ve got the job. Work half as much as me and I’ll pay you.”

Most of them by noon were finished. They’d all gone across the fields. It was very, very difficult to get the place built. And then you’ve got planning coming up and asking you if we’ve got permission and they’d try and shut you down.

I’ve been put in prison here. I was put in a pit. You go down there and the police are four stories above you with rifles and you’re in a dirt pit looking up. Now one guy there spoke English. He said, “Tony, you’re a nice man. They’re going to lock the stalls later on so you make sure you get one by yourself or you’ll get raped all night long and there’s nothing you can do about it ‘cause the guys don’t listen.”

Now the Spanish law is that you can’t do more than 72 hours inside without a charge so I thought all I had to do was 72 hours then I’d be out, but this blond headed guy said he’d been there a month.

“But what about the law?” I said.

“There is no law,” he said. “The law is those coppers up there with the rifles and they can do as they wish.”

Custom bedsheets featuring Tony and his mates

Was there a lot of this sort of thing when you first started? Was there a feeling of animosity from the locals for starting this place?

I never walked around being big headed, but I gradually became very well known. It’s a good business but it’s never made any profit as I wasn’t in it for money — I was in it for lifestyle.

I got the greatest compliment ever one day when I walked in to the restaurant one day and Julio Iglesias was having lunch and he said, “Tony, I envy you.”

I said, “Mate, you’ve got a 41 million dollar airport and I’ve got a fucking bicycle. How come you envy me?”

“I’m not talking about riches, I’m talking about lifestyle.”

I walked out of the bar with tears in my eyes. Here was the nicest man in show business saying that he envied me. I’d made it. I’d done it.

Do you reckon you’ve cracked life?

Most people don’t have the tenacity to keep going. It doesn’t come easy. I’ve achieved a lifestyle second to none. I’ve got Julio saying he envies me. Ron Rice, the founder of Hawaiian Tropic is a multi-millionaire with two 747s and he says he envies me. I’m doing something right.

Why do you think you’re still here?

I love life and I love women. I should have been a lesbian. I don’t want it to end. I want to live a few more years.

What’s going on tonight then?

I don’t know. I never plan. If you make plans they all come unstuck. I just go along with the flow.

Howard Marks is knocking around here at the moment making a book with you. You said they were going to make a film too. What’s that going to be about?

They’ve already made a film about me. But it didn’t get finished. I was going to be played by that good looking man from Hollywood. What’s he called?

I don’t know… Robert Redford likes to think he’s good looking.

No, before him — a very good looking man. I had dinner with him once. Anyway, they had him talking to this blonde, who was an actress. And the camera was moving around — camera work is always important. She’s talking to him and the camera goes down his body to his fly. You see a hand go across and open the fly. The camera goes to her face and she goes, “WOW.” You don’t have to say anything — that says it all. And then I die. But it was nicely done, it wasn’t morbid.

And with that sleazy-yet-poignant image, I leave Tony Pikes sat on the edge of a sun lounger as he finally submits to the power of sleep.
An Interview with Wig Worland

If you walked into a WHSmiths during the 1990s, then chances are that you will have seen the high-calibre work of Wig Worland.

As a photographer at seminal skateboard magazines like R.A.D. and Sidewalk, his sharp eye helped capture a relatable world of British skating, a million miles away from sun-drenched California schoolyards.

First question – when did you start taking photos? Was there something that set you off with it?

I started in school when one of the better teachers realised I wasn’t going anywhere academically and lent me her camera. I don’t think there was anything else I could have done to be honest. I started to assist photographers straight out of school.

How did you end up doing skate photography? What was the camera set-up back then?

I grew up near an adventure playground. One day in the early ‘80s a quarter pipe with ‘Skatopia’ written on it appeared there. We would ride our BMX bikes on it. A few weeks later a guy called Wurzel appeared – he literally dropped over the fence.

All of us, including Wurzel, rode bikes for a bit but as the world transformed around us we all got into skateboarding. One of my best friends at the time was London street skating legend Phil Chapman. He let me take pictures of him and I got better at it.

It’s funny how when you’re young it just doesn’t occur to you that those are the formative years, even though that’s what every older person is saying to you at the time.

My first camera was a Canon FTB with a 24mm lens – I couldn’t afford a fisheye lens. I then wasted more time and energy on a 17mm lens. It was really terrible, but I did get my first picture published in RAD using it.

What was that?

A guy called Doc with a chuck on handrail at the bus station in Milton Keynes in an article in R.A.D. in 1990. In the same article came my second and third published picture. It was such a pivotal moment in my life but just like buses, three came along at once.

Do you remember the first photo you took where you thought, “I’m getting quite good at this”?

Not any single shot, but I think when I got to shoot Manzoori or Channer or Wainwright, I was beginning to shoot people who were making great pictures all the time. The trips back and forth to the lab became less fuelled with anxiety and worry about what I was doing.

So something must have been going right, maybe I knew enough about the dark art of shooting on slide film that I could relax into it. A bit anyway.

The late 80s and early 90s are quite a while ago now. What are some things people forgot about that time?

There was no Instagram! There wasn’t anywhere other than the monthly magazines (and of course books) to get any information about anything. It really is odd to say it now because we are all so used to finding anything out that we want to know immediately.

My sister has a theory that technology is making us all more stupid. We simply don’t have to retain any information anymore. To get from place to place you don’t even need a sense of direction, just flick on ‘Waze’ or whatever and it tells you where to go.

How weird was it to be a skater or a rider in the late 80s? Obviously now skating is going through another ‘cool wave’, but how much stick did you get back then for it?

We got so much hassle from everybody at the time. It’s ridiculous when you think about how ‘cool’ it all is now. We didn’t care at all though. We knew what we were doing was way more important than simply school or fashion or T.V. or whatever else our other friends or peers were into. We were involved in making something happen.

R.A.D. was split fairly evenly between skating and riding. Was there much of a divide at the time? And what were your opinions on the other avenues of raditude?

I’ll fully admit it; I went from BMX to skateboard. I was probably a little too young to catch the first wave of skateboarding in the UK. I was six or seven and my mum wouldn’t let me have a board, though my best mate at the time had much older brothers so I can claim to have ridden a Logan Earth Ski in the 70s.

By the time BMX hit I was a little more in control of my life. I saved up my lunch money for an entire year so I could buy a Kuwahara ET. My friends and I had so much fun knocking about on those bikes in the 80s — it was amazing. Before I knew it I’d given up BMX ‘racing’ and was getting more serious about BMX ‘freestyle’ (which really is an oxymoron when you stop to think about it).

Within a year or two I had switched to a GT Performer and I was entering freestyle ‘contests’ and wearing ever more dodgy clothing. Obviously we didn’t know it at the time but they really were the formative years of my life.

A good friend from that time, Lee Reynolds moved to California and went on to become a very successful freestyle pro rider with Haro. Back then we all hung out at Mons ramp like one big happy family, and that’s where I started to meet more people.

As BMX started to die, I just moved my attention to skateboarding. There was just so much to get into. You can do way more stuff with a skateboard than a bike! Sorry to the entire BMX community.

What were you looking at for inspiration back then? Even your early photos had a definite style.

I was looking at BMX Action and BMX Plus from America that would appear periodically in the newsagents near my school. Then Freestylin’ and Transworld, and Thrasher when I could find it. Back then Thrasher wasn’t quite so appealing — it was half a music magazine with really cheap paper, and was scrappy compared to glossier titles of the day. It’s amazing how Thrasher has outlasted them all.

I loved Spike and Windy, and, obviously J Grant Britain, but I also really love TLB’s pictures. He really was an amazing complete photographer – properly trained and much better than me. Now I have had a chance to see the stuff in the RAD archive, I can’t begin to say how amazing it is. It might not have looked all that good in the mag but that was because of the awful print quality. When the book comes out you’ll see what I mean.

R.A.D. faded into the shortly-lived Phat in the early 90s. How did Sidewalk come about?

Andy Horsely and I were doing a magazine called The System during the last days of TLB R.A.D. When R.A.D. was sold to yet another publisher that was out of town, Tim didn’t want to leave London. He thought it was a dead end. By a series of strange occurrences Andy Horsely and I managed to get ourselves in the door at R.A.D. There’s a bit more to this story, but the full version will be in the book hopefully.

Whereas early skate magazines had their fair share of day-glo high-top fashions and boned-out, high-zoot grabs, Sidewalk had a much more British look. Was this intentional? Or was this just a reflection of the times?

It was absolutely intentional. We wanted it to look like a British skate magazine, and perhaps naively, we wanted it to feature all British people, in Britain. The US skate magazine culture was, and still is, so dominant, but we wanted to showcase the UK.

At the time the world was beginning to see Rowley, Penny and Wainwright but we knew there was so much more. Making an all-British magazine was way more difficult than any of us imagined and I’m not sure how sustainable that idea was (and still is). We tried our very best given the resources we had.

Was there things you wouldn’t photograph – maybe dodgy outfits or questionable moves?

We had an unspoken ban on the Benihana at Sidewalk. Ha! I wonder if anyone else would admit to that. Everything else was totally fine. We even put Dan Cates in the mag with all his craziness for heaven’s sake!

The mid-90s seemed like the real glory days of magazines. They were thick, they came out once a month, they had all sorts of mad stuff in them… and they could all be bought from WHSmiths for a few quid. Why do you reckon there were so many good mags around at this time?

It was really the only way to communicate before the internet really took a grip. Nowadays, you put your tricks up on Instagram and let the world judge you. Back then, we shot the photo, we took it to the lab, and then it was sent off to be printed in cyan, magenta, yellow and black on paper.

After a lot of fuss and bother, the magazine hit the shelves and the rest of the world could see the moments that I had had all to myself. It really was an incredible moment. I’m not sure I’d go back to it though! It was pretty insular and created some difficult politics. It’s probably a bit more democratic now. If you don’t like what somebody is doing, you ‘unfollow’ them and that’s that.

What was a typical day like back in the early Sidewalk days? Was there a typical day?

Probably wake up late and head to the office via the lab, to pick up the film from the previous day. Maybe pet the dog when I got there for a bit. Horse would invariably arrive later than me and we’d get lunch. After looking through some pictures on the light table I’d head out to shoot skaters in various parts of the country.

One day I’d be in Hull, the next in Birmingham and the next in London. It was a pretty insane schedule to be honest.

I’ve said this before in other interviews but I’ll say it again, I hated driving up and down the motorway system in the UK, but I loved the people I met along the way. I really don’t think there was anyone that I didn’t like — it was incredible. A good example of this is driving to Hull, which is a really long way from anywhere. But when I got there, there was Eggy and Banksy and Scott. Amazing people.

This might be a bit of a camera tech guy question… but imagine I’m stood at the top of that flatbank hip at Radlands and a young Tom Penny is cruising towards me… how do I capture the action? Should I pan? Is my flash mounted on the top of my camera… or on a cable… or on a stand? What film should I use?

If you’re at a comp it’s best that your flash is mounted on your camera, because if you’re trying to be clever like I was in the 90s trying to use an off-camera flash on a lead (Windy Osborn/Spike Jonze style) you’re going to miss a lot of shots. Yes, always pan with the subject if you can, it’s just better and I’d use whatever film you can afford. It’s really expensive and you only have 36 to 39 shots depending on how clever, or stupid, your camera is.

If it’s not contest day then spend a little longer on your lighting. But not so long that you forget to shoot the scene, the look of the place and the informal portraits of the skaters. You’ll regret that later on if you don’t shoot that stuff. Ahem…

Sidewalk did a very good job of making some fairly drab looking spots pretty good. That photo of a lad named Cookie gapping from a Carpet Right car park in the rain comes to mind… something like that could easily look pretty depressing in lesser hands. What were your tricks for making these fairly everyday places look decent?

Bring your own sun — a portable flash. Oh, and a little jiggery pokery with the slide film we were using as well. Also, know what you’re doing, and how the film is going to react to the light. Photography is all about various kinds of lies to create the shot you want.

I’m glad you remembered that Cookie shot because it is pretty special. He was such an amazing, positive person. Never mind my photograph, but how did a person stay positive when you had such terrible conditions to skate in! It’s not exactly California.

Pretty much sums up how we should all approach life, the Cookie story…

I don’t know if I’m looking into this too much, but a lot of the Sidewalk stuff celebrated British culture rather than disguise it. I’m not sure where I’m going with this question, but do you think it’s important that people embrace their situation, rather than endlessly dream of California?

My entire life’s philosophy is to draw out what you can from the place where you are, rather than dreaming that somewhere else has the answer. This ridiculous dreaming is the reason that the air is so polluted these days with people crossing the world on long haul flights to wherever and with people driving from perfectly fine A, to almost certainly nearly the same B.

Of course all this is fine for me to say, I don’t have a car but I live in London where there is a brilliantly sophisticated Public transport system. I grew up in Milton Keynes so it wasn’t a shock to get to California and see the state they’re in, but I truly believe the car has ruined a lot. Not least for our children who can no longer play in the streets primarily because of the number of vehicles on the road. Rant over.

Haha fair enough. What were some of the hassles of making a magazine back then? Any camera mishaps or blatant errors come to mind?

Radio slaves were terrible but they still are. That’s the nature of radio waves in a very wet country. There was some dodgy kit but you could usually spot it pretty quickly and pass it on. I did have all my cameras stolen from the boot of my car once which did feel like the end of the world at the time. Grant Brittain very kindly sent me one of his old cameras and a fish eye to start me off again and Pete Hellicar rang round all the big names in the industry in the UK asking for donations to get me started again. Really kind, amazing people.

The problems were always with the printers or repro people. Handing over your precious photographs and layouts to people who aren’t as invested in the project shall we say. Having said that, there weren’t that many problems, only ever issues that the editor or I would notice.

I’d say skate photography fits under the documentary category, but how far would you go to get a better photo? I know moving the occasional rucksack out of shot is fairly commonplace, but I’ve heard stories of photographers carrying around brighter clothes for people to wear so they stand out more.

There are a few skaters who would bring their own brighter clothes for the shoot. Have a look through my shots and see if you can guess who they are for a fun game. I think this is brilliant.

I don’t think that skateboard photography is documentary at all. It’s a collaboration between the skateboarder and the photographer to produce the best image they possibly can.

What about the days when nothing happened? Surely there must have been a few afternoons when no one was feeling it, or did the fact you had a big camera bag egg people on a bit?

It rains a lot in Britain, I’m sure you’ve noticed. On those days, if you were lucky, we’d sit about in the local Skateshop. If we were less lucky we’d get caught at the local indoor skate park and wait for the rain to stop. I remember thinking then that I would never get that time back, now of course if I had that time back I would do just the same thing. Amazing days.

I’m sure people did feel motivated by having a magazine photographer in town to shoot pictures of them yes, but that just makes me wonder what it’s like now? You can literally shoot a picture whenever you like and upload it anywhere.

Do you think these advances in technology have improved skate photography or not?

I would have killed for a digital camera back when I was shooting skateboarding every day. I’d not only have been able to see what I had in terms of stills, but shooting sequences would have had a lot less pressure involved as well. A couple of people have said that seeing the used rolls of bails lining up on the stairs or pavement beside me gave them extra incentive to land the trick, but it made for some pretty heated sessions.

The Chris Oliver kickflip off a bus stop into bank with another drop springs to mind. Fair play to the ginger genius though, he bloody landed it, and he can say he did it on film as well. So, so sick.

Did you enjoy doing sequence shots or was it just a case of documenting the new tech?

I wasn’t really interested in shooting sequences to be honest, I always thought that was the job of the video camera. In some ways I wish I stuck with that attitude and concentrated on the style of the skater rather than the high tech that they could put down. I think that would have made for a more interesting back catalogue.

This is maybe another fairly camera-orientated question, but I’m interested, so the casual readers will have to suffer… you were maybe one of the first skate photographers to push the studio-lighting style out into the real world. What led to this development?

Ollie Barton thinks I was the first to do the studio on the street thing. I guess other people had tried using flash slaves off camera before, but I made it my own. I was the first out there with portable studio flash which had more spread of light than the dedicated flashes made by camera manufactures. I’m sure I was responsible for keeping the Lumedyne brand going for a while. Lumedyne really are the most terrible looking lights that have ever come to market, made from bits bought from Maplin or Radio Shack, but they worked quite well and everybody had them in the early 2000s.

Did setting up multiple flashes in ropey areas ever become a problem?

It’s funny you know, I never felt odd about setting up lighting anywhere. If you’re prepared to pop a light out on a dodgy estate then you’re serious about getting something done. I think most people whoever they are respect that, some are even interested in it.

There were a few hairy moments — like a car taking out a light in downtown Stockport while shooting late at night. But the light was in the middle of the street, so that one was on me. Nobody ever picked one up and legged it. Not once, but as I said they don’t look expensive so maybe that was enough.

Maybe a bit of an obvious question, but do you have a favourite photograph you’ve taken? And are there any photos which you wish you took?

As I rather flippantly alluded to earlier, I don’t feel I shot anywhere near enough incidental stuff. I was too interested in making the lighting right to capture the trick perfectly. If I could go back I’d have a point and shoot with me at all times and I’d use it constantly.

I don’t have a favourite photograph. There are just too many, of so many amazing friends and brilliant talented people. I couldn’t pick one above all others.

Today it’s easier than ever to take a photograph. Is this good or bad? Has the advent of phone-based camera gadgetry devalued the art (or at least the science) of photography?

No, it hasn’t devalued it. Because more people have cameras, more people are interested in photography. If you want to lug around a huge old school view camera to shoot pictures then there are sub-genres of sub-cultures that can more easily facilitate that stuff nowadays. Of course more people think they can do it, but it’s still the case that only some people do it well.

Have you got any wise-words you’d like to add?

No, just enjoy life as best you can. We’re not all going to be famous or millionaires, so don’t believe anyone when they tell you to follow your dreams — real life might conspire to not let you get there. Life just happens to most people.
An Interview with David Patrick Kelly

Of all the scenes in all the films to have been made over the last 100 years, not many are quite as powerful (and downright mental) as the penultimate scene in The Warriors. After a long and arduous journey through New York City, the Warriors finally make it to their home turf of Coney Island, only to be confronted by a mad guy wearing a headband driving really slowly in a hearse whilst clinking some bottles together and shouting, “Warriors, come out to play-ay.”

It may not sound like much when you try and describe it to people, but anyone who’s seen it will agree that it’s like nothing else on film — and it was improvised on the spot. As it turns out, the man with the bottles was David Patrick Kelly, a young actor and musician who was plucked from the stage after Warriors director Walter Hill saw him performing in a Broadway play.

David has since gone on to be dropped off a cliff by Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando and chow down on large Parisian sandwiches in Twin Peaks, along with countless other film, television and theatre appearances.

I don’t want to beat around the bush too much here David — the bit at the end of The Warriors where you’re rattling those bottles together and shouting, “Come out to play-ay,” is probably one of the best scenes of any film ever made. Where did the idea for this scene come from? Is it true that originally you were going to use dead pigeons instead of bottles?

I knew that Walter Hill was giving me an opportunity when he asked me to improvise something. All I wanted to do was make something unique — all that was in my head at the moment was this has to be my own ‘voice’. That was around a lot in artistic circles — having your own sound, your own look, your own style.

It’s always been important in film for me to try to use something that is actually present at the moment you are shooting the scene — whether it’s little bottles or some deceased pigeons (they were considered a nuisance on the boardwalk and were often poisoned). It was kind of a record of that moment in time beyond what was in the script.

Can you tell me a bit about the making of The Warriors? What was an average day making that film like?

I remember working on The Warriors for about three months. I would wait every night to hear if I was working the next day. At one point my small apartment was robbed, I think by the gangster guy I got the idea for the sound of ‘come out to play’ from. I had to move out, put all my stuff in storage and live in various cheap hotels — one of which was across the street from the Chelsea Hotel when Sid and Nancy were living there. It was a crazy time in New York City.

Who’s this gangster guy?

He was my next door neighbour. I lived next to him for about four years. He had two little dogs he was always shouting at. If I did some home improvements he would be motivated to try that too but would only start the task before it would fall to the wayside.

I don’t really know if he was a gangster, but sometimes you get a feeling that perhaps there is a life going on that you don’t want to know more about. So the sound you hear me making in The Warriors started from something he said to me and I took it up a few notches.

The Warriors was your first film. How did you get the role?

My life was saved by rock and roll. Because I could play I got the part in Working on Broadway that Walter Hill saw. I played James Taylor’s songs (ever listen to his guitar playing on Joni Mitchell’s “All I Want”? Astonishing). When we came to improvise the ‘come out to play’ moment Walter first asked me to sing something, but it came out like you hear it — one take.

That’s brilliant. What led you to acting in the first place?

In high school we did a play by J.M. Barrie called The Admirable Crichton. I had the role of a pompous Lord who was completely at a loss when shipwrecked on an island. I noticed that the other actors couldn’t keep a straight face while I was acting. It was a funny role and I guess that gave me an empowered feeling — a lightbulb clicked on for me.

How did you wind up in New York?

It’s where great theatre was and I have always been a theatre dog. I had a kind of idea of what theatre should be and I have managed to do most of it — great productions of Shakespeare, avant-garde, adaptations of Chinese classics, rock and roll cabaret…

You’ve lived in New York for a while now. How has it changed since the ’70s?

New York, and the entire world, seems like a branded shopping mall now, but I’m kind of a Warholian optimist. Much is improved — although CBGB’s is now a John Varvatos store it smells much better. Transport around the city is much better with hybrid buses and taxis that actually go to where I live in Harlem. Areas are safer too — I live on a street named after a New York City gang called Young Lords Way.

Before The Warriors you played with a band at some of New York’s most infamous venues — CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City. These are places that are talked about a lot now, but as someone who was actually a part of the ’70s New York punk/art thing, what was it actually like to be there?

When I first came to New York in the early ’70s one of my survival jobs was working as a staff member at Max’s Kansas City in the upstairs music room. There were only 150 seats but, for a time, it was the major showcase for anyone, with or without a new record.

Springsteen, The Wailers, Charles Mingus, Television, Patti Smith, The New York Dolls, Suicide, Peter Frampton, Iggy Pop, Odetta, Dave Van Ronk, Andy Kaufman, Doc Watson, Merle Haggard… it was an incredible education and after a couple years I played there as well. I think I am the only one who staged a play there.

Maybe this still happens now too, but it seems around that time everyone did everything… writers painted, actors sung songs and filmmakers made sculptures. Where did this freedom come from?

Max’s and the artistic mentality that thrived there influenced a lot of the culture in New York at that time. The famous downstairs restaurant where Debbie Harry was a waitress was the meeting place for writers, filmmakers, painters, sculptors, actors. Everybody wanted to do everything. It was part of that Warhol ‘everybody is a superstar’ thing.

That flowed directly into CBGB’s and that scene. It was a biker bar discovered by Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell, Richard Lloyd and Billy Ficca. I read a review of them playing there by Lenny Kaye and went down and signed on myself. It was a wonderful scene to be a part of.

A few years ago you released an album called Rip Van Boy Man. What is a rip van boy man?

I was an official part of the CBGB’s Summer of 75 Top 40 Unrecorded New York Rock Bands. The list included me, Talking Heads, Ramones, Blondie, and many, many others. A few years back I finally did a professional mix of a few tapes I had — I had a very talented band and I wanted to put it out there that there was more going on in that scene than is fully realized.

I added three more recent songs from a play I wrote and starred in at a place called Here in NYC. The song “Rip Van Boy Man” is about suddenly being an older fella in a flash and knowing the best is still ahead.

I suppose the next thing I want to ask you about is Twin Peaks. David Lynch came up with Jerry Horne specifically for you. How did this come about?

I met David Lynch for Wild at Heart. I brought in a prop made for me by the artist Joni Mabe. I was playing a stalker character — so I brought in a strange suitcase shrine to womanhood. After that meeting David wrote the character of Dropshadow for me, and when I was doing Wild at Heart he asked me to do Twin Peaks. I am one lucky guy.

I always thought David’s work at that time had this Maginot Line between straitlaced ’50s and wild ’60s, so I asked the hairstylist to give me an extremely short sided haircut that was wild on top. I bought my suit at Agnes B. for Jerry’s first entrance.

What’s David like to work with?

David is a great guy to work with. He’s filled with joy and exactitude and serendipity.

Arnold Schwarzenegger dropped you off a cliff in Commando. Arnold’s strong, but according to my research you’ve been doing martial arts for years — who would win in a real fight?

Arnold is surprisingly humble and encouraging and we had a great deal of fun. I wouldn’t want to fight him but if we were fighting on the same side… look out villains.

From what you’ve said it seems a lot of what you do is about being in the moment. A lot of things miss this these days — stuff is too scripted, too planned. Why do you think this is?

In the comedies from Hollywood there’s just enormous pressure because they must get laughs every few minutes or they are screwed. In something like Twin Peaks, Lynch truly didn’t care if it was funny or weird or scary — or sometimes all at the same time.

I have always been allowed to improvise and add things from the moment into my film and T.V. projects. Whether it’s Louie or Flirting with Disaster or Commando — the directors have always trusted me.

Apart from maybe Harry Dean Stanton, I don’t think I can think of someone who’s been in as many cult films as you. How come you’ve been in so many good things?

Most actors cannot really choose where their career will go — you must make the best of what you’re given. But by simply keeping in my mind the things I wanted to do I have been able to act in science fiction, film noir, war epics, family dramas, comedies, Shakespeare, Chekov, Ibsen, great poetic avant-garde artworks. I’m very blessed.

For someone whose work is based around spontaneity and the moment, is it weird that people like me are e-mailing you from across the ocean to talk about films from over 30 years ago?

I’ve always said that art is a bet with history, and if my work can mean something or perhaps inspire somebody decades later that is extremely fun and rewarding.

I think I’ve run out of questions now. Thanks a lot for agreeing to do this. Have you got any wise words you’d like to pass on?

Encouraging words from Horace — “Nil desparandum!”
An Interview with Matt Weber

The term ‘street photographer’ gets bandied around a lot these days, but most of the time all it means is someone who once took a photograph of a busker. Matt Weber, on the other hand, is one photographer who definitely does deserve that title. He’s been lurking the lesser-seen localities of New York since the early 1980s, and is just as active today as he was thirty years ago.

Using the powers of the internet age I fired him over a few questions, and by some stroke of luck, he answered back. Here’s what he had to say on photography, driving taxis and why New York isn’t quite what it used to be…

Alright Matt, how’s it going?

I am OK… photography has been the best thing for me emotionally, but not financially. Most photographers these days are being hard pressed to find a way to make a decent living off of their work. The few who are doing well should count their blessings.

When was it that you started taking photographs?

As a kid in 1968, but then I took a twelve year break in 1972 and didn’t really get back into it till 1984.

What was it that made you pick the camera up again in the 80s?

I was tired of seeing amazing things and not being able to photograph them. I kept saying, “Man I gotta get a camera!”

You shot photographs for a long time whilst working as a taxi driver. How did you work this? Would you intentionally take fares to areas where you knew would be better for photographs?

I took people anywhere and I never refused a fare unless they appeared very threatening. When I ended up in what was still considered a ghetto, I was on the prowl for pictures. Since I had been a wild driver (hot rods) when I was young, I didn’t mind being in any bad area because I would run ten red lights if necessary, and I had a bulletproof partition which helped me feel a lot safer if I had the wrong people in my car.

Was the bulletproof partition ever put to use?

Yes, but it’s difficult to be sure if I would have just been robbed or if it also saved my life.

I’ve always thought being a taxi driver sounded like a pretty interesting job — a good way of seeing things and talking to people. Are my predictions right, or is it just another boring job?

It is a very boring job, but I found the camera made it much better. I wasn’t only looking for the next fare to wave their arm in the air; I was looking for the next image!

Where are your favourite places in New York to take photos?

These days there are few places which haven’t been gentrified. Coney Island is always a fun place to shoot, but it is quickly losing most of its original flavour.

I don’t know much about New York but I’ve heard a lot of people say it’s changed a lot in the last twenty years — maybe a mix of Mayor Giuliani and 9/11. As someone who’s been there since the ‘80s, how do you think it’s changed?

The main thing is that before 1985 anybody could afford an apartment in NYC. Now you need to be 100% bonafide with all your papers and money in perfect order. When I was young you just had to hand $150 to a landlord or super and he handed you a set of keys! It was just a handshake and you were a tenant. Therefore the city contained all sorts of characters and was a lot better to document, but it was dangerous too. Now it’s safe and dull. I’m not sure what is better sometimes.

What was it like back when you first started taking pictures? Do you think people’s attitudes to being photographed are different now?

No… New Yorkers are still uptight unless you approach them with a big smile, and then a good portion of them can be disarmed. Attitude goes a long way.

You’ve photographed some fairly wild moments. Has anyone ever turned sour and gone after you?

Yes, I have been attacked and threatened too many times to count. It can leave me doubting myself for a few hours or even a couple of days, but not longer.

What is it that you’re looking for when you’re walking around with your camera?

If I knew I would tell you, but the beauty of the city streets is that there is always the possibility of something coming together at any minute.

Are there certain things you wouldn’t photograph?

I avoid shooting midgets and people with terrible birth defects, but I reserve the right to shoot anything. One has to be comfortable with what they do. If I see a person whose face has been badly burned, I would never photograph that person, unless the burns occurred in a newsworthy situation and I was doing a story on that.

Do you go out intentionally to take pictures, or have you just always got your camera with you anyway?

I have always had a camera since 1989… I have missed a few potentially epic images when I was unprepared.

Do you follow other photographers much? Who else do you like?

Due to the internet there are too many to mention. I watch the work of over twenty people, most of whom I have become friends with. The classic guys from the twentieth century are still the best teachers — Frank, Winogrand and Evans are the obvious ones.

Is it always New York? Do you take pictures anywhere else?

I always have my camera with me, but I haven’t had a car lately so my road trips are less frequent, which is a drag.

Do you ever think you’ll stop?

Death or a major stroke could do the trick.

What do you get up to when you’re not taking pictures?

Watch too much football. Watch too many terrible movies on HBO while I scan my negatives each night.

Wrapping this up now, have you got any words of wisdom you’d like to share?

Shoot what you like otherwise the whole thing will be pointless…

See more of Matt’s photographs over on his website.
New Stuff: Videoland by Andy Sturdevant (available at Antenne Books)

New Stuff: Videoland by Andy Sturdevant (available at Antenne Books)

Videoland – A Visual Catalog of American Video Store Logos, 1980-1995 is exactly what it says on the tin—28 pages of peak-era video shop logo design wizardry, collated by a man named Andy Sturdevant.

Mostly hoiked from old newspaper ads, the logos hark back to the salad days of independent video shops and their endless shelves of dodgy horror shlock.

Get it here.

New Stuff: Videoland by Andy Sturdevant (available at Antenne Books)

Videoland – A Visual Catalog of American Video Store Logos, 1980-1995 is exactly what it says on the tin—28 pages of peak-era video shop logo design wizardry, collated by a man named Andy Sturdevant.

Mostly hoiked from old newspaper ads, the logos hark back to the salad days of independent video shops and their endless shelves of dodgy horror shlock.

Get it here.

New Stuff: Videoland by Andy Sturdevant (available at Antenne Books)

Videoland – A Visual Catalog of American Video Store Logos, 1980-1995 is exactly what it says on the tin—28 pages of peak-era video shop logo design wizardry, collated by a man named Andy Sturdevant.

Mostly hoiked from old newspaper ads, the logos hark back to the salad days of independent video shops and their endless shelves of dodgy horror shlock.

Get it here.
NEW STUFF: RAVE FLIER ZINES AT RARE MAGS

New Stuff: Rave Flier Zines at Rare Mags

Stockport’s Rare Mags have got their hands on these unreal fluro-covered collections of archive rave fliers from San Francisco’s Colpa Press. There’s a few different titles to be snaffled, from Los Angeles to the UK, but they all focus on the early 90s, and are all crammed with wild early desktop computer art.

With the internet still a distant sci-fi dream for most at this time, the humble flier was the only way to get the message out about events like these, meaning each one needed to be full of info, and any attempt at minimalism was thrown right out the window.

In short, this means these old rave fliers are a pure treat to look at, and even a quick glance fills you with a good indication about what was going down at these things. Horseback rides during a three day bender at the ‘Ancient Temple of Imagination’? Apparently so.

Get them here.
NEW STUFF – TEN ‘TIL LATE BY MARK MCNULTY

New Stuff – Ten ‘til Late by Mark McNulty

Café Royal Books, Southport’s finest purveyors of staple-bound British documentary photography visuals, have republished Ten ‘til Late by Mark McNulty. Originally released back in 2013, this is a 28 page wander into the world of late 80s and early 90s club culture, complete with Vicks sweatshirts and a few loose bottom jaws.

Thanks to Mark’s high-class, up-close, flashed-out photos, this is a lot more than just a nostalgic look at a distant time, and is worth a look even if you’ve got zero interest in clubs and going out and all that — it’s rare that a subculture is shot with such skill.

Here’s what Mark had to say about the photos when I talked with him a year of so back…

“It was all about finding the right place. Using the flash, you didn’t just want to photograph someone against a wall, because it didn’t look very interesting. You had to be in the middle to get all the flashing lights and everything. The people at the edge are usually just standing around, so you had to get involved.”

Ten ‘til Late is available now courtesy of Café Royal Books
OLD STUFF: THE CARS THAT ATE PARIS (1974)

Old Stuff: The Cars That Ate Paris (1974)

You’re not meant to judge books by their cover, but does the same apply for DVDs? The Cars That Ate Paris was bought for approximately £3 on a whim after I clocked its sinister looking cover along a shelf of second-hand gems – and I’m pleased to say I most definitely was not disappointed with my flashy purchase.

The film (directed by Peter Weir of Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Truman Show fame) is basically an Aussie version of The Wicker Man, with rusty looking cars instead of dodgy pagan rituals – and tells the story of a young man trapped in the remote outback town of Paris by a bizarre community of up-tight conservatives and bored, petrol-fuelled teenagers. Both parties rely on the slightly dubious trade of flogging old automobile parts from car accidents, which they cause by flashing bright lights in oncoming drivers faces. There’s also a fairly vague storyline about the local surgeon keeping injured survivors as guinea pigs for his experiments, but this doesn’t really come to much.

To be honest, the film might be a load of rubbish – but like a lot of lesser-known films from the mid-70s, it’s a fully enjoyable watch. Even with a pretty daft storyline and some pretty naff dialogue, a film is always going to be good if it features tonnes of scrap metal, a dribbling village idiot character and a load of small town weirdness.
R.I.P. David Berman

R.I.P. David Berman

I’ve found myself listening to the Silver Jews a lot over the last year or so. It’s rare I take much notice of lyrics, but David Berman’s words always stood out as something worth listening to. Funnier than any so-called ‘comedy music’, with more potent imagery than most films, his songs were filled with strange American characters that could have been ripped out of the pages of a William Faulkner book.

Not many other songwriters would sing about people wearing duct tape shoes and belts made from extension cords.

It seems that being so sharp must take it’s toll.

Here’s a video of the final Silver Jews show.
OLD STUFF – A LOUNGE LIZARD ALONE, ULLI PFAU, 1990

Old Stuff – A Lounge Lizard Alone, Ulli Pfau, 1990

Here’s a real gem found in the seemingly endless audio-visual
abyss of Youtube. A Lounge Lizard Alone is a short film documenting jazz-cat
and general man about town John Lurie as he prepares for a stripped-back gig
somewhere on the continent.

The performance, backed by the rhythmic din of famed subway
tub-drummer Larry Wright, is decent, but the real gold is the everyday footage
of John swanning about before the gig, buying dozens of plastic horns and
musing on acting, the music business and fishing.
An interview with Eddy Rhead from The Modernist

The Modernist is a society/magazine, dedicated to spreading the word of Modernist design, well-thought-out architecture and bold and brave displays of concrete.

Seeing as they’ve just moved over to a fancy new exhibition space/shop arrangement in the centre of Manchester (a magnanimous move for an establishment that doesn’t trade in ‘quirky’ burgers and expensive pints), now seemed like an alright time for a quick e-mail chit-n-chat.

Here’s an interview with co-founder Eddy Rhead about the new abode and how the times have changed…

After ten years as a ‘society’, and eight years of making the magazine – you’ve decided to open up a fully-fledged Blofeld-esque HQ, complete with exhibition space and a shop. Maybe an obvious question… but what led to this bold move? Is it something you lot have wanted to do for a while?

Yes – this has been a long time coming, but we’ve really struggled to find somewhere that fitted all the criteria. We have always had to beg and borrow spaces for exhibitions and events and people have been very generous in the past, but it takes a lot of energy and time to find venues.

That energy and time has meant we have let a lot of projects fall by the wayside or just never got off the ground. Now, with our space, that stress is lifted. If we want to stage an event or hold an exhibition then we are ready to go and can focus our energy on doing stuff instead of trying to find a place to do it.

What’s going to be there? What sort of things are you planning to do?

It’s a three storey building. On the third floor will be the boring stuff for running the Society and magazine – the offices and stockroom etc. On the first floor we would kind of like people to have access to our library of books and somewhere to just hang out and shoot the breeze with us. A bit like a hotel lobby. It will be somewhere we can have our own meetings, but if a small community group needs a space to meet they can use it too.

The ground floor will the main focus obviously. It will primarily act as an exhibition space but there will also be a retail element where we can sell our own publications and merchandise as well as a finely curated range of other products.

We’ll grow it over time and reveal more nearer the time but it will be design led products and stuff you can’t buy in the North West. It will also act as an event space – not only for our own events like talks and film shows, but if people want to hold book launches, product launches, etc, there then we would really welcome that.

Do you think it’s strange that there’s not more of these sorts of venues? There’s loads of buildings out there – but not many are for exhibitions or film screenings?

I don’t know about strange – just very frustrating. I think, culturally, Manchester is losing its way a bit. The Manchester spirit has always been to just get on and do it and that is all very well, but there needs to be accessible spaces to take chances and experiment.

Sadly, as the city centre has become financially more prosperous, space for creatives, who are usually skint, has become impossible to find. We are a creative organisation ourselves and will continue to hopefully carry on what we are doing, but we really want to bring people along with us.

We have always been about collaboration and Manchester is amazing that for that. We have always had people offer their talents to us because I think they see what we doing and seen we aren’t taking the piss. We aren’t in this to make money – we just want Manchester to be recognised as a hugely creative city.

We know loads of hugely creative people doing great work, but they struggle to find spaces to put it out there. We hope to be able to, in quite a modest way, offer an opportunity for creatives to show off their work. This is a democratic space and because we are an independent organisation we can put on whatever we want.

Saying that, we are kind of relying on people wanting to put their work in it, but judging by the responses we have already had we will not struggle to find stuff to put in the space. We’ve already got enough ideas to fill it for the first year.

I know you lot are having a shop in there – but the exhibition/gallery element seems at the forefront. Do you think it’s damaging that most buildings now are based around spending money and buying things? Do people need other stuff to do?

Don’t get me wrong – this space will have to pay its own way. The publications and merchandise we sell pays to keep the Society going and we are going to expand our own range of products and also sell other products too.

But we aren’t going to sell any old crap – it will have to fit with our own ethos of good design and high quality. We want to blur the lines of what is for sale, what is an exhibit and what is just our own stuff that we have lying around; “Yes, that book is for sale, but that typewriter isn’t.”

But, as you say, the exhibition is the prime focus on the ground floor. We want people to come and see the exhibitions we have on, hang around for a bit, have a chat, and if they buy something then that’s just gravy.

We’ve spoken to a lot independents in Manchester – be they bar owners or retailers and you would not believe how many are excited about what we a doing.

The thing is, even though they have businesses to run, they understand that Manchester cannot just be bars and shops. They understand that people need more than to just drink and shop. Nobody else was offering what we want to do so we just thought, "Fuck it – nobody else is going to do it so we should do it.”

The problem is there are powerful ‘gatekeepers’ in Manchester – landlords, property developers, the council etc, who just don’t understand what we are trying to do. Luckily we have found a landlord who digs what we do and understands that we bring a new and interesting element to the area.

Were you annoyed you couldn’t be in a Modernist building? Or will you be fitting a Mitzi Cunliffe relief to the front?

Yes – its kind of ironic we are going to be in one of Manchester’s oldest buildings. Ideally we would love an empty Modernist white cube but we just cant compete in that market.

Our building is a listed Georgian weaver’s cottage so couldn’t be further away from our own aesthetic but its a really nice spot, we have some great neighbours and we think its going to work for us. As I say the building is listed so I don’t think we’ll be putting a concrete mural on the outside (as much as we would like to).

Changing subject a little, after a decade of the Modernist Society – how do you think peoples’ attitudes to this sort of design have changed? Do people appreciate it a bit more now?

Without a doubt. When we first started we thought ourselves as just a bunch of cranks interested in some crazy, niche shit. We kind of laugh now about how much we sweated about doing our first MODERNIST badge and how nervous we were about ordering them – thinking that no one would buy it. We have now, literally, sold thousands of them and people keep buying them.

Stuff we were into 10 years ago is now pretty mainstream and you can buy £100 coffee table books about Brutalism and the like. I like to think we had a hand in people appreciating this stuff more – that’s kind of at the core of what we set out to achieve.

It’s a bit of a double-edged sword and I have to hold my tongue sometimes when some mainstream magazine or newspaper rings up and asks us to name ‘The 10 Best Brutalist Buildings’ and they clearly don’t get it.

But saying that, it’s great that a new generation of people are getting into what we’re in to – they don’t have many of the preconceptions and prejudices about Modernist architecture that many people from a certain generation have.

And as a final question, do you think your attitudes have changed at all since you started out? Is there anything you weren’t into then that you now appreciate?

Every day is a school day. We have been very lucky with the Society and the magazine to meet some super interesting people from all over the world and almost every day I’m finding out stuff I had no idea about. That’s what keeps it interesting and what keeps me doing it.

I have a pretty curious mind so am always keen to find out new stuff and I think we have only scratched the surface.

It’s been great setting up our other chapters in English cities but it would be great to take this international. There is so much amazing architecture and design around the world that I know nothing about and life is just too short. At this moment in time, in Britain, I think we need to making a real effort to be reaching out to our friends around the planet instead of becoming more isolated.

As far as my own attitude, I’m slowing coming round to Post Modernism. I used to hate Post Modernist architecture but some of it is growing on me.

It’s like anything – there was a lot of crap but the cream rises to the top and some of it was pretty good. We may even put on an exhibition on Post Modernism at our new place if anyone is willing to curate it…

The Modernist is now open at 58 Port St, Manchester, M1 2EQ
OLD STUFF – THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF HARM BOTMAN

Old Stuff – The Photography of Harm Botman

These photographs were scanned in from a fairly unassuming book about Dutch photography made sometime in the 80s. The book itself isn’t particular amazing – but these blurry, half-frame shots have always stuck in my head as a prime example of how photographs should look.

According to the book, they were taken by a man named Harm Botman, but no explanation or blurb is given apart from this vague sentence…

“Harm Botman has registered in a succession of different images, a part of his youth which has left a particular impression upon him.”

A browse around the internet doesn’t give much away either. I managed to find out that Harm’s brother Machiel is also an esteemed photographer (with a similar penchant for loose black and white action) and that he died in 2012 at the age of 60 – but beyond that, information is sparse.

To be honest I’m not really sure what more I need to know anyway. These mysterious shots stand up perfectly fine on their own.
OLD STUFF: CLEAN, SHAVEN

Old Stuff: Clean, Shaven

Quite often it takes a while to appreciate something. I remember when I first watched Clean, Shaven — after finding an old copy on DVD for a few measly quid in a second-hand shop — I didn’t really know what to make of it. The scenery was nice, but it was short and not much really happened.

After re-watching it late one night last week – it seems I used to be a bit of a moron. The film, (directed by Lodge Kerrigan, whose second film Claire Dolan is also worth a look) is in fact a true gem worthy of at least a few hundred words of positivity.

The basic story is that a schizophrenic man called Peter Winter (played by Peter Greene before he got typecast as a ‘bad guy’) has been released from a mental institution and is trying to find his daughter. He also might have killed a small girl and stuffed her in a big orange bag in the boot of his car.

Whilst it might be known to some as that film where Zed from Pulp Fiction tears off his own fingernail – this isn’t some daft gore-fest and, like the Marathon Man dentist scene or the bit with the drill in Pi, this infamous segment is just a brief slice of a film stuffed with potent imagery.

Mostly shot on an island in Canada (Miscou Island, if you’re wanting to book a trip) – the film features such classic roadside visuals as pylons, cheap motels and various dilapidated houses – the likes of which wouldn’t look out of place in one of William Christenberry’s family holiday slideshows.

Sound, the occasionally overlooked bedfellow of vision, also plays a huge part in showing Peter’s view of the world – with radio static and buzzing wires constantly invading his mind. The rusty vistas and scratchy sounds combine to make a fairly intense 72 minutes, and whilst it’s hardly lazy Sunday viewing – the best films often aren’t.

The relatively ‘low’ budget also adds to the appeal.

Usually when a film is described as ‘low-budget’, it turns out it was actually made for around ten million quid. To some bloated Russian oil baron that might sound like a drop in the heavily polluted ocean, but surely that’s still an absolute unattainable fortune that no one can ever imagine harvesting (never mind spending on vanity project like a film). That said, this film was reportedly made for around $60,000 dollars. That’s still a ridiculous amount of money – but it does seem slightly more every-day.

As a side note – have any daytime television game-show winners ever pumped their prize-money straight back into making a bold and individual work of independent cinema? Could a good run on Catchphrase, Pointless or Tenable provide the lump-sum needed to make the next Eraserhead?

But I digress. Clean, Shaven was made relatively cheaply and to be honest I don’t see how more money could improve it. I suppose the few practical effects could maybe have been done easier with a bit more dosh, but I don’t think they would have looked any better.

And anyway – making a dead glitzy, high-gloss film about a schizophrenic man driving around the rusty corners of a remote island in a bashed up old car with smashed in windows in search of his daughter would probably be a bit strange.

Clean, Shaven is available on DVD via Criterion.