He is very tall.  At one point I stood on an apple box, which is the film industry name for a box that is used to temporarily support anyone or anything that needs to be supported or propped up, to get myself up to his height.

“Aah....the old Sarkozy step,” going on to tell us how the former French president would stand on one for group photos with other world leaders.

He even stayed for lunch after we had finished, yet there was an ever present, gossamer thin, bubble of unknowableness encompassing him.  It recalled Kitty Muggeridge’s 1960’s quote about David Frost.

‘He rose without trace.’

I mention that I was at a barbecue at the house of a mutual friend the previous summer and had noticed that the barbecue they were cooking on was his, a gift from Barack and Michelle Obama when Obama was President and he was the occupant of No.10. It had a little brass plaque on it.

“To The Right Honourable David Cameron MP and Mrs Samantha Cameron on the occasion of your visit to The White House.”

“Aaaah yes, The Obamacue!”

I asked him if he had to pay for it when he left office because it was a formal gift to him as Prime Minister, not a personal gift to David Cameron.

“Yes, I did have to pay to keep it but fortunately it had attrited rather a lot by the time I left, so I got it for a knock down price.”

I’ve developed techniques, methods and ways to find the subject, to know them better than I did at the start of the encounter.  By making myself a little bit dumb, benevolently curious, unthreatening, I can draw someone out.  The man who left after 4 hours was as much of a mystery as the man who arrived earlier that morning.

One small moment that stays with me, more for its mad incongruousness than anything else.

Off of the main studio is a small room for dressing, changing, make up and peace.  It has a single window which overlooks Kensal Rise Cemetery.  During an idle moment, as my assistants adjusted the lighting out in the main studio, we were in that room together.  He stood in silence at the window, looking at the view outside, the great expanse of Victorian life and death laid before him.  He poses a tentative question:

“Have you, er, have you seen ‘Fleabag’?

“Er..yes….yes I have.”

‘Why has he brought that up?’ I silently ask myself. I join him at the window and take in the full scope of the graveyard.  Then I realised why.

“Oh yes, I think they filmed some of it in there, some scenes with her sister.”

“The relationship with the sister is pure genius.”

The prolonged silence continues, so I leap to fill it with something.  Something profound.

“You know,  I really fancy her actually, Phoebe Waller-Bridge.”

DC continues to stare out of the window but gently nods his head, as if in agreement, and offers this response:

.

“Yep………. yep, yep.”

.

And we rejoin the silence, eyeing up the vast plains of mortality below, before he departs with his Special Branch protection detail, back into the west London traffic.

The hotel meeting room they have given us is approximately twelve inches narrower than the backdrop we’ve brought, a nine foot wide Colorama in Storm Grey, standard issue. The only way to make it work is to set it up at a diagonal in the room and shoot through the door from the corridor.

The shoot is due to start at 5.55pm. I have eight minutes to get a cover and an opener. It’s eight minutes, I later discover, because apparently his day is broken down into two minute slots. Minutes eight to ten are to allow him the time to move to his next appointment in the hotel. By 5.45 we are ready. Time to test the lighting. Tom, my assistant, turns off the room lights. Ten seconds later they come back on again. Damn, there must be a motion sensor in here. The room lights are as powerful as our photographic lighting. We try several more times but the same thing happens. We will have to trust our judgement that we have the power relationship between the four lights right.

I had been told in advance to not try and engage him in conversation. When I suggest I could mention that I listened to his podcast series, ‘UNCONFUSED’, his consigliere interjects with a ‘talk to the hand’ move and exclaims ‘Don’t even bother.’ More out of weariness than aggression.

Now it’s 5.57. No matter what, he is leaving at 6.03pm. At 5.58 Bill Gates and New Statesman editor Jason Cowley emerge from the interview. Jason enthusiastically bigs me up to Bill, tells him I’m great….quick. Being quick is the ultimate compliment in this landscape.

The adrenal state at this point is off the chart. I dread to think what my blood pressure is at.

He gesticulates at the apple box I’ve placed vertically on the backdrop.

‘Here?’

He sits on it. I check my settings one last time and Tom confirms everything is correct.

I open with, ‘I’ve been told to not even try and engage you in conversation.’

He does not reply.

I begin to direct him. Being free of having to talk meaningfully is liberating. Simple directions. Lean forward, lean back, turn this way, move that hand etc. When photographing people who wear glasses you’ve got to pay big attention to the danger of reflections. You’re managing so many variables and challenges and trying to communicate with the subject AND trying to get a portrait that’s good enough for a cover.

A few seconds later I turn to one of his people and ask, ‘Can you give me a two minute warning when we’ve got that much time left?’

‘Sure.’

She then looks down at her phone, ‘Oh…actually you only have one minute left.’

In my head, I’m screaming at myself to get something from him that displays a hint of character or individuality.

She is counting me down. ‘Twenty seconds.’

With 15 seconds left I exhort him to ‘Give us a wave before you go, Bill!’

His face lights up into a warm and playful chuckle. His hand comes up to do an almost cartoonishly over the top wave goodbye. Then he is up and gone.

Tom looks at the metadata on the images and declares:

‘Four minutes fifty seconds. 103 frames.’

Remembering the great David Bowie on his birthday.

These pictures were taken on an afternoon in July 1999 for the Sunday Times Magazine.

After the appointment was cancelled twice, each time arriving at the studio door with several cases of equipment, only to be turned away due to unexpected circumstances, I finally got to do this on the third try.

I was told I’d have 5 minutes to do a sit down portrait with him in the lobby of the studio, the Chung King House of Metal, aka the Abbey Road of hip hop, on Varick Street in New York.

However, after the portrait was done, when I was packing up, his assistant Coco came back to the lobby and said,

‘David says that if you’d like to go through into the studio you can spend a bit of time in there taking photographs while he works with the other musicians.’

My five minutes ended up becoming about an hour and a half.

What can I say that hasn’t already been said?

He was funny, he laughed a lot, he sounded like he was doing an impression of himself.

You could hear Bromley, his voice took me back to being on the school bus in the mid 80s. Our driver always had the radio on and there was a guy on the Steve Wright Radio One afternoon show who impersonated him. He smoked constantly and he told really indiscreet tales about other famous people. Surgically sharp observations on the nature of fame and ego, including a story about the internal stage politics of Roxy Music.

He noticed me humming his song ‘The Laughing Gnome’ ever so quietly to myself as I was photographing him and said,

“I’ve got better ones than that y’know.”

When we were shooting the initial ‘five minute portrait’ I told him that, growing up in Surrey, I once spent a whole summer in my late teens acting as a driver for a local surgeon who’d lost his licence for drink driving. My job was to drive him to the entrance gates of Orpington hospital five days a week, whereupon I would get out and he’d drive in as if he had arrived entirely under his own steam. I’d then spend all day kicking around Orpington bored out of my mind, dreaming of a life more exciting than this, and on Fridays I’d get a bus to nearby Bromley to see what new releases were on at the cinema there.

Maybe we bonded over Bromley and that’s why he gave me more time? Who knows, but it’s nice to think that might have been the reason.

1982

The last day of a family summer holiday in France.  I was 14 years old. My dad finally let me do the thing I had been itching to have a go at all fortnight. He let me hold his new Pentax ME Super camera and take one picture with it. One single picture, make sure you look before you leap.

I loved it. I loved the buttons and dials and metallic feeling of it. The mottled surface of the casing, making the grip more stable.  The strange symbols, the odd, illogical numbers and markings, the way I could frame the world to my liking through the viewfinder and bring things in and out of focus. I was a shy kid.  Having the camera up to my face allowed me to hide from the world and confront it at the same time.

The camera had a gold sticker on it with the logo of the Asahi Optical Company of Japan. It said “PASSED” in block capital letters, as if to say that this item was of such complicated and vital construction it required extra approval to leave the factory from those whose name it bore. It was relevant.

I have no recollection of what I photographed in Brittany in 1982. I only remember that I wanted do it again. Bit by bit my dad began to trust me with the camera, and I was allowed to use it more often. Eventually, he seemed to stop using it altogether and it became mine, in all but name, by osmosis.

Sometime later, months or years, the memory and recollection of time and place is compressed by the passing of time itself, I was in the school library and came across a book, ‘Black & White Memories’, by a photographer called David Bailey. I cannot tell you enough what an evangelical, Saul on the road to Damascus moment this was. The pictures in that book were the key to a door that opened into a room that I didn’t even know existed. A room that was wholly new, yet which felt like the most comfortable place in the world.

This was a room where photography didn’t have to be weddings and repetitive family portraits. Oh! You can do that?  You can do that?  You can do this? You can go there?  You can meet these people?  You can meet those people, who, incidentally, are quite different to these people.

The stark white backgrounds inside a black frame.  The clean lines. The way he cut off the top of peoples’ heads and went straight to the eyes. Then the complete lack of ambiguity when contact with the eyes was made.  The confidence. He had a style of photographing pairs of people and getting their heads to tilt in opposite directions, which created a symmetry that was utterly hypnotic.  There was a rhythmic flow.  It was music in visual form. The words of Ian Dury’s ‘Sweet Gene Vincent’ come to mind:

White face, black shirt

White socks, black shoes

Black hair, white Strat

Bled white, died black

All extraneous details eliminated. No ambiguity. No frills, no fuss, no flim, no flam.

At this point, I had no context for Bailey’s place in the whole scheme.  He happened to be the starting point but I knew I needed more and from there I learned about lineage, about Penn, Avedon, Cartier Bresson, Eve Arnold, Ralph Gibson, Bruce Weber, Helmut Newton, Erwin Blumenfeld, Lee Miller, Jacques Lartigue, August Sander, Paul Strand, Joel Meyerowitz, William Klein, Arnold Newman, Elliot Erwitt, Lee Friedlander, each one opening a further door to their own influences and persuasions.

In time, my interests and tastes in photography have travelled across a lot of ocean but Bailey’s work and story have remained as the Greenwich meridian of my photographic core. Even now, when I look at his work all these years after first finding it, I feel that I am back in my home port.

2011

It’s 1st March, St. David’s Day, but I’m certain that the David I’m going to meet is no saint. Somewhere on the walk from Euston to his studio off the Gray’s Inn Road I step over a crushed daffodil on the pavement.

Of all the people I know in this business, every one of them seems to have worked or spent time with him. They all have their stories and most of these involve extreme language or confrontations of one sort or another. I’m the only person I know that has never met him or worked with him or have any tales to tell.

Ascending the stairs into Bailey’s skylight flooded studio, I’m immediately struck by the life that emanates from it.  I’ve been asked by a British newspaper to get together with him and discuss the way the world of photography and print publications has changed in the last half century.  Bailey requested a preliminary meeting to decide if he liked me enough to go ahead with the idea, so this is a pop-in.  Cup of tea, quick chat, see how we get on, leave.

Bailey’s gaff, and it really is a gaff, has all the timely grime of his 30 odd year occupancy. Polaroids, one signed by Jarvis Cocker, “I am Jarvis xx (it’s true)”, bits of weird equipment, postcards, ephemera, a cage of exotic birds, skulls, human skulls, animal skulls, a skull that looks like it was designed by George Lucas, a picture of Mao. Is it a Warhol? I don’t know. Bailey with Ronnie Wood, Bailey with McCartney, Penelope Tree as a sort of Mickey Mouse King of Clubs, a picture of Bailey’s assistant, Mark, pulling onto the back of Bailey’s trousers as he leans down from the top of a freight container to take a picture in Afghanistan.  The place is consumed with life and vitality.

My first sight of Bailey is of him sitting on a stool with a cape around his neck as a young, dark, handsome man cuts his hair. His voice has that familiar, slightly high-pitched, old school Cockney lilt to it. He sounds exactly like he did in the Olympus ads he appeared when I was a kid.

“Hello, are you Chris?”

Yes, I say, I am indeed.

“Siddown, siddown, has anyone offered you a drink? Tea? Coffee? This is Kashmir, he’s cutting my hair. What’s that book you’ve got? Is it any good?”

I’m made to feel welcome as Bailey includes me in the ongoing studio conversation with Mark and his P.A., Danielle. It goes on like this for a while. People come and go. His wife Catherine comes in and we all have lunch. Their daughter, Paloma, is floating around the place, doing various bits and pieces. It’s people sitting around talking about stuff. Bob Dylan is on the stereo. Bailey loves Dylan.

He says something about the Kray twins (“Ron and Reg”) and their mother, Violet. I mention that my granddad was from Vallance Road, the same street as the Krays, and that his parents were killed by the last V2 that hit London in March 1945. 

“A V2 hit my local cinema when I was a kid. I remember being very upset. I thought Hitler had killed Mickey Mouse.”

Kashmir finishes the haircut, packs his scissors away, is the recipient of a warm farewell from all and leaves. I make a comment to Bailey about what a great name ‘Kashmir’ is for a hairdresser.

“Oh that’s not his real name, that’s just what I call him.”

“What’s his real name then?”

“Oh fuck it, I dunno, Gianni or something. I just call him Kashmir because he looks like a Kashmiri carpet salesman.”

The conversation goes back to my great grandparents.  Bailey asks me if they were Jewish and I say that they were.

“So you’re Jewish!”

“No. After the war my granddad anglicised his name and my mum was brought up Christian. We are the black sheep of the family.”

“You married?” 

“Yeah.”

“Your wife Jewish?”

No. English. Posh English.  Her family goes back to the fourteen hundreds.”

“Hmmmm. Shiksa.” 

A Shiksa is an attractive gentile girl who might be considered a temptation to Jewish men or boys. He spits out the word as if awestruck at the audacity of the girl to tempt me away from the faith.

“I’m not even Jewish! How can my wife be a Shiksa?” 

“I once thought I might be partly Jewish. Turned out I’m not.”

He asks me how I got into photography. 

“When I was a kid, in the school library I found a copy of ‘David Bailey’s Box of Pinups’.

“Really? Did you nick it?”

“No!”

“You should’ve done. That’s worth about twenty grand now, a complete set.”

 I realise I’ve made a mistake. It wasn’t ‘Box of Pinups’, it was ‘Black & White Memories’.

“Oh. Nah, that’s not worth anything. Terrible printing.”

I go on to explain that, for me, photography was not the end in itself. It’s always been the conduit that has allowed me to meet and talk to interesting people.

“Yeah? You’re in the wrong job then mate. You should’ve been a hotel receptionist.”

Time passes and the ‘quick chat’ has turned into 3 hours. I’m getting anxious about the fact that I’ve got to go and pick up my daughter from school.

“Bailey, this has been great. It’s been such a treat to come here and meet you. Thanks for having me but I’ve really got to go.”

“Go? You haven’t seen my darkroom yet.”

Now is my chance to turn the tables.

“Go on, then.  Quickly. Five minutes and then I’m going.”

We go downstairs and into the darkroom.  We stand around in the red light while he prepares a negative for printing. This is where he seems to really want to be more than anywhere, in the dark, on his own, making prints. Outside, the exotic birds are squawking relentlessly.

I deliberately haven’t pressed him on the reason I am here in the first place, the newspaper conversation. I didn’t want it to get in the way of how much I’d enjoyed just hanging out with him and talking about photography, as well as all sorts of other things. It was a great afternoon, everything that this life can deliver on its best days and nothing like what it would have delivered had I become a hotel receptionist.

He seems to sense this and says one of the most generous spirited things I’ve ever heard.  This from someone whose opinion, as hard as I might try and pretend doesn’t matter to me, really does matter to me.

“I’ve enjoyed it today, Chris. Before you came, I had a look at your work and I like it. I like your portraits. It’s been a pleasure to spend time with you. I don’t know if I want to do this newspaper thing but if I don’t it won’t be because of you. I’d like to stay in touch and maybe we can do something else together. Even if you are a bit serious.”

And with that, we bid goodbye.

The Something Else

Sure enough, Bailey does not want to talk to another photographer about photography or publishing and this is fine with me. I had the conversation I’d always wanted to have on our meet, so I feel like I got all the juice out of the orange without having to deal with the pips.

Instead, he has asked me to take his portrait for an interview he is doing on his own work.

I take my two favourite assistants, Sarah and Andras, and we discuss what we are going to do before we arrive. I tell them that, as a matter of pride, I do not want to get one derogatory, sarcastic comment from Bailey about the way we have set ourselves up.

I realise this is futile when Mark, his assistant, wanders over to have a look at our lights.

“Ooh, just you wait till Bailey sees this. He’s gonna rip the piss out of you.”

 When Bailey arrives he doesn’t quite do that but he does have a good prod and poke at everything, almost to see if our setup is going to stay up by itself, or collapse and mess up his studio.

I give him a look and start taking pictures.

“If you leave it alone it won’t fall over.”

 “What shutter speed you got there?”

“Sixtieth.”

“You sure? Sounds like a thirtieth to me.”

One of the things about Bailey is that he laughs a lot. He’s got opinions, often to the contrary of other peoples’ opinions, but in the process, he laughs a lot. He is very funny, which is why he thinks I’m too serious.  And I don’t think I’m serious at all.

We knock the whole thing off in 15-20 minutes. I like doing it quickly. It’s like a plateful of food.  You have to eat it while it’s hot. Too long out of the oven and the moment is gone.

“That’s it. I’ve got it.”

“You sure? You didn’t give me any direction.”

“What would have been the point? You wouldn’t have done anything I asked you anyway. I wanted you as you are. I’ll work around you. I like it like that. I find things I didn’t know I was looking for.”

 We sit on his sofa at one end of the studio, side by side, in silence, watching Mark and someone else lean a ladder on a wall and climb up it to a big shelf above to fetch a Colorama backdrop roll.  I look at the painting on the wall, a huge painting of butterflies. Mark’s ladder bisects it and he climbs up past it to the top.

“Is that a Damien Hirst?” I ask. 

“Yeah.  He gave it to me.  Worth about a million quid, that.  Well, it would be, if that lot didn’t keep leaning their fucking ladders on it.”

In Milan to photograph Vivienne Westwood before her 2012 autumn menswear show. We are given the use of a plain, red carpeted room.  There is some nice daylight from the window on the left-hand side. The perfect set up for a simple, clean portrait.  Also in the room are a dozen red velvet covered dining chairs, plush and well upholstered.

The Dame enters.  She seems ambivalent at what we are about to do.  It’s all part of the circus, a line item on a spreadsheet somewhere.  An exercise in schedule fulfilment.

Her publicist explains that she is being shadowed by a group of fashion students from China. Did I mind if they stayed in the room to observe the shoot?

I have placed one of the plush, well upholstered, red velvet covered dining chairs in front of the wall and she has already spotted it.

“Here?”

I realise I need to be at the same height.  I cross the room to fetch another of the dining chairs, all as equally plush, well upholstered, and solidly velvet as each other.

The observers continue to observe, obviously gripped by the ritual.

The silence in the room, it’s an overpowering scent. As I walk back across the room, carrying the chair, I break it by saying something about how happy it makes me anytime I am able to do my job sitting down, and I carefully place the chair the right distance from Vivienne.

Finally, ready to work, I lower myself onto the seat of the plush, well upholstered, red velvet covered dining chair, identical in every way to the one on which Vivienne Westwood is seated.

In one tenth of a second my body and entire world implodes.  I am flat on the carpet and every leg, joint and stick of the plush, well upholstered, red velvet covered dining chair has been reduced to its constituent parts.

The publicist rushes forward, her face a silent scream of fear and agony.

“OH MY GOD! ARE YOU OK?  VIVIENNE?  ARE YOU OK?”

There is a small pause before Vivienne Westwood quietly speaks, her Derbyshire meets Manchester accent untainted by 40 odd years of global adoration and transnational interactions.

“Oh yeah.  I’m fine.  It’s him I’m worried about.”

She nods her head minutely in my direction and the Chinese students write it down.

Late March 2003, a Friday, I am living in New York City. Been here for almost three years, my trips back to London confined to Christmas and the two months in the summer when the concrete and glass serves only to exacerbate the fetid and oppressive humidity of the place, rat people darting from one air conditioned refuge to another.

All my life, The Beatles have been here. They saturate my earliest memories. A babysitter playing ‘Help’ on my dad’s stereo that lived inside a glass cabinet. Just the sound of ‘The Night Before’, the reverb, colours my impression of the sixties as a time of space, light and opportunity. Young men bombing about a deserted late-night London in Minis, with beautiful girls in miniskirts and knee high boots, before going back to Habitat flats with record players on the floor.

I became obsessed with everything about them: their accents, their wit, their hair, especially their hair. Even today I can have deep conversations with like-minded types on what defines peak hair for The Beatles. My thoughts on this can change from one day to the next but widely speaking I put it somewhere between mid 1965 and early 1966 – from the making of Rubber Soul to the making of Revolver. Although, interestingly, I think Paul McCartney had a hair resurgence during the recording of the White Album. For Lennon, I think peak hair could be the Rubber Soul sleeve. George never stopped having great hair from 1963 to 1969.

David Bailey’s iconic 1965 portrait of Lennon & McCartney was both my photographic and musical ground zero. There are plenty of other great pictures of them but there’s nothing that comes as close to capturing that mid-sixties stylistic & monochromatic graphic austerity. Its insouciant directness, a one note symphony.

Now I am in London in late March 2003, a Friday, over from New York just for this one thing. I’m in the tenth year of my career as a photographer and I have been commissioned to photograph McCartney. All the way over on the plane, all the way here in the car, I keep reminding myself that this is one of the reasons why I became a photographer. To meet, spend time with, and document the people who define the era in which we live.

He’s got a world tour of arenas coming up so he’s rehearsing with his band in the now demolished London Arena.  This is so they can all get the feel for an arena sized space.  I have been told to arrive at 8am and set up in time to shoot McCartney at 10am.  The entire place has been set up as if for a show that is going to happen, but which never will.  There’s lighting, full sound, catering for all the crew, even a wardrobe department which takes care of all Paul’s stage clothes and sartorial needs.  The arena floor is completely empty.  There are no seats installed.  It’s just a vast open space. We load all our gear in and build a full photographic studio right there on the floor in front of the stage.  We are no more than twenty feet from stardom.  I have been guaranteed half an hour with him.

10am comes and 10am goes. My assistants and I sit around for hours, mere yards from McCartney as he runs through song after song with his band, his entire live sound set up being given the full workout. My own private show. It is a wonderful way to spend a day, doing nothing but watch Paul McCartney play the hits while I wait for him to give me half an hour in front of my camera.  I die contented.

Finally, around 5pm I am told that he is ready and he comes over to my pop-up studio in the middle of the seatless auditorium. We are perhaps three minutes into it.  I am barely even out of neutral and into first gear when he says,

“Sorry, I’ve got to go…doing a live thing at the BBC. You’ve got enough, yeah?”

“But I was told we’d have half an hour.”

“I know but I just got behind on it all today and this BBC thing is live, so I’ve really gotta go. Anyway, you’ve got enough, haven’t you?”

Now or never.

“Well, not really, no, and to be honest I’m a bit disappointed. I came all the way over from New York for this. I was told to be here at 8am and ready at 10am, which I was. I sat here all day right in front of you and now you’re telling me you have to go.”

“You came from New York?“

“I live there.”

“New York, wow.  Ok, fair enough. When are you going back?”

“Tuesday.”

“What are you doing on Monday?”

I shrugged an arms out, open palmed shrug, along with a pleading, yet hopeful face.

“Nothing.”

“Ok, I’ll tell you what, leave all your stuff here over the weekend.  Our people will look after it.  Come back on Monday and I’ll give you half an hour then.”

“Really? Half an hour?”

“Definitely, I promise.”

“Ok, thank you, that’s a deal.”

We shook hands on it and, as he gathered up his bag and coat, he told me about his first trip to New York in February 1964.  The trip that kicked off American Beatlemania.  Even now, he had not forgotten how utterly life changing the experience had been and he articulated the sense of awe that it instilled in them all, “Like...wowwwwwww!”

In the meantime, Paul’s car had been driven onto the arena floor and, as he climbed in the back, I had the pleasure of this brief exchange with one of the most famous people to have lived in the twentieth century:

“Bye then, Paul. Have a good weekend, I’ll see you Monday.”

“Yep, you too, see you Monday.”

All weekend, I realise that I have the advantage now. He’s bound himself to a commitment and promised me my half hour.

Come Monday, McCartney’s publicist is there to smooth things out. All is fine. Time is no problem but he’s not wearing the right clothes. I beg him to put on a dark round neck sweater and a dark grey pinstriped jacket on top of the white t-shirt he’s turned up in. He’s happy to oblige.

To give him an idea of what I have in mind, I mention my other favourite photographic series of The Beatles, after Bailey’s Lennon & McCartney session. It was four individual portraits, taken by Richard Avedon in August 1967, that he joined together as a single montage.  Black and white, shot on a very dark background, all four of them in dark clothing, it is often referred to as the ‘Mount Rushmore’ image.  Paul struggles to remember but I describe it and he catches up.  That, I explain, is my inspiration today.

How funny, I think, while he puts on the sweater.  Something that to me, and millions of others, is the dictionary definition of iconic, yet the subject himself had to be reminded of it.

We go over to the studio set up that has been in place since Friday. He’s in a good mood.  Here is my theory. I’ve always had the sense that James Paul McCartney, throughout his life, has never stopped being an ambitious 1950s Liverpool grammar school boy.  He’s competitive, focused, has a relentless work ethic, and likes to achieve something every day. His persona, his public persona, the one we all know, is a front that he has developed as a coping mechanism as the years have passed. I don’t think it’s a conscious front. It’s a part of him as much as his hands are a part of him. Underneath all that breezy, winsome charm is a surgical ruthlessness that has kept him and his interests aligned. It is this that I want to get on film.

Our half hour ticks by and I’m getting nothing different from what he’s given every other photographer for the last forty years. While I work, he chats a lot.  It’s nice but it’s also distracting because he is almost unwilling to go where I want to lead him.  In between these chatty moments he serves up a series of autopilot poses.

Inside, I’m losing altitude, I can see a plane just going down and down and down. The ground’s getting bigger in the window all the time when, finally, I just say it out loud:

“No, too much. Much too much. Do less. You’re an honest man, you can be sure of your achievements.”

“What’s the matter? You don’t like a bit of whimsy?”

Outside, the second Gulf War is only a few days old. I pause for a second, then understatedly say,

“Not when there’s a war on, Paul.”

And like that, it’s all there. The thin layer of sea covering the edge of the beach fizzles into the sand and everything I believed to be concealed underneath is revealed.

The public McCartney we have known all our lives is gone, the eyes narrow and, the thing I remember most, his jawline tightens and clenches. For a few seconds his face has gone from soft marshmallow cherub to steel reinforced granite. Right there, for two frames, locked in silver nitrate, he hates me, and I love him for it.

Postscript

Not long after I took these portraits, I got a message that he was interested in buying the pictures outright. Copyright, negatives and all. My paranoid worry was that he disliked them enough to want them removed from the public domain, though whether that was the real reason or not, I will never know.

I thought about it for a while and then politely declined the offer, explaining that my rights in my photography were the equivalent to his publishing rights in his songs. Whatever you do, DO NOT give away your publishing. Besides, trade ownership of your work for a payment and once the money has gone, what do you have left? 

A year or two on, back in London, I was cycling home from the West End one summer night, about 2am. I’d had a good evening and was merrily trundling along, enjoying the quiet melancholy of the deserted streets. I came through Regent’s Park, round Lord’s Cricket Ground, heading north. The streets were completely deserted, save for one couple on the pavement to my left up ahead as I turned right into Cavendish Avenue, where Paul has had a house since the mid-60s. As I got closer, the slight upward incline making it a bit harder than it should have been, I sensed that the man seemed pleasantly inebriated, his arm around the woman, both consumed in each other’s company. As I drew almost level, I could hear his voice and realised who it was. I chugged past, standing up on my pedals and turning to clock them all in one move as I went. He looked at me and in the most outrageous comedy Scouse accent, bellowed, “EY! GO EASY D’AIR LAD! KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE ROADDD WILL YA!”

The woman laughed and I nodded as I gave them both a little salute.

I continued on and at the end of Cavendish Avenue made the left turn into Circus Road, en route to a two wheeled, late-night glide across the Abbey Road zebra crossing, taking exactly the same journey that he has taken on foot to that studio a million times.

A thought drifted across the inside of my head:

‘How about that? Paul McCartney will never, ever know that that guy on the bike was the photographer who turned down his offer to buy some pictures that he hates.’

Post-postscript

Twelve years later, I am contacted by someone at the publsihers Hodder & Stoughton.  They are publishing a collection of Paul du Noyer interviews with McCartney. Paul, it is believed, has interviewed Macca more than any other journalist, over a 35 year span.  The book is to be called ‘Conversations With McCartney’ and the man himself has the final say on the cover image.  He would very much like to use one of my portraits of him from 2003. 

Time, how mercurial she can be.  Viewed through the prism of a twelve year gap, he had come to see those pictures as something special after all, which in its own way was the greatest reward of all.