Derek Ridgers

Derek Ridger Interview. For me, Derek’s pictures of 77/78 punk rock are iconic and essential in that the majority capture the club and gig-goers as much as the bands.  I also love the fact that he was an amateur and ventured out to take his shots and was in the right place at the right time at the Roxy, Vortex and other places.

Tell us about your background in music and photography; was it always music and photography?
No I went to art school in late 60s, I was a contemporary of Freddie Mercury, in fact we were friends at the same art school so I m no spring chicken. That was Ealing. I went there a few years after Pete Townsend left.  I did graphics for a couple of years, studied advertising and marketing and went to become an art director when I left art school. I worked for 10 years at agencies until, well when punk started it was 76.  I was taught photography when I was at art school but I was never very interested, I was the kind of guy that would avoid the lessons and find something else to do when I should have been being taught. By the time punk started in mid 76 I was quiet an amateur photographer and I used to take my camera to gigs because I found you could pretend to be a professional and go down the front and join in with the other photographers. In those days you never really got many photographers at gigs.

Where you always into your music then?
Yeah music came first for me before photography

What was your likes then?
I was very much into 60s music then, and now in fact. I like the Doors, Jefferson Airplane, Mother of Invention, the Byrds, Crosby Stills and Nash and although I didn’t see the Byrds I saw all of the rest of them.

What had made you change your mind then?
It was somewhere between, well I think the Sex Pistols started in ’75 and I started to see a few punk bands early ’76, like the Vibrators at Kingston Poly. And that probably was the summer of ’76, the thing is I must admit I didn’t really like the music but I thought it was quite exciting. The thing that change me from photographing the bands to the kids was the kids; they went mad at this Vibrators gig. I was at the front photographing the band and thought I would love to turn around and photograph the kids because they are more interesting than the band, but I didn’t quite have the gumption at that point. I was mid 20s then and I was always really shy, until I took up the camera and became professional. I am not shy now, the opposite if anything, but still not completely outgoing unless I have to be, having a camera of course does help change that.

I grew up in West London where there were a lot of gangs and you had to watch your back. It was only a few years after I was a teenager and when I saw these punks to begin with I thought it could be dangerous but in actual fact it wasn’t very dangerous. I mean punks always had a big ego as did skinheads and teddy boys and once they found out you weren’t gonna be selling their pictures to the newspapers they were o.k. so I got on fine with them all.

So how did you become involved with going down to the Roxy Club?
Well I was very keen on music as I said, as soon as I started to get into the music a little bit I wanted to check out more of the bands so I would see more of the fans. It was certainly the look of the fans that made me want to take pictures at first. So I went down on the opening night which was late December ’76.

That was Generation X?
That’s right

Do you remember anything of that?
Yeah I do remember what it was like that first night because it wasn’t all that much different from the club it had been, which was Chaguaramas. There was still a few of the old trannies there. These old trannies still thought it was going to be Chaguaramas and then the punks came down. I remember being in the queue that evening and there were a few faces, because I was going to clubs quite a lot I’d gone to the Nashville where they had a few proto type punk bands like the 101ers and the Hammersmith Gorillas who had a punk attitude without really being punk bands. Ultimately I saw quiet a few bands at the Nashville as well. I’d gone there in 75/76 and it was certainly going that way, so by the time the Roxy opened I was already quite keen. There was this stall in a market just on the end of Gerard street, that sold all the early punk records, it might have been called Rock On. That was the only place I knew of though to get stuff at that point. I bought Spiral Scratch there and quite a few of the early punk records.

I think there was probably about a hundred people in the queue, but when you got in there it wasn’t particularly packed. In fact I never saw it packed, not like some clubs get. Some clubs that had bands on like the Marquee in Wardour Street, once you got in there you couldn’t move; You’d have to stay where you were. Also I went to see Siouxsie and the Banshees at the Nashville and it was so packed that I got urinated over. The guy behind me was disabled and couldn’t move. I wasn’t particularly happy but I did understand.  But I think he should have gone before he came out. The Roxy was never that crowded, but I used to always be at the front, pretty much on stage.

How did your subjects respond to being photographed?
Most of them were fine, when I take pictures of people I like to use a bit of charm. I am not right in peoples faces and I’m genuinely interested in people. There are people that I got to know in ’78 that I still see now occasionally. I have made some lifelong friends from that point, people that I met in clubs etc.

Fashion was so crucial to punk making it photogenic, what do you think of that?
I completely agree with you; one of the things that attracted me to punk was that there were quite a few girls running around in underwear wearing suspenders. I didn’t have a project or book to do, I just felt a compulsion to photograph these people. The music I got quite into but that didn’t last so long. I can’t remember the last time I played one of my punk albums.

At the front was there spitting and can throwing?
Yes there was lots of spitting, and stuff like that, they might have spat at me a few times and I might have had a little bit of aggression but not much.

In the early days was there a buzz?
I have been to very few clubs that had a buzz like the first few months at the Roxy. On a good night it was pretty crazy just like walking into a painting. There was everything going on there, people rolling about on the floor. There was always a good inch or two of beer and various other liquids lining the floor. It wasn’t a big place and it was quite dark. There was light on stage, the DJ booth and around the bar that was pretty much it. You could go in the corners and there would be no light at all. There were a few mirrors round the edge of it. It was a time when people were producing there own punk clothing and you couldn’t go to Miss Selfridge and get bondage trousers so most people made their own clobber.

When young people are making there own things and trying to express themselves, that’s often when its at its most interesting. Now You can go to Camden and buy any outfit and pretend to be that it doesn’t mean you are a punk or goth just because you can afford to buy the gear. But at the early months at the Roxy, those punks were dressing in what they really wanted to dress in. The Sex Pistols used to be down there;  I never saw them play at the Roxy but they were always hanging about, but this was a time when I was still to shy to go up to them. Gene October was always there, he was friendly but had an aggressive side. Friendly when you talked to him though.

What were the best bands you saw there?
The ones I enjoyed most were the Buzzcocks, Adverts, Siouxsie & the Banshees and I also saw the Slits a lot; they were very good.

They had a chaotic stage appearance
Yes they did but I thought they were very sexy as well. I do have a salacious side to me, that probably leads me to go to certain places and into certain things that if I didn’t have that I wouldn’t do. But I rang up Viv Albertine and said “I would really like to take some pictures of you.” She said “What do you want to do it for?” and I said “I haven’t really got any reason”, and she came into my office and met me and I managed to blag a photo session out of her.

What was the crowd reaction to them at the Roxy?
It was always the same you would get half completely into them and half that wasn’t. It was all very loose and raucous. I think there is a picture in the book 100 Nights At The Roxy took the end of the night with the floor covered with old cans, shoes and stuff like that.

I reckon the most exciting band I saw down there though was probably X Ray Spex and they really made a racket. Oh and Cherry Vanilla, but that was from another perspective. She was quite sexy and she had a T-shirt with lick me written on the front.

But the music was terrible
Oh I know it was terrible, and her backing band was the Police. I forgive a pretty face quite a lot.

Where you their when the live album was recorded?
I don’t know there was one night when the Buzzcocks played and there were five bands on one night. That was probably the maddest night; the most crazy. There was some pogoing, and a lot of pretend fighting, and beer spraying, stuff like that. I think there were people down there that night that I never saw before or since. It was an atmosphere that was quite dark and dangerous, but also quite sexy and that was it at its best, when it was pretty full. There were other clubs that never had the same atmosphere like the Vortex. There was always a fight every time I went to the Vortex; a little more of a violent vibe because it was a bigger place.

That was a complete lie for a start as I ended up helping them put the book together and they did not have many pictures at all. If I had never rung him up and blagged my way into the project they would not have had any pictures I think.

What did you think of the 100 Nights At The Roxy when it was finished?
I thought it was great when I saw it, but then all the pages fell out. I don’t suppose there is a copy of it in existence where the pages haven’t fallen out. They were falling out at the time it was published; that was the sick thing. It was cheap glue or the wrong glue that was used to bind the pages in. That sort of binding is called perfect binding – well that was very imperfect! Michael Dempsey was a sweet guy but like all publishers at that time didn’t want to pay but unlike them he did pay!

I still think it’s the best book on punk rock
It gets across the grubbiness of the place.

Did you see any dismal bands at the Roxy?
Even the best bands were verging on rubbish at times.  I liked the Cortinas and Penetration.  I saw them a few times. Penetration were the only band I got to know that were friendly. I got to know Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Slits but neither were particularly friendly, but then that was part of that act; I think part of the punk fashion. The two that left the band were reasonably friendly but Siouxsie and Steve Severin never had anything to say to me. It’s funny some people are like that. Sometimes you can photograph someone once and 10 years later they remember your name and greet you like a long lost mate; Bono’s like that, but I photographed Nick Cave about 7 times and every time I come to photograph him again it’s like he never met me before. It’s funny how some people are friendly while other are not, well Siouxsie and Steve are definitely in the not very friendly area. Siouxsie has this manner where I think she thinks she’s brighter than anybody else and everyone is trying to shaft her over something. That’s the feeling I always got from her.

Were there any bouncers at the front?
No, there was no space between the crowd and the band. I was at the side about 3 feet from the singer’s head, if you had been further back you would have been right in the melee. I went to see Penetration at Brunel University and there was a skinhead gang there. They stormed the stage and I was in between the stage and the riot so a whole lot of people jumped on my back and my knees virtually bent back the wrong way. I thought I was gonna break my legs that day. They jumped on the stage and trashed the bands equipment so the band went off obviously,  and that was the end of the gig.

Was there many memorable incidents that stick out?
Gene October asked me to take a photo of him and his band, and as soon as I got my camera out he threw beer all over me, just as one of his little jokes I think.

I know you have some reservations but I really like the photos in there, I think they capture the time
The prints are not very good because I didn’t do the prints at that point. I’d get someone else to do them. Wasn’t quite Boots but nearly. If they are printed nicely and cleaned up they might be better than they seem to be in the book. There might be a lot more tones in the dark areas.

They do come across as being very grainy in the book in some places
Yes, but they are probably very grainy anyway and there wasn’t a good range of tones in that book which was probably because the screen used to print it was quiet coarse. It wasn’t a high quality bit of printing by any means. If they were printed nicer the pictures may seem better.

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Interviews Punk77 – January 2006 | April 2020

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