All rock’n’roll is a combination of two things….music and image. You can write all you like about an album but it won’t change whether it’s good or bad. But image is different…whether it’s sex or rebellion pictures sell records and a lifestyle. You can try to describe the Sex Pistols circa ’76 but a picture makes you think “I wanna hear them and I wanna look like them” and often conveys better the impact and shock of the time! They also become iconic and like they say a picture is worth a thousand words – think Che Guevara or Sue Catwoman right.
Punk was no different; in fact it was an intensely visual experience with its provocative fashion and look allied to the music counterpointing culture and as such lent itself perfectly to the medium of photography. Truth in pictures and truth in words however did not necessarily amount to the same thing, as photographer Jill Furmanovsky points out in the feature on her, and there was still a conflict between punk realism and the glossy airbrushed images of pop dreams. It was also possibly the first and last youth movement where its followers were as photogenic as the bands and in the initial stages received equal prominence. I know of no other music movement where in the first 18 months of it becoming public there were so many books, magazines and features on it across music and newspapers all powered by some fantastic images that have become iconic.
We’re now in the 21st Century and the insatiable demand for more Punk stories and autobiographies hasn’t abated. No book on punk is complete without the famous punk photos from the era and it’s the same for this site. This site uses images from all the photographers below without gain and in its enthusiasm often with assumed permission and for that, I apologise profusely and hope you recognise the spirit this site is intended. I’ve got some work to be able to credit all the photos added over 21 years so please bear with me. If you are adamant you want images removed I will comply!
The following is to acknowledge this and to recognise their part in the rise of punk rock and if you are researching photos to use will give you an idea of where to get them from. Some of these photographers were seasoned pros, others got into it by chance but for the most part, it was right place right time. With there being only four music papers at the time, Melody Maker, New Musical Express, Record Mirror and Sounds, and the fanzine Sniffin’ Glue image were important to define your genre of music.
Roberta Bayley
Debbie Harry & Roberta Bayley Picture Credit – Robert Grossman
There’s no person more responsible for documenting visually New York’s early Punk scene than Roberta Bayley (apart from Bob Gruen). I think she was my first interview some 25 odd years ago for the site when I was very inexperienced at it. I’d bought something off her off eBay and then cheekily asked for an interview which I’ve since lost!
Anyways from working the door at CBGB’s to producing some of the most recognised iconic photos of the punk era (mainly USA). A fantastic visual journey. Read a lot of her memories of the time in ‘Please Kill Me’ and see her work in books like ‘Blank Generation Revisited – The early Days Of Punk’ Think Ramones first album cover, cover of arguably the best book on US punk Please Kill Me, and numerous photos including Blondie and the New York Dolls and you get the picture!
Adrian Boot
Regular contributor to the NME and a great example of his work was the iconic series of photographs of the Pistols with Rotten dressed as a teddy boy complete with quiff.
He wrote in 1977
A single live photograph can be worth its weight in advertising space- yet it is within the technology of any amateur.
Adrian has had an amazing career. Check out his website and drool over the timeline of bands he’s worked with and locations.
Ian Dickson. Freelance photographer and contributor to Sounds. His photo of Mr Rotten graces said persons autobiography No Blacks, Dogs or Irishmen. A fine selection of photographs are in the recently released book Flash Bang Wallop! Great action photos of The Jam. For his sins, he was also the manager of The Maniacs!
What made you get into photography and how did you start your involvement with Rock’n’Roll?
I was working in the north-east of England for a mobile crane manufacturer, in the publicity department as a graphic designer when I bought a second-hand Russian Zenith B 35mm camera one lunchtime and got totally hooked. I’d sit at my desk daydreaming about becoming David Bailey – so much so, that I got fired!
Next day, I decided that I would be a professional photographer and set about doing it. I started off photographing kids and babies around the new housing estates that were springing up at the time. Six months later, I was made in-house photographer for the Tyneside Theatre Company in Newcastle, thanks to Chris Steele-Perkins, my predecessor, who put me up for the job. About a year later I was introduced to a guy called Bob Brown, at a theatre first night.
He turned out to be the manager of the City Hall, the city’s major rock venue and he invited me to come along whenever I wanted to photograph the bands that appeared there. My first shoot at the Hall was Rod Stewart and The Faces, not a bad way to start!
What sort of music were you listening to and how did you get involved with punk?
My music tastes are widespread! I first got into Elvis when I was about 10 or 11 years old. I first heard “”All Shook Up”” on an ancient clockwork gramophone in a friend’s back garden and things were never the same. In 1963, I got into The Beatles and, a little later, Bowie. By 1976, I was working for Sounds and they sent me to photograph the Pistols and their audience (the paper was most specific about that) at Notre Dame Assembly Hall in Soho. That was my first taste of real punk, though I’d done The Stranglers and Patti Smith a little earlier.
You photographed the Ramones on tour here? What kinda of effect did you notice them having as they toured? Was the crowd different in attitude/reaction?
Again, I did The Ramones for the paper, at Eric’s in Liverpool. They got a fantastic reception in this sweaty, overcrowded little club. The photos of the boys, in the book, are from that assignment and show quite well how they went down.
Punk was as visual as it was vocal which must have been a godsend. Yet somehow rock’n’roll always seems to look best in black’n’white? Have I got a point or am I talking rubbish?
No, you’re not talking rubbish. Punk was never glamorous – quite the opposite in fact. Old sweaty clubs and pubs – none of your Wembley bright lights and all that razzmatazz, so black and white photography was it. I actually never shot any colour on any punk band, so that says it all.
I particularly like the relaxed backstage pictures of bands like the Stranglers. They were obviously pretty relaxed around you. What did you make of them and their attitude as supposed outsiders in the punk scene ? As attending quite a few gigs was there any difference in audience reaction, atmosphere to say the Pistols playing as opposed to the Ramones or the Vibrators?
I was very handily placed as Sounds photographer, you must remember. The paper was the first to champion the movement, so there was kudos in that for me. As a result, the individuals I met were extremely “”professional”” in their working with me (as far as they could!) so I had no problems with them at all. Audience reaction was pretty straight across the board – loud, short and fast!
You took some pictures down the Roxy Club of The Rezillos ?? (How did they all fit on stage ?) What did you make of the place and how did the audience react to you photographing ?? Ever have any trouble photographing?
A tight squeeze – but that was true almost everywhere. I can’t really remember much about the Roxy – after a while, every gig looks like the last one! Now and again, I’d get caught up in the stampede down the front. There have been moments when I’ve been taking photographs with my feet six inches off the floor, honest. The worst thing was the gob. I couldn’t wait to get home sometimes, to have a shower. I counted it a blessing if it happened to be raining after I’d left a gig!
Punk seemed to throw up a number of women photographers such as Pennie Smith and Erika Echenberg (R). Similarly so on the New York Scene. Why do you think this happened and what do you think of their work?
Erika was actually my assistant for a short time as she learned the ropes. I’d send her out on shoots I couldn’t get to and she did very well. Then she met Brian James. Pennie Smith is one of my favourite photographers, male or female and I have enormous respect for her. My wife, Shoko, has also taken up the cause and is the resident photographer at Concorde 2, a venue you may have heard of, down here in Brighton.
What is your favourite punk photograph taken by yourself and also by someone else and why?
For obvious reasons, the John Lydon autobiography cover shot from that gig at Notre Dame but, on an equal basis, the Paul Weller shot too. I can’t split them. I like a lot of Ray Stevenson’s work and Dennis Morris’s also.
Erica (Pictured right with Mark P) worked as photographer for Sniffin’ Glue and is responsible both for straightforward pictures of all the bands at the time and also importantly for the punks and punkettes who were an integral part of the scene. All the books of the time, 1999 – A Punk Explosion, Punk Rock, Punk, Not Another Punk Book and In the Gutter used her pictures as did the daily tabloids for their shock horror stories and quite rightly so. In punk the fans were as important as the bands.
I always thought Erica Echenberg’s photos of the Roxy were fantastic. Whether it was the bands she captured, or the punks and punkettes dressed in their homemade fashions, they dripped with atmosphere and seemed to capture the very essence of punk and a sense of fun.
Tell us a bit about yourself… I was born in Montreal Canada and my father always loved photography. He always had fabulous cameras and it was kind of his hobby and so I enjoyed it, took it up from him. After high school I went to artschool and I kind of stuck with the photography side of things did pretty well and then I thought well I’d come to England and best do something with my life. So I thought I’d best go to photography college which I did and I went to Ealing Technical College and there all I wanted to do was rock photography really. I met a chap who knew Ian Dickson (check out his excellent book ‘Flash Bang Wallop’ crammed with loads of cool punk piccies) who said Ian was looking for an assistant. I had done a few rock gigs in Canada and I went to meet Ian and he gave me the job. So from there learning the technical side in the darkroom, being his assistant and going on gigs I got a lot from it and met quite a few people in the music business. Met people who worked at NME and Melody Maker and it really just went from there. It was a passion, a focus, a path. I was very lucky and I think luck is really important. So once I started working for some of the mags they kept asking for me and I was a rock photographer. A female rock photographer which was really important as there wasn’t very many of them.
Was it a general love of Rock or a general love of photography? Photography really and music. Probably music first and photography second. Technique was pretty low down because really I didn’t have any money, and my cameras were pretty rubbish so I think it went in that order. In those days going back 30 years you had to prove yourself. You had to take the pictures, develop them and print them and then you had to get them to whoever wanted them pretty quick. So once you’ve proved yourself people ask you to do more work. I made a lot of mistakes, that’s for sure. But I had to do people like Barry Blue, Bay City Rollers to Queen at the airport. All sorts of things before punk. I remember I had to go to church to take pictures of a christening for the band Pilot. I did a lot of work for Melody Maker, Sounds, Record Mirror, and NME. I went on TOTP quite a few times, I had front covers with the band called Mud and 10CC. You just went where they told you to go but normally it was quite exciting.
Those were the days eh????!!!
How did you come to get involved with punk rock then? That was odd. I was kind of in the business by then and a knew people. I had a friend PR business who worked for Tony Brainsby. She was hip to the scene and heard about some bands who were playing at the Hope & Anchor. That was the first place I went. Somebody played ‘New Rose’ to me and I couldn’t believe it. It was so fast and crazy and then I heard the Damned were playing the Hope & Anchor so I went with my cameras to take pictures which I did.
I met Bryan James and we went out together for a while. Once I met him it kind of gelled and was very, very exciting. There was a camera crew there. It was easy days. You got to meet the bands. There were lots of other people hanging about sort of from the dinosaurs who were already writers and journalists and they were sniffing about.
Speaking of sniffing how did you come to be involved with the fanzine Sniffin’ Glue? It was one of those things where people met people met people. It was a small scene, so you knew the bands and I guess Mark P. I met him at a Generation X gig and I was taking photos. I was young and he came up to me and started talking. Harry his mate was there. Another connection. I did a lot of work for a band called Curved Air with Stewart Copeland and his brother Miles. Miles had a record company and Nick Jones worked for him and they were getting involved in this up and coming punk scene and it all meshed together. Mark P got involved. Small intimate little group. Sex Pistols weren’t involved or the Clash, they stayed away from these little groups. Mark P asked to use one of my pictures and we became firm friends and used to hang out together. He never paid me for anything. I enjoyed the fanzine and being part of it.
We went down to the Roxy a lot. It was easy to get to. I lived in Knightsbridge. Very unpunk. I never had to pay to get in. All the bands hung out there and I just started shooting. Why I did it I had no idea. It just happened. Some got published. I never thought that 30 years later people would still be interested.
You had to use different levels of flash and shoot shots differently. The Roxy was very small in a basement and was very claustrophobic, to be honest with you. There was only one way out and up the stairs. I wasn’t shocked when I first went there as the Hope and Anchor was similar and I had been there. As the bands got bigger they would get bigger stages and better dressing rooms. I followed the Damned around so saw their beginning from the hope and anchor to the Roundhouse and beyond. Alcohol riders, dressing rooms and famous people. Marc Bolan was there.
Crowd shots? They loved it, actually loved it. When you have people called Dee Generate or Jerry Attrick. I mean they wanted to have their pictures taken. They were dressing up and trying to be other people not the little school kids they were and they enjoyed it. Noone said don’t take a picture. The fans loved it. In retrospect punks were just innocent little kids. They were the sweetest little kids. You probably think they were scary, kind of frightening, but they were just young kids who maybe put some black liner on and sugar stuff in their hair; nothing was very scary at all. I didn’t see that much drugs or alcohol. I was innocent too and I wasn’t looking for those things. Everything was beautiful.
Me? I didn’t look very threatening. I was pretty straight looking and wasn’t very punky looking. That wasn’t my thing though. I was a photographer. When I met Bryan we got invited to a lot of things.
Fashion? Absolutely photogenic. There’s photos of the kids with safety pins through their cheeks, mouths and noses. They just really looked good. I wish I had had colour film but I didn’t have the money. I don’t know how it would have looked either. There was no computers. They were in their houses dying their hair and fixing their clothes and for them that was their outlet and it was exciting.
Women photographers? Punk was great for women. Punk helped women a lot. You know if you were a woman you could be in a group, a drummer or a singer. You could do anything you wanted. You could be a fan. You could be a photographer and nobody cared really and that was fab. Before that what girls were in bands? There weren’t any. Wasn’t it fabulous? You could wear underpants on stage, say rude words and preach and do all sots of things and get away with it. For me that was the right time and place to be a woman and very, very important.
Still an effect today? I don’t think it lasted that long to be honest. It’s still a mans world. It must have done something. Now seems very contrived. Then it seemed innocent times. They did exactly what they felt like and it was accepted. It didn’t matter if you weren’t beautiful or you weren’t thin as long as you had something to say and you wanted to say it. From Ari Up to Blondie to Siouxsie to Chrissie Hynde to Poly Styrene.
What was your aim in your photos – was it premeditated or luck in the live situation? Because my mindset is photographic for me it was just an extension of myself. Instead of writing a song which I couldn’t do, I could take a photo, capture the moment and it would be a part of me. What I took I felt was a part of myself. I like to show shoes in photos or they had a bit of humour in there. For instance Sham 69. They just look humorous because they weren’t serious. Or I would take the drummer out of Eater and have him stand up to see how small he was. He was about 12 or something. I think my pictures were used because they did have a bit of humour and a bit of social awareness. Nothing too deep. I’m not that kind of person. I’m also kind of shy and to for me to get the photo I had to speak to people and we would engage in discussion. Of course being a foreigner I always kind of stuck out a bit as well. I was just trying to take the picture and capture the moment and enjoy it really.
My favourite picture? Pogo shot…one of them is actually Shane from the Nipple Erectors. They are all in mid-air and everyone else is in a circle around them backed away against the wall in that shot. You can see people who were around at that time. I think it really captures the moment. That’s the other thing; It was the clothing, it was the dancing, it was the gobbing and it was the camaraderie of the people from rich to poor. It didn’t last long.
How did you survive the crush? It was nuts. I started at the front but soon moved to the back. I used a chair at one point but the gobbing that was pretty disgusting but as the bands got bigger they moved onto better stages and there were pits for the photographers. Gobbing was the worst. I had to wash every night. On leather it would slide right off. The worst was when they threw things. One time this huge chair went past my head and then the other time a huge heavy padlock just missed my ear. It was dangerous. It felt very dangerous. The pogoing – I’ve got a lot of shots that weren’t in focus!! I wish I had a digital camera it would have been easier. When I got more established I would go on the side of the stage. In those days you didn’t need photo passes or just shoot two numbers if you are lucky. Then you could shoot the whole gig. Now everything is fast, downloaded and emailed or uploaded. Back then I took the pictures, used my kitchen and took out all the stuff to develop them. I think my pictures are worth a lot more because I had to work hard for them and get the shot. Technically I was abysmal – there were disasters. For instance the flash might not work.
The end? Punk lasted from From October 1976 and 1977 and by 1978 had disintegrated. Bryan left the Damned.. It changed a lot and I got disillusioned. I worked for the newspapers and worked for Punk Lives. The bands changed and the good taste left. The Mohicans came in. I was doing PR for the Police, the Who, Stones but I kinda left photography a bit. I was doing work for Kerrang. Bryan was in the Lords Of The New Church and then we split up. The punk thing had had its day. I had had my time and I was moving on. You don’t really realise the whole thing is changing and yourself.
If you can, get hold of Erica’s book ‘And God Created Punk.’ It’s probably out of print so eBay is your best bet. It’s crammed full of fantastic photos and complete with Mark P’s over the top prose in full flow. If you want to see more of Erica’s photos and indeed Ian Dickson’s and others pop along to the Redferns gallery.
Ahh the gorgeous and very talented Jill Furmanovsky. In the December NME 1978 she wrote “Prejudice and bias are just as rampant in the music press as in other forms of journalism. In fact sometimes when reading a feature where I was present, I don’t recognise having been there at all.”
A professional photographer, her live shots mix interesting angles and perspectives that make us take a second look at something so apparently straightforward as the performer(s) on stage. Large selection of her photographs in ‘Glue – The Ultimate Punk Accessory’
Jill has had an amazing career, and though we only talk about punk here, she has famously photographed Oasis extensively, won awards for her pictures of Charlie Watts and was flown over to cover the Rolling Stones play Cuba.
More than that she wasn’t just a photographer in punk times. At the time she was going out with Miles Copeland, she was an established photographer but she and Miles had an ethos of just mucking into whatever needed doing and were caught up in the excitement of the possibilities of punk. So if you look at some of the Step Forward/ Illegal sleeves they feature photos or cover designs from Jill. They were also bound up with Sniffin’ Glue from the start which eventually also found itself at Dryden Chambers with Miles. So Jill, like Erica Echenberg, took photos for that fanzine and Mark P became A&R for Step Forward taking Sniffin’ Glue photographer Harry Murlovski with him.
In short the influence of Jill Furmanovsky on punk hasn’t been recognised and she was really wonderful to interview. Being a photographer for a living, like being in music, hasn’t been easy for Jill and she nearly gave up, especially during the Eighties when video and highly stylised music stars became the medium of choice.
She also helped found a brilliant collective of famous rock photographers called Rockarchive in the late 1990s, which, in addition to providing an outlet for the photographers to sell their work, aims to boost the profile of rock photography in general.
The following snippets are from an interview I did with her for the Menace book in 2023.
Jill Furmanovsky (Photographer) I started working at the Rainbow in 1972 as their kind of in-house photographer. I was a student at the Central School of Art and Design doing graphics, so it was unpaid. I’d done a two-week course in photography and blagged my way into the job. By the time punk came along in 1976 I had already four years’ experience doing live shots and was starting to work for the music press.
Her Photography training wasn’t as you might know it now as it wasn’t even a recognised art surprisingly.
I was an art student so I was more looking at paintings than photography because at that time it wasn’t considered art; it was a service department to the other courses. So if you were doing sculpture you might need a photo taken. I was looking at photography because I was interested in it for my own research. The people who taught Photography to us were professional photographers so we had a fashion photographer called Ian Hessenberg – teaching us how to do bits in the studio, getting a model and design. Jurgen Shadowberg worked in South Africa during apartheid for a magazine called Drum – the first magazine for blacks – and then visiting lecturers. I became interested in the usual greats like Bresson. My photographic visual training came from quite a variety of visual arts
One of the earliest punk gigs I went to in 1976 was Generation X at my old college and there I met an incompetent photographer at the time who kept getting in my way but was kind of a bumbling friendly guy. This turned out to be Harry Murlowski and he was shooting Generation X for his fanzine called Sniffin’ Glue with a Zenith B camera which of course I looked down on at the time. Mark Perry was there so I became friendly with Harry and invited him to my darkroom in the basement of Miles’s [Copeland – brother of Stewart and The Police manager and Faulty Products owner] house who I was living with at the time. Harry knew all about punk. I was helping him process the prints and he was helping me build a darkroom then Sniffin’ Glue broke into one of the empty offices in Dryden Chambers and ran an electricity cable from Miles’s offices to theirs. Then they would hang out there. They would sleep there if they were at the 100 Club or the Roxy so Sniffin’ Glue was now a neighbour.
That symbiotic relationship continued with Jill starting to do bits for Sniffin’ Glue and taking some extra pictures if they needed it. Between her and Harry, band and live shots were covered for the singles, and as someone with some design training, she was responsible for a lot of the early sleeve designs that played a key part in establishing punks’ cultural and visual identity, and signposted to the punk buyer that this was something they would like, whether they had heard it before or not.
I was there for photography, but I took on the role because I had graduated with an art school graphic design degree. I was not a very good graphic designer. But that didn’t matter; if you could only play 3 chords you could form a band or if you had access to a photocopier, you could make a fanzine and there was no concept of good or bad design that matched the mood of punk and was the kind of vibration at the time.
I had some basic knowledge, and I knew how to use cow gum and a scalpel. Cow gum was used by graphic designers to paste lettering and pictures on artwork. You can pick it up and move it but it’s no good for sniffing! That’s how we made record covers in those days. Nobody really knew what they were doing. Everyone was just doing it and getting by and enjoying themselves.
It looks like I did some shots of Menace in Miles’s house and then did some in the street. I did do some of them full length facing the camera and then I thought, “Well what looks menacing?” and I thought, “Bovver boots,” and there’s a little bit of a kind of a skinhead-y look to the clothing and that looked a bit menacing. It was done by the light of a parked car outside Mile’s house.
There was Cherry Vanilla, Vermilion, and of course Wayne County, who were these fascinating characters coming over from the States. They were a little bit more way out and in your face. Vermilion was one of the few women who was her own person and a strong one at that. I think I might have suggested the location as the background seemed a very punk thing to do and matched a song on the single.
Vermilion by Jill Furmanovsky. Safety pins and badges not part of the original picture.
A regular on the second wave of punk London gig circuit, she’d released one single on Illegal with her band Dick Envy before they imploded. That first single had a photo of her astride her Hells Angel boyfriend’s chopper and an unreleased shot on same said bike, with Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, with leather jacket and breasts exposed, which was taken by Jill Furmanovsky.
Favorite punk singles and bands?
Cortinas Fascist Director – I got amazing shots of them I loved them – The Models – I loved them the singer was so pretty a lovely looking. Sham 69.
Just some of the iconic sleeves Jill designed often in conjunction with Harry Murlovski’s photos and hers that helped form part of Punks early visual recording identity.
Menace at the Roxy are some of my favourite punk shots. I just think they are fantastic and I love them. It’s Morgan; he is a really really great performer and one in particular, he’s no more than a foot away and he’s wearing an interesting kind of robe. I don’t know if he made it himself or what, but it was a sort of Vivienne Westwood style off the shoulder bondage-related look and ended in shreds by the end of the gig. Then you have the audience, which is quite sparse, but virtually within a few inches of them so that the band and audience are nearly completely one, to the point where Morgan is actually singing directly to the person in the shot. He was really good and full of energy.
Menace at The Roxy Club by Jill Furmanovsky
To me those pictures sum up punk so well – you have very little stage between audience and group; they are all one, all on the same page and all in it together. One sets the other off and the Roxy was ideal for that because the stage was only a foot high, and the audience was right on top of the performer performing. It wasn’t really a stage, more a platform, very small and compact. There was very little lighting in there as well, so these shots are all taken with flash. In the iconic shots of punk, you’re not actually seeing what you end up with; the flash goes off and it’s like catching animals in the headlights of a car and they’re just frozen. That is also part of the language of punk photography, and why photos taken in CBGB’s look quite similar because they were also shot with flash. Punk was the black and white era.
Because I was involved with Punk and it was so influential on the music press I started to get work doing the kind of work I wanted like feature and portraiture work with all the music papers. Then it was the New Wave Gary Numan, The Jam, Ian Dury, Elvis Costello and Siouxsie.
Dead Or Alive cover shot 1983
I really enjoyed it until MTV when it started to become too self-conscious. I had to respond by becoming technically better using lighting etc. But at the same time it wasn’t my favourite kind of work using stylists, make-up artists and fashion dilemmas – should I wear this suit or that suit – Fuck knows! The punk bands I’d been used to either wore whatever or had made their own shit and that I could get into.
I used this period to learn how to do studio work and I was immensely grateful as I had a steep learning curve as a photographer but for me that energy of punk had now been replaced by a kind of narcissism that didn’t really chime with me much. So around the mid-eighties, I tried to do other things outside of rock n roll and went to Peru and Bolivia to do photojournalism there.
For me, it’s always been about photography and I love music very very much and working with musicians and their lifestyles. I like immediacy and even in a studio I have the minimum amount of people there and would try and work on my own wherever possible. I still do. There’s an intimacy when you don’t have a crowd.
In the nineties, I worked for Mojo and q and did portraits and thought rock has really got old and yet 30 years later bands like the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton are still going. Charlie just died. I photographed him in 1992 and won an award for the picture. I thought he looked old then but 30 years later he was playing Havana doing a 2.5 hour set.
When I started working with Oasis in 1994 I thought wow now I’m working with the Beatles. I loved their music; they weren’t looking in the mirror every 5 minutes. They went from stage to dressing room in the same clothes and that was my kind of band. I was invisible because they got used to me being around and I did some of my best work as a photographer with the boys.
It ball came about because I was trying to publish a book about my work way back in 1982 when I started to become disillusioned but I couldn’t find a publisher. It was 13 years till 1993 that I found a publisher and it was my diary from the Beatles with an Instamatic photo of Paul McCartney and his girlfriend. I was looking for an upcoming band to finish the book and Oasis was upcoming and they were a Beatley – and the book was called From The Beatles To Oasis.
They loved it and asked me to take more pictures. Three years later I did a book on them and ended up documenting them right until they split. That meant there was a continuity in my rock photography career. I was privileged to be there and they liked working with me and that took me up to 2009.
It’s extraordinary really. It’s my best body of work and spans into the digital era. Noel says that was the last rock n roll gig where there were no mobile phones; you have this vast audience of 120,00 and no mobiles. A year later we were in the digital era.
Jill Furmanovsky we at Punk77 love and salute you
Bob Gruen and Joe Strummer
As chief photographer for Rock Scene Magazine in the ’70s, Bob specialized in candid, behind the scenes photo features. He toured extensively with the emerging punk and new wave bands including the New York Dolls, Sex Pistols, Clash, Ramones, Patti Smith Group and Blondie. Bob has also worked with major rock acts such as Led Zeppelin, The Who, David Bowie, Tina Turner, Elton John, Aerosmith, Kiss and Alice Cooper.
It was his New York Dolls photographs that got him friendly with Malcolm McLaren who at that time was managing the Dolls for that short period.
A little-known fact that how Bob Gruen came to England and met the Sex Pistols was because his most lucrative pictures were of … The Bay City Rollers.
Bob Gruen I made more money with them than I did with John and Yoko, or the Dolls or anybody else I’ve worked with. I photographed a lot of bands back then, and when I was traveling in Europe or Japan I could go to the magazines and sell them two or three pictures each of Kiss, Debbie Harry, The Rolling Stones, maybe one or two of the Dolls, and thirty-seven or sixty-four of the Bay City Rollers. They might do a story on some of these bands, but they’d do a whole special issue on the Rollers. I was cleaning up. One of the first things I did with my Roller money was buy a 54 Buick Special. In ’76 my son was in Paris, which was my original inspiration for going to Europe. Jane Friedman was there with John Cale. I went to his show and met Patti Palladin and Judy Nylon and some people from the French press.
I ended up working out a deal that lasted for years with one magazine there which printed many of my pictures. Because French laws made it very difficult to send money out of France, I’d wait until they owed me for several issues and then go and pick my money up, have some great meals, travel around Europe and the trip would pay for itself. I went to Paris with Blondie, toured England with the Clash, and had a great time. When I first got to London, Malcolm’s was the only phone number I had. He had just started the Sex Pistols. He found me a rooming house that was really cheap and took me to a place called Club Louise, where he and a lot of the kids who were buying his clothes were hanging out.
Bob’s “Sid Vicious with Hot Dog” photo was acquired by The National Portrait Gallery, London, in 1999 for their permanent collection.
It was a lesbian club and they were used to unusual people coming in. The punks, kids who were cutting and dyeing their hair weird, who would get into trouble looking like that in a normal pub, started hanging out in the basement of Club Louise because they felt comfortable there. The Sex Pistols were the local conquering heroes by this time. They’d played a few gigs. Johnny Rotten was sitting around with an attitude like he was some cool guy. I met Billy Idol, Siouxie, (who was part of a bunch of girls called the Bromley contingent with Sue Catwoman) and Marco, who later played with Adam Ant. I remember Marco looking over at the Sex Pistols and saying– ‘gee, I wish I had a band’. I just told him, ‘why don’t you start one? I mean, look at the competition, it doesn’t seem that hard’.
The next time I came over he was playing in his own band. I remember Joe Strummer and Mick Jones had just gotten together, and I went with Vivien (Westwood), Jon Savage and Carolyn Coon in Vivien’s tiny mini to the ICA to see the Clash play their second show. I have pictures of that. I thought they were a fucking great band, and after I came back to America I started to hear more about them. I liked them and wanted to see them again the next time I went to London. Bob Gruen Interview by Carlo McCormick (originally posted in The New York Trash)
Mick Mercer. Erstwhile creator of fanzine Panache and later editor of Zigzag during its Goth period and arguably the greatest writer and expert on the subject today. Some great pictures of lesser-known bands such as Johnny Curious and Neo to the more famous Clash, Slits and Blondie.
In the case of most of the well known bands, I would be at the gig anticipating taking one whole film (such excesses in those days!), whereas when a band came on and I thought, I don’t personally like these, or I wasn’t sure, I wouldn’t bother risking the expense.
And of course at most gigs I’d simply forget about taking photos altogether and simply get myself down the front to have fun….People forget…they didn’t do auto focus, or auto exposure in 77. You shoved down the front and tried to focus with about a hundred people pogoing around you. Godammit, it was war! Punk77 Interview 2003
Dennis Morris. A man who got the breaks but used them!
Born in Jamaica but ended up in Dalston Hackney which is in East London, Dennis developed an interest from the age of nine in photography. He lucked out that the choir he was in was sponsored by Donald Paterson, a manufacturer and inventor of photographic equipment. Paterson had also set up a photography club and some of the boys, including Dennis, also got involved in that. Though not initially supported by his family – it wasn’t a working-class thing to take photos – Patterson changed their minds.
Morris then lucked out again in 1974 when aged 14 he played truant at school and took pictures of Bob Marley at his studio door when he was in London. Marley was so impressed that he invited Morris to come with him and the band on tour and Morris was off.
Inspired by his street photographer heroes, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Don McCullin, and a natural for composition, he spotted a boy (pictured above) in sunglasses standing beside graffiti for the local reggae band Black Slate.
Morris got involved with Island Records and his photographs appear on record covers including Burning Spear, U Roy, The Cimmarons, Aswad, Big Youth Bob Marley and Third World
His luck continued when doing some photo work for Virgin Records he was asked if he wanted to photograph the Sex Pistols for them as they had just signed. What followed was photos of the band recording Pretty Vacant, their promo film and their secret tour. Some great pictures including Sid smoking a reefer and the promo pics for Virgin. Some of these pictures were published in his book Rebel Rock in 1983.
Even when the band split it was Morris who accompanied Rotten and Don Letts to Jamaica and photographed them there.
On his return Morris became A&R at Island and according to him signed up Linton Kwesi Johnson and The Slits. The latter was not to work out as there were arguments between the band and Morris over direction and image resulting in Pennie Smith taking over photographic duties and the band being left with producer Dennis Bovell.
That said it was a temporary blip as Morris got involved with PIL, designing their logo, and photographs for their first album and being involved in their Metal Box concept.
If that wasn’t enough he joined Basement 5 as a singer in 1979, signed to Island, and released some great records including Last White Christmas.
A man of many talents.
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.
He was quite negative about the quality but I think he was totally wrong about them and since this interview has thank god got them all cleaned up and available in a book that is essential in showing how people looked and got the recognition his work deserves. Derek has had a long and varied career photographing bands and fans through the years and there’s more on his website here.
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.
How did you first become aware of punk and how sympathetic were you to it? I wasn’t sympathetic to it at all to begin with. I think the first punk record I ever heard was The Damned’s New Rose, well actually by the time that came out I was sympathetic, I think I actually bought that record
What had made you change your mind then? It was somewhere between, well I think the 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.
The Roxy Club WC2
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.
So did you start taking picture of the crowd straight away then? Almost straight away on that first night. I was still a little bit reticent. One photo I took was of of big tall black guy in a gold lame mini dress and he had things on his fingers that made them look long.
Was that the guy with big hoop earrings, one of the trannys who’s on the Live At The Roxy album (pictured right)? Yes
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 life long 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 cant 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 and 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.
How did you get involved in the 100 Nights At The Roxy book? I had a year of learning photography at the same time I was doing some of these pictures. And therefore I was in this photography group with just a few mates. I showed them some of these photos and I don’t know that they necessarily liked them much, but they said they weren’t bad. I rung up Andy Czezowski after I read in the NME that he was doing an album or a book and said I have got a load of pictures that I took of your club and do you want to see them and he said we have got all the pictures that we need but bring them down anyway.
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.
Was 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 singers 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 like one of his little jokes I think.
So what was your favourite photo from the Roxy? I think my best picture was one of TV Smith from the Adverts (Right) I am really close to him and he’s sort of going round the edge.
What’s your favourite one of the audience? I don’t know that I have got a good one. At that time I was learning and I thought they were good pictures which is why I phoned Andy Czezowski up. But in the intervening years I have come to realize they weren’t very good.
I know you have some reservation 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.
Interviews Punk77 – January 2006 | April 2020
As the 1970s drew to a close and changes in music, fashion and attitudes collided to form Punk, Sheila Rock was right at the heart of the electrifying youth movement. Whether candid or posed, her striking photographs perfectly capture the innocence of the early days, the DIY fashion ethos and the raw energy of Punk.
They combine bands posed or live and critically the fans, punks and punkettes who made up the movement again posed or natural. Also, the only photographer to have captured the notorious Moors Murderers rehearsing.
Check out her books Punk+ and Young Punks for an amazing array of photos all in the early stages of her career.
The punk girl asistants in BOY London – Middle – Soobie from Muvvers Pride
Pennie photographed by Joe Strummer while on Bullet Train in Japan
Writing in the NME December 1978 Pennie stated:
I take photographs. I am not in the rock business to perpetuate intentionally glossy images – the only thing that should do that is a mirror.
Perhaps best known for her pictures of The Clash – “they know that photography is not about presenting the best profile.” She hit the nail on the head when she said “live pictures are basically luck plus a quick trigger finger.”
Pennie worked on NME as staff photographer until the early 1980’s and published a best selling book The Clash, Before and After.
Pennie’s photos were used for two iconic album sleeves – London Calling (see below) and she was also chosen by the Slits to do their iconic nude Cut photographs after it all went pear-shaped with Dennis Morris.
Ray Stevenson previously worked for underground papers like Oz and International Times and photographed stars like Marc Bolan and David Bowie before disillusioned went into semi retirement.
All this changed in 1976 when he and his brother Nils went to work for the Sex Pistols. Ray became the official band photographer. Being in the right place right time, his photos capture all the major figures and bands in the beginning of punk and featured in the major weekly music papers. It made his fortune as later books like ‘The Sex Pistols File’, ‘Vacant’and Punk Book all use his pics.
Again his photos have become iconic not least the one below of the very photogenic Soo Catwoman and of course Siouxsie.
TalkPunk
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