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Music and musicians have played a bigger part in my life than I intended. As a young man I set out in life to become a photographer because of the whole broad scope of life that photography opens up. I have achieved my ambition, travelled the world, met the famous, the infamous, and a lot of nice people besides. Now, at the end of a long career I find the memories of musicians and music the most important of all. I look at their photographs and I hear their music.
The Beatles head my list as they head all other lists, but there are many other musicians among the pictures with whom I enjoyed a passing or sometimes lasting friendship. Strangely, I was with The Beatles at the beginning of their career, in the middle and in the latter days as they prepared their Anthology. In the summer of 1963 my friend Mike Hennessey was one of the first to see them coming. He signed John, Paul, George and Ringo up to our magazine ‘Today’, for a fee of £25.00 each to give their names to first person articles. We had them to ourselves for over two months in which we got to know them well.
In January 1964 we were in Paris with them, practically locked in the George V Hotel while the rest of the press fumed outside. Derek Taylor, working for the Daily Express was inside with us and it was the foul up with press relations at this point that led to Derek becoming their press officer. It was the beginning of the restriction of freedom for them, something they were to experience for the next six years. It was eight days before I supposedly secretly slipped them out the back door of the hotel and up to Montmartre for some ‘Parisienne’ atmosphere. The mob descended in minutes and we had to escape to a pre-arranged photo studio where we had berets, gendarme hats and other French props at the ready.
I must have been a precocious young man. As our days in Paris ended I decided I had had enough of The Beatles and turned down the next trip with them, this just happened to be their world breaking first time in New York. I have never had any regrets about that decision.
Shortly after, I started my own career as a freelancer and as everyone who has run their own business knows, the things that you enjoy doing are not always the same as the things you earn money from.
Later in 1968, Derek, Mike and I came together again at the newly found Apple office in Saville Row. We met frequently and socially in Derek’s barn of an office where the world waited for a Beatle or four to appear. I had a studio rigged inside in case they ever did. But they only appeared irregularly and singly, so one by one we met George, Paul, Ringo and John again. Mike and I did a feature, Inside the Crazy World of Apple which went round the world.
In between these Beatles encounters I had got used to providing my own living and began to pursue some of my own interests. This led to a variety of travel and writing on industry and trade.
The whys and wherefores of the British empire took me to India and the trail of Mahatma Gandhi, the man who had pulled the rug from under that great empire. Returning from India I shared some affinity with George who had found the spirituality that has sustained his life there. We all knew the Beatles had problems and when they split in the early seventies we thought that was that. Time has proved us all wrong.
Derek Taylor moved on to Warner Elektra Atlantic in an office just round the corner from my studio and Mike Hennessey pursued his career with editorships and posts in the music business. It is from this period that many of my photographs of musicians derive and I consider myself fortunate indeed to have enjoyed these long running friendships. Over more than thirty years the three of us (before Derek gave it up) must have drunk lake of wine together with nights at Ronnie Scotts, festivals, receptions and celebrations – all great times to remember, but the work was paramount and we never failed to deliver pictures and copy on time.
In the mid seventies the music went a bit dry. In the eighties most of my work was commercial. But then came a strange chance encounter, which may have had the hand of the late John Lennon on it working from above. I was photographing a site in central London where it was intended that a statue of John was to be placed. Amazingly, Derek and his wife Joan came round the corner and we met again for the first time in eight years. This led to meeting Neil Aspinall again who for the next seven years had me editing the Dezo Hoffman collection of photographs that he had recently purchased, and then going on to build the library that is now the Apple Archive of The Beatles. I rebuilt, reclaimed, bought at auction and recovered all the best pictures that had been lost over the years and these were the pictures that made up much of the Beatles TV and Video Anthology.