Mick Rock

by Oliver Craske

From Rock Faces (Rotovision, 2004)

The first thing David Bowie ever said to him was, "I like your name." Being born Michael David Rock was a pretty auspicious beginning for the king of glam photography, who in the early 1970s captured defining images of David Bowie, Queen, Iggy Pop, and Lou Reed.

Mick Rock, born in London, arrived to study modern languages at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in 1966. Soon after, he met Pink Floyd's original singer and songwriter, Syd Barrett, at a gig the band were playing in the town. This was to lead to Rock's first major photography session nearly three years later.

At the time, however, Rock had no interest in photography. He was inspired more by French symbolist poets like Rimbaud and Baudelaire, who in the nineteenth century had explored altered states in order to produce their visionary works. Rock followed the same recipe; in his own words, "psychedelics opened the doors of my perception, and that's what led me very directly into photography."

After leaving university, he moved back to London, where he pursued photography and film. For three months he shared a flat with Syd Barrett. The creative force behind Pink Floyd's first album The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, Barrett had left the band in early 1968. Rock had shot "about three bands" before Barrett asked him to take pictures for his first solo album, The Madcap Laughs, in 1969.

Rock had just bought a second-hand Pentax for £45 from friend Aubrey 'Po' Powell (one part of Floyd's legendary design team Hipgnosis). The session took place at Barrett's Earls Court Square flat. The only furniture was a bed and a record-player, but Barrett had just painted the floorboards in alternating colors, turquoise and orange, and this formed the foreground for the album’s cover image. The frame shown here was taken on the street outside; the woman was Barrett’s "lady friend of two weeks", known as Iggy the Eskimo.

By popular reputation Barrett was a classic acid casualty, and tales abound of his increasingly erratic behaviour, but Rock often found him full of humor, and believes his withdrawal to Cambridge in 1971 was "a matter of choice not necessity". Perhaps, he reasons, he had a better survival instinct than some of his contemporaries. "I got the feeling he just didn't want to deal with the business, the repetition of touring. He told me he didn't have any fun any more with it. Now of course there were the other issues, the psychedelic ones, but how far they contributed who can really say?"

In a wholly unexpected postscript, in 2002 Barrett paid him the compliment of signing 320 copies of Rock's limited edition book of their sessions, probably his first public activity in three decades.

Rock is hugely proud of these early efforts: "I may have equalled those pictures over the years but I've never done anything better." They also proved pivotal in terms of his career, giving him a connection to rising star David Bowie, a major Barrett fan.

Rock was a writer too at this point; in fact before taking up photography he had seen writing as a more likely career. In 1971 Rolling Stone published his articles on Syd Barrett and Rory Gallagher, for which he supplied pictures too, and when he first met Bowie in March 1972 he was again wearing both hats.

They quickly found common ground. "I swapped stories of Syd Barrett for his stories of Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, which seemed like a good exchange." With Bowie about to unleash his Ziggy Stardust persona on the world, so began Rock's greatest collaboration, as he followed Bowie around Britain and America for much of the next twenty months, amassing 6,000-plus shots. His position as the official framer of the Ziggy image was privileged, to say the least; Bowie's management banned all other photographers.

As 1972 wore on, the "Ziggy juggernaut" became unstoppable. For Rock the key moment came on 17th June at Oxford Town Hall, where he captured the infamous image of Bowie on his knees playing Mick Ronson's guitar with his teeth. Androgyny and sexual ambiguity were the order of the day, and Bowie knew the power of the image. He wrote on the print, "Thanx to all our people for making Ziggy. I love you, Bowie," and ran it as a full page in Melody Maker. There was such a strong reaction from the press and audiences that this new guitar dance, the so-called "guitar fellatio", became a regular feature of Ziggy's show. "It became one of those great rock'n'roll gestures," opines Rock, "like Pete Townshend smashing his guitar, or Jimi Hendrix setting his on fire. It's so familiar now the shock value of it cannot be appreciated."

As Ziggy skyrocketed, Rock was one step behind with his lens. "It was the association with David that opened everything up. That's what made me numero uno glam photographer. And it wasn't just the rock'n'rollers: fashion designers, the parties, painters, Lindsay Kemp, the Rocky Horror Show. I was like a piranha, gulping down anything to do with it."

And he shot movie film, too. Earlier he had taken 16mm footage of Barrett (before ever photographing him), and Bowie encouraged him to shoot promotional clips for four of his singles, starting with "John I'm Only Dancing". These were primitive, micro-budget affairs, but inventive and wonderful period pieces now, and launched another sphere for Rock. Over the years he has made videos with the likes of The Kinks, Cockney Rebel, Ace Frehley from Kiss, and Paul McCartney (“My Love”).

Even as his own profile started to soar, Bowie gave helping hands to two artists who had inspired him: in July he arranged for both Lou Reed and Iggy Pop to play their first British concerts. He then produced Reed's acclaimed album Transformer, while Iggy Pop, having signed with Bowie's manager, Tony Defries, reformed the Stooges to record their third album, Raw Power. During their electrifying one-off gig in London, Rock took the album's cover shot and many other great frames capturing Iggy Pop's awesome (and extremely supple) stage performance.

Defries had organised Reed's UK visit and he tried unsuccessfully to sign him too, according to Rock, who took a classic photograph at the Dorchester summing up the relationship of manager and stars. He explains: "It was a press junket for David before he went to America for his first ever gigs there. Tony Defries is in the background, eyeing the terrible trio with a big smirk on his face."

Perhaps Rock's most iconic image graces the cover of Lou Reed's album Transformer, taken live in London in July 1972. Reed was wearing white kabuki-style make-up that had started to run, and Rock's monochrome frame captured a distant, dissolute air. "I think Rolling Stone said he looked like a degenerate panda bear," he remembers.

An element of chance dictated the final image. "Lou had helped me select from the original contact sheet and he had clocked that frame early on. In those days I used to do my own black and white prints. I had one print where it had fallen out of focus in the enlarger. I hadn’t noticed until it got into the developer. I liked it, even though it was technically a mistake, so I brought it along with the other stuff, and when he saw it he was again very decisive."

This picture was again taken on a 35mm Nikkormat, which had replaced the Pentax but was still his only camera. "I'd finish one roll and load up the other, alternating black and white and color, available light and flash. This was one of the available light shots. By the time I got to America that autumn for the Bowie tour, maybe I had two cameras, and from then onwards I always had two. But I moved quick. That's why I got a lot of stuff. Remember there were no four-hour shoots in those days. You didn't even have the money for it – you'd shoot two or three rolls and it's over. Now you shoot two or three rolls and that's like wiping your nose; it's nothing."

Rock shot Reed regularly through the 1970s, including covers for Coney Island Baby, Rock And Roll Heart, Growing Up In Public, and Walk On The Wild Side; the Transformer image was also reworked for Reed's 1982 LP The Blue Mask.

Rock's early experience of the photographic studio was limited, but as he gained more confidence, especially after the Pin Ups shoot with Bowie and his saxophone in September 1973 (the first time he used his Hasselblad), he found he enjoyed controlling the lighting, and his photography entered a new phase. Ever since, studio work has dominated his portfolio.

It was during Rock's second shoot with Queen that he shot the famous image that appeared on the Queen II album cover. He was given a brief: a gatefold sleeve, featuring the band themselves, and a black and white theme. Rock was inspired by a picture of Marlene Dietrich on the set of Shanghai Express, arms folded, wearing black against a black background, lit dramatically from above with shadows under her eyes: "I showed Freddie the shot and he got very excited about it."

The session took place in a studio on London's Great Newport Street. "I used to share with a photographer I never met," says Rock, "a guy called Beverley Goodway who used to shoot for The Sun, so on one day you'd get the Page 3 girls, and on the next you'd get Freddie Mercury. Nice spiritual balance."

If Rock's cover seems particularly familiar to us today, it is most likely because it inspired Queen's ground-breaking video for "Bohemian Rhapsody", though Rock had nothing directly to do with this. "That was two albums later. But, as Brian May acknowledges in the recent DVD compilation, the video was based on my image."

The iconic images aside, Rock also took pictures of dozens of other bands in the mid-Seventies, many legends included, from glam stars Roxy Music, Mott the Hoople and Cockney Rebel, through Meatloaf, Genesis, Thin Lizzy, and Patti Labelle, to The Rolling Stones, Grateful Dead, Bob Marley, John Cale, and Tina Turner.

Ozzy Osbourne was another. The shoot took place on the roof outside Osbourne's management offices in Mayfair, London, in 1974. Black Sabbath was not particularly his cup of tea, but he was pleasantly surprised; in front of the camera the notorious beast he'd been expecting was nowhere to be found.

"Kelly Osbourne, who I worked with a few months ago, told me this was her and Sharon's favourite picture ever of Ozzy," says Rock, "He looks like a poet, so I'm sure that's why they thought that. He looks very, very pretty. Everyone I lensed at that period ended up looking androgynous."

In 1977, Rock uprooted himself to the Big Apple. "I had been in and out of New York since 1970 but I'd really got addicted to the place—addicted being the right word," admits Rock. "It was certainly a very degenerate place and absolutely to my liking." In his new home city, he found new subjects in the emerging punk scene. Lou Reed and Iggy Pop being forerunners of punk, Rock found his glam past was rarely held against him: "I took the first ever pictures of The Sex Pistols, and when I came to New York I got all embroiled in that—The Ramones, Talking Heads, the Dead Boys."

And Blondie. In a small loft on 21st Street in Manhattan, Rock set up home and studio. "That's where the first shots of the divine Miss Deborah went down. She's a superb, unbelievable subject. Really the most photogenic female rocker ever." Rock had been commissioned by Viva magazine, which however went bust before publication. With Blondie the hottest band of the moment, Bob Guccione, who owned Viva, decided to put the shot on the cover of a stablemate. Rock clarifies: "He plonked Debbie on the cover of Penthouse, clothed in black up to the neck, alongside the cover line 'the Marilyn Monroe of Punk'—and it was his best selling issue of the year!"

He continued to burn the candle at both ends as the decade closed, shooting artists including Carly Simon, Siouxsie Sioux, Robert Gordon, and Chris Spedding, as well as favourites like Iggy Pop, Lou Reed and John Cale. But as the inferno of punk was reduced to a smoulder, so too was the blazing energy within Mick Rock being doused temporarily. "New York was so revved at that time, with the Punk Club and 54," he recalls, "Everything was out of hand. I lost my soul in that period, I think. By 1982 really I was burned out."

Rock remained active in the 1980s as photographer and art director, and made more music videos. He developed his experimental photography and began a now extensive portfolio of photographic collage artworks. But like many of his musician subjects, he had become defined by his very public work, and for some years he felt compelled to escape the shadows of his past. By 1994, though, he was able to write, "Recently I came to realise that only by embracing those early exposures could I finally escape back to the present."

Two years later, a heart bypass operation literally gave him a new lease of life, and he is very much back with us in the present, while reveling in the renewed attention for his past achievements. He's published seven books since 1995, mounted one-man exhibitions, and is now one of the senior figures in rock photography. He has been working again with David Bowie, Debbie Harry, and Lou Reed, and is in demand from later generations, including the likes of Johnny Marr, Supergrass, The Chemical Brothers, Third Eye Blind, Kate Moss—and a certain very hip trio from New York.

"Working with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs brings me right back to the cutting edge, and I haven't been there since about 1981!" admits Rock. "I'm very taken with them. They're totally uncompromised and very bright, all of them. I did a great shoot with them. They got it big time. Karen O's got the thing." She has repaid the compliment, describing Rock as "the ferryman; he takes you from the island of mortals, across to the island of myth, of the gods." Bringing him full circle, Mojo invited him to write a piece on the band to accompany his photographs in their July 2003 issue—the first time he had written for a magazine since the Seventies, when full-time photography had gradually left no time for writing. Rock's enthusiasm for the group came over loud and clear.

Mick Rock has never been afraid to stir up a bit of hype, but he does it with genuine enthusiasm and an engaging charm. He can talk you into almost anything. Wherein lies half the secret of his success, perhaps.