Adrian Boot, rock’ n roll photographer
With a stunning back catalogue of music pictures, Adrian Boot introduced reggae and punk to a global audience. Steve Fairclough discovers how a one-year sabbatical turned into a lengthy career and shares the stories behind shooting the world’s biggest sta
Joe Strummer is just a bloke; Bob Marley is just a bloke. It wasn’t until years later they became sort of demi-gods
Since the early 1970s Adrian Boot has trained his camera on some of the biggest names in music – from Bob Marley to Mick Jagger. Best known for both his live concert photography and his celebrity portraits, with his full head of hair and wiry frame Adrian looks like a rock star but prefers to shoot them instead. He switched a career as a teacher for one behind the lens and has since documented major music events such as Live Aid in Philadelphia and the Nelson Mandela Freedom concert in London. Today he mainly works on his image archive – which is showcased on his Urban Image website – plus book and exhibition projects. He is, quite literally, the man who was there, saw it, shot it and got the tour T-shirt…
What drove your initial interest in professional photography?
From a very young age I was always fiddling around with cameras and liked photography. I also liked chemistry and was more into the darkroom side of things. I couldn’t really afford a camera but I could afford to buy the chemicals to change silver prints to different colours and that sort of thing, which I used to do a lot.
I went to university to study chemistry and didn’t ever think of photography as a serious option. Then I learnt chemistry and physics and became a physics teacher in Jamaica, at the University of the West Indies and at a school in Port Antonio. During that time I pursued my hobby as a photographer – mostly black-andwhite and mostly people and street photography. Jamaica was really good for that – I wasn’t so much interested in palm trees, beaches and blue skies in those days. It was much more the sort of gritty, reportage, sort of romantic side of photography. I came back from Jamaica with a whole hoard of black-and-white snaps that I‘d taken over the years.
I used to take photographs, make the prints in my house in Jamaica and take them around the local community and give them away. In those days it was quite rare to get hold of a photographic print of anything so I became quite popular. That gave me a lot of in-roads into what was going on and I came back and published a book called BabylononaThinWire, which was the underbelly of Jamaica; it was written by Rolling Stone journalist Michael Thomas, whom I’d met in Jamaica. Thames & Hudson published it and there was an exhibition based around the prints at The Photographers Gallery but I thought that would be it…
Then I suddenly found myself being asked to take more and more photographs. A lot of the images in
BabylononaThinWire are pictures of Rastafarians and musicians. Don’t forget, back in the early 1970s nobody had heard of Rastafarians or paid any notice to reggae or Jamaica, so the book did quite well. I was teaching in Kingston in Surrey at the time and after a year I decided I could have a sabbatical year off and just take photographs because people were calling me up all the time. That’s what I did and I’m still having the same sabbatical – I never went back!
So you didn’t have any formal photographic training?
There’s not any formal training in
photography, although I’ve since taught photography. My formal training was in chemistry; I knew physics and chemistry and photography inside out. In those days it was about being able to get a dozen or so prints onto the editor’s desk the next morning. That’s not such a frightening prospect these days, but when you had to process a roll of ISO400 film for a live concert, and then struggle to get a print out of it, that was quite a challenge. It was less about how good the photography was; it was more about ‘did you get a picture of so-and-so and where is it?’
Who were your main clients through the 1970s?
Mainly the music papers. I got a reputation of being able to photograph black faces – I know that sounds racist, but it was true. While I was in Jamaica I spent a few months in Big Sur in California at the Ansel Adams School, where I honed my knowledge of the zone system.
In a nutshell it will help you take photographs of a white horse in a snowy field or a black guy in a shadowy room if you’re thinking of placement, pre-visualizing pushing the film and so forth. I got quite adept at that and I applied it to Jamaicans –
trying to photograph a black face in bright sunlight is very difficult.
Then, punk came along and crossed over with reggae and the whole ‘Jamaica scene’. Basically they all lived on the same council estate, so the music crossed over and you got a lot of young white kids going to reggae shebeens and vice versa. That’s how I got involved with The Clash and the growing punk scene.
When did you become a staff photographer for Melody Maker?
Fairly early on in my career. I was there all the way through the Allan Jones years [as editor]. Allan and I used to go on all sorts of adventures; very often creating the story as much as covering it. I was shooting every day. If it wasn’t a concert it was some artist in a hotel room, or I’d try to get a photograph of an artist who probably didn’t want his photograph taken. But you could count the photographers who were covering the music scene on the fingers of one hand. We were all shooting in black-and-white because, of course, [laughs] colour hadn’t been invented yet… well not as far as NME and MelodyMaker were concerned.
When did you first come across the punk movement?
I’m not sure anybody identified it as a movement in those days. It always strikes me as quite strange the way that, years later, people try to intellectualize these phenomena. At the time, punks were the dregs of society almost – people who couldn’t get jobs and were disenfranchised. Not much has changed – young people are still in the same state! The difference in those days was that you could still go to art school for free, mess around for three years and even form a band, which a lot of people did.
I guess all those kids on the council estates up and down the country didn’t feel a connection [to society] so they created their own stuff – fashion, magazines and bands. They didn’t care whether they were good enough to play music and the record companies weren’t that interested anyway. So, from that point of view, I guess it [punk] was a bit of a cultural thing but I certainly didn’t think it was anything special. It was a bunch of kids from the local council estate trying to form a band and writing and creating their own magazines.
Were The Clash or the Sex Pistols difficult to work with?
No. The Clash was really easy – they were nice people and quite well educated. With the Sex Pistols – well, John Lydon was an intelligent guy and he didn’t suffer fools [gladly]. The others were, well… certainly you wouldn’t even try to have a
conversation with Sid Vicious, but I only photographed them [the Sex Pistols] two or three times.
I photographed The Clash lots of times; I was a lot closer to The Clash. But did I like their music? Sort of… I liked The Clash but I wasn’t keen on the Sex Pistols, though their shows were always exciting. For me, a band is great if they’re photogenic and there’s a lot going on on stage. If it’s just a guy with a guitar standing there I tend not to like it – the music might be amazing but I would be bored. If there’s somebody jumping around the stage, causing mayhem with audiences erupting, then I’m on the case.
In those days what sort of cameras and film were you shooting with?
For concert work, my trusty old Nikon F, and a couple of lenses. I’d have a 200mm lens, a fixed one, maybe a 28mm, and a 90mm that I used to shoot portraits.
Can you explain more about your use of Nikon gear?
Whatever the latest F camera was I would have upgraded to that body, although I rarely upgraded the lenses. I still have a zoom lens that I use, which must be 30 or 40 years old by now. But we changed the bodies and I bought a digital Nikon, a D3X, which I still use. The lens I still use is the 80-200mm, which is a sort of standard lens. It was essential for live and action photography, so nearly all of the live photography was shot on that and quite a bit of the sessions too.
Is there anything in particular that you like about the D3X?
It’s like the F4 [SLR] but digital. It takes all the lenses. But do I use many of the facilities in the camera? No. Very often I’ll switch it to manual out of habit. I do trust the digital meter and stuff, but more often than not, especially with live photography where the subject might be very bright and the background very dark, it’s hard. I tend to use the screen on the back to get a kind of a light reading and I tend to shoot concerts manually going up and down using my eye.
I use autofocus a lot, almost universally now. Gone are the days where I had to trust to luck on focus. I guess the fact that it’s a very fast autofocus [is good] but I guess that’s in common with most cameras now. I was thinking of upgrading the Nikon [D3X] body at some time, but I’ve not done so. A recent session I did on that camera was for the BBC with Grace Jones in Ireland – she’d just made a film and I did a lot of set photography.
How much do you use Photoshop?
I’m quite good at Photoshop. I don’t use any special effects or anything. With some of the hotel work I played around with HDR but I don’t really do much of that anymore, either. It’s nearly all just basic standard retouching, which I’m quite good at. I have a Flextight scanner and a Nikon scanner – it’s a Coolscan 5000, which I have to say is a brilliant scanner. I’m not sure Nikon makes it any more, but it’s certainly the best I’ve ever had.
Who did you most enjoy working with during the punk era?
I liked working with Debbie Harry, only because she was so picturesque. It revolved around whether I was going to get a good picture out of it and if I knew I was going to get a good picture I enjoyed it. Technically some of my pictures were rubbish – like The Clash
The Clash were really easy to work with – they were nice people and quite well educated. With the Sex Pistols – well…
[on the streets] in Belfast – but they got the covers of Sounds, Melody
Maker and NME – the following week. Because of the subject, and because no one else was able to get it, it was unique and successful. That’s often the case. Newspaper editors often say, ‘We want a picture of Kylie Minogue falling out of a taxi. We don’t care whether it’s shot on a Box Brownie; we don’t care whether it’s in focus, so long as you can see it’s Kylie Minogue falling out of a taxi.’ That’s always been true.
Photography is not so much about the cameras, the film and the process; it’s about the interaction with people. It’s about having enough bottle to knock on the dressing room door. It’s really a sort of sociology rather than anything else.
Do you feel privileged to have been working in the 1970s and 1980s?
No. Not really. I could have done something else and you’d be asking me the same question. A common question I get is, ‘what was it like photographing Bob Marley?’ or ‘what was it like photographing Jerry Garcia?’ As if I’d had an audience with God or The Queen or something. At the time you don’t think like that – Joe Strummer [of The Clash] is just a bloke; Bob Marley is just a bloke. It wasn’t until years later that they became sort of ‘demigods’, so it’s a strange question to ask a photographer ’what was it like to photograph…?’ I did photograph Nelson Mandela and there was a good cause to say ‘what was it like?’ He was a nice, charming, awesome guy.
What was it about Nelson Mandela that struck you?
Well, there are few people that will drop themselves down to your level and have a conversation and joke with you – Mandela was like that. You didn’t feel intimidated. Strangely enough, Mick Jagger was like that – you didn’t feel intimidated. He was always very pleasant and polite. Whereas other people, Van Morrison for example, were very offish and didn’t like photographers. Different artists play it different ways.
How did your involvement in shooting Live Aid come about?
I ended up working with Live Aid because of Bob Geldof, who I knew quite well. He just dragged me in to take photographs and sent me to Philadelphia to cover the show and then I did a book. I helped him put this
LiveAid book together, which we did really quickly through my publishing contacts – that was it really. I see Bob once in a while; he’s all right… a bit of a megalomaniac, but he’s OK.
Can you explain what the Urban Image project is all about?
Our website, Urban Image, represents about 10% of the archive and I’ll be spending the rest of my days going through the photographs that I’ve taken and putting those out. I’m in my element ploughing through old negatives. There are bands and stuff that has never been scanned in and never even been printed.
Urban Image is an archive that is one of the few remaining independent photographic libraries. They’ve nearly all been sucked in by Getty, Corbis or Camera Press these days. Urban Image does quite well simply because it’s historical – nobody is going to go back and photograph The Clash so, in a sense, we have a monopoly. Sadly, we did quite well out of Tom Petty recently because, of course, he died and I did one of the earliest photo sessions with Tom Petty and the band in San Francisco – stuff like that keeps us alive.
Do you have any idea of how many images you’ve shot?
I’ve done nearly 3000 photo sessions: everything from a [full] photo session to a few snapshots. In terms of rolls of film, one session might have 10 rolls of film and another session might only have one, so in terms of rolls of film I guess you could add a zero to that [3000 figure]. When I’m finally dead and buried I don’t know what’s going to happen to all the negatives. That number is just for black-and-white. I’ve got filing cabinets stuffed with colour transparencies but there aren’t so many of those. If I shot colour it was because I’d do a session and shoot a roll of colour as well. By the 1980s it was primarily colour. The music press was starting to go to colour but that presented problems because colour’s not as flexible [as black-and-white]. You could go into a room with a lighter and a roll of Tri-X and, even without using flash, you’d get some quite interesting shots; trying to do the same thing in colour was not as straightforward. In those days you wouldn’t know until two days later whether you’d got anything back.
Nearly all of the photographs that count have made 10 times more money since they were first commissioned. I’d go and photograph The Clash for MelodyMaker and I’d get a cover plus an inside spread and I’d make maybe £150 or £200. Those pictures have sold countless times since, so it’s a case of looking more at the long term and I still think that collecting archival images is valuable.
What’s next for you?
I’m working with Mykaell Riley, the ex-Steel Pulse musician, who is now a professor at Westminster University. We’re working with the Lord Mayor’s office and the British Library on a big exhibition called Base Culture, which is the story of black British music. We’ve been doing that for a year and it’s due to happen in September 2018. It’s not just reggae – it’s black music period. I’m also working on a
Women in Rock series with Sterling Publishing in New York.