FAMILY ALBUMS
Lou Reed? Irascible. Paul Simon? Paranoid. Van Morrison? Vainglorious. How Scottish photographer who took these intimate portraits of rock ’n’ roll royalty says kids are FAR better behaved!
THE setting was Mulholland Drive overlooking the sprawl of Los Angeles bathed in sunlight and smog. The subject was former Generation X singer Billy Idol, working the trademark lip curl as he sat astride a monster motorbike. And the man behind the lens was Ken Sharp from Fintry, Dundee – a photographer with his work cut out.
Idol had come off his bike days earlier, his right leg was up to the knee in plaster and the star did not want it in shot. Then there was his entourage: the meddling PR man, Idol’s mother Joan, who had come along in a bright yellow shell suit…
Only when Middlesex-born Idol called out ‘Can I get one with me mum?’ did the lensman’s mood brighten. This could be interesting: Billy Idol in his shades and biker leathers next to his mum in a lurid shell suit. Delicious.
The PR man intervened at once. ‘No that’s not going to happen,’ he said, closing the session down.
‘I suppose he was right,’ reflects Mr Sharp today. ‘He must have known that, if the magazine had seen it, that would have been the picture.’
Now 63, the self-effacing Scot was for many years the holder of one of the most envied jobs in photography. He would travel to exotic locations, meet his musical heroes and take pictures of them for a glossy magazine which loved his work so much it often wiped out double pages with a single shot.
But things were rarely that simple. Not when his subjects were mercurial rock gods, often as prone to sulks as to back-slapping bonhomie.
Indeed, 15 years after moving on to photographing children rather than music stars, he says he has noticed a distinct improvement in the cooperation of his subjects.
‘Quite often the rock stars are worse behaved than the children,’ he laughs. ‘Certainly both get bored very quickly.’
It was as a photographer for Q magazine that Mr Sharp built up his portfolio of rock star portraits which, in later years, graced the walls of Beanscene coffee shops all over Scotland and kick-started the family portrait business he now runs with his wife Lesley.
‘Q wanted to change the style of music pictures,’ he says. ‘It was less about mythologising these acts and making them look like gods. They wanted more gritty and realistic pictures, which suited my style.’
It certainly did. Among his first assignments was to photograph guitar legend Eric Clapton in London.
‘Can you do a job on Thursday?’ his editor asked him on the phone.
‘Sorry,’ replied the freelancer. ‘Totally booked up that day. What’s the job anyway?’
Clapton’s name was all it took for him to clear his schedule. The moody shot of the star lighting a cigarette was widely admired in the rock fraternity, particularly among PRs for younger acts anxious to be seen as ‘serious’ musicians.
But it cut little ice with the grouchier, longer established names.
‘Van Morrison, Lou Reed, Neil Young … they’re all notoriously difficult,’ says Mr Sharp. ‘These guys don’t care. They believe in what they’re doing and see it as their craft and the PR side is very much secondary. I’ve done all three of them and they’ve all been difficult.
‘I’m a huge fan of Van Morrison and I’ve met him quite a few times but he never once let on that he knew who I was.’
His photo session with Canadian rocker Neil Young, meanwhile, lasted seconds.
‘We were in a hotel suite and I set up in the bedroom and his manager asked me what I was going to get Neil to do. I said I’m going to get him to lie on the bed and pretend he’s reading a magazine.’
‘You’ll never get him to do that,’ the manager told him.
Young did lie on the bed as the photographer clicked off four or five warm-up shots, but then he sprang up, shook Mr Sharp’s hand and said: ‘That was great, I’m sure you’ve got a great picture.’
‘No, no, I’ve just started,’ protested the photographer. But Young was gone, already walking out of the door.
The late Lou Reed was perhaps the most cussed of all.
‘The first thing I said was, “Can you take off your sunglasses?” That was a “No”. He was smoking this cigar, so I thought we’d use the cigar for a picture and asked him to take a puff and blow it out and he says, “What? So that it blows in my eyes?”
Frustrated by Reed’s attitude,
Mr Sharp did a sarcastic cough as the former Velvet Underground frontman left the room and, seeing Reed stop and look round, wondered if he had gone too far.
Which explains his anxiety when he was sent to New York to photograph Reed and his reformed band a year later.
‘He was being difficult again and I thought, if he remembers me, it’s going to be tougher still.’
Reed eyed the photographer suspiciously and asked: ‘Have I worked with you before?’ ‘No,’ lied Mr Sharp. ‘Are you sure,’ persisted the American. ‘I’d definitely remember.’ The session went ahead and this time Reed was charm personified.
Only very few jobs were complete disasters. On one occasion Mr Sharp was despatched to New York to photograph Paul Simon. The interview went ahead but the photographer was barred.
The problem was Simon’s paranoia about his receding hairline. At the 11th hour he decided he could only trust ‘his own’ photographer to take pictures.
With others – such as Marianne Faithfull – the rapport between the photographer and his subject may not have been to his taste, yet the results were stunning. His editor deemed the unglamorous image of the weathered 1960s icon ‘exhibition standard’.
Not everyone in music is high maintenance, however – or, at least, not always. Paul McCartney was ‘lovely – just such a nice man’.
Chatting away chummily during a session at his Sussex farm in the early 1990s, the former Beatle interrupted proceedings only to take delivery of a bass guitar for his son’s 13th birthday. A year later McCartney spotted the photographer at an awards ceremony in London, made a beeline for him and said how much he’d liked the pictures.
‘And how did your son like the bass guitar?’ asked Mr Sharp.
McCartney turned to him, amazed. ‘You remember that?’
People tend to remember meeting Paul McCartney, the photographer reminded him.
Rolling Stone Keith Richards was no less charming. ‘The last thing I wanted to do was another close-up picture with him and the skull ring on his finger. Everyone does that picture and it’s one of these things Keith Richards does – like Paul McCartney doing his thumbs up – because that’s what they get asked to do and they’re just giving photographers what they want.’
Instead he sat Richards on an amplifier with his guitar and captured a series of glorious black and white frames, much imitated thereafter.
CHRISSIE Hynde of the Pretenders so enjoyed her sessions with Mr Sharp she’d interrupt her stage act to wave at him in the crowd; Sting was an attentive host, passing over the cowboy hat he was wearing when he feared the photographer’s bald head might be getting sunburned.
But no one, perhaps, was more unaffected than the great Leonard Cohen who, having invited the photographer and interviewer into his home, ordered them a takeaway meal. On discovering one of the two was vegetarian, he got to his feet and said: ‘Okay, I’ll make you something.’
‘He was absolutely wonderful,’ says Mr Sharp now. ‘To be sitting there with Leonard Cohen cooking for you and chatting to you, that was just a dream.’
Recalling those audiences with rock royalty as he sits in his front room in St Andrews, Fife, Mr Sharp is keenly aware that he enjoyed access beyond the dreams of his fellow music fans. But it is also clear from his portfolio that he made the most of it.
Does he miss the thrill of those encounters? ‘I’ve never been very interested in celebrity,’ he says. I’ve always just wanted to do pictures.
‘If I take a picture of a girl of eight and if it’s a nice picture, she’s going to show it to her grandchildren when she’s 80 and say, “that’s me at your age”. That means more to me. How many pictures are there in the world of Eric Clapton?’
Lots, certainly. But precious few of Ken Sharp’s standard.