I’ve worked in photography and design since the early 1980’s.
My portraits have been featured in such publications as The Face, ID, Time Out, Actuel, Libération, American Harpers, The British Journal of Photography, The Sunday Times and The Guardian to name a few.
My interactive digital media work includes the multimedia site for Primal Scream’s XTRMNTR, featured in the Museum for Applied Arts in Frankfurt, an innovative artificial intelligence application for Simple Kid, which won the BT Interactive Music Award 2003 and digital projects for Amnesty International & The Institute of Contemporary Arts among many others.
After buggering about with music technology for a few years, remarkably I signed a record contract with Warner Brothers on my thirty three and a third birthday. At the time I jokingly said I would not continue past 45. That birthday was my last day in a studio.
Arrogantly believing I was now in the entertainment industry and burdened with a room stacked full of over a decade’s worth of negatives and transparency sheets, including the night-life I had been covering for Time Out and all my studio portraits, I casually tossed the bloody lot in a handy skip. I was to regret that no more than when the V&A asked me to use them for a show.
In the recording studio I have produced and mixed albums for such diverse artists as Mick Jones & Big Audio Dynamite, Mark E. Smith’s The Fall, The Grid and The Tiger Lillies, including a soundtrack for the musical Shock Headed Peter, which won two Olivier Awards in 2002. Big Audio Dynamite’s Rush/Change of Atmosphere was honoured with Billboard Magazine’s Rock Single of the Year and was number one in many territories. I am still waiting to get paid!
Since then, returning to formal studio photography after a long hiatus, I worked on, for want of a better term, mass portrait events. Finding a location, perhaps a gallery, club or pub, I set up a makeshift studio. Participants are asked to bring an object relevant to the theme. The intention is to invoke a party atmosphere. I usually try to shoot about a hundred portraits over the course of the day. Fortunately I have a wonderful team. The ensuing portraits from each event have formed the basis for a subsequent book and exhibition.
For the last 15 odd years I have resided in Catalonia for reasons of cultural health.
In 2019 I opened Gros, a bar and restaurant in Calella, Catalonia, just prior to the COVID pandemic decimating the world and destroying the hospitality industry. Not great timing.
After four years I just got out alive, although a whole lot poorer for it.
In between all this malarkey I have travelled the world in search of the bizarre, the offbeat and the plain disgusting to salivate the palate. It is a sickness of sorts but curiosity and greed prevail.
I grew up in a household that was very much focused around the kitchen. From an early age, on Saturday afternoon I might be helping my Pa pull the bones out from a boiled pig’s head to make brawn or dress a whole salmon with cucumber scales.
My parents were very adventurous in culinary skill and knowledge at a time when garlic was considered evil foreign muck. The only place that sold olive oil was the chemist. They went to ‘continental cookery’ classes every week, returning, rather refreshed, clutching, maybe, a Barbary duck that they had just learnt to bone out whole and stuff, or a cassoulet, ready to cook in the stove for many hours, in a Le Creuset Dutch oven, bought for the purpose.
Friday nights there was often a cocktail party where I was bidden to pass around the hors d’oeuvres and later serve the drinks. Once I had been sent to bed I would creep halfway down the stairs to listen in on the conversations, not that I understood much once the booze had kicked in (the guests’, not mine). These were noisy hedonistic affairs though no car keys on the table, at least as far as I noticed. Shame in a way as all the guests drove home afterwards though the country night. No breathalyser then and no socially responsible drinking advice from the authorities.
Saturday nights were for dinner parties and this is where the folks recently acquired skills were presented to the assembly although some of the guests would bring a course. One of his favourites was pa’s CEO, Dean, an American. His wife was from the mid west and her contribution was, for the most part, some bizarre creation always involving something in aspic, chicken and sweetcorn in orange jelly for example. Dig out old 1950s cooking pamphlets if you have never seen these monstrous creations though I have always fancied doing a dinner entirely of these without warning the guests.
Of course there was a collection of recipe books in the house, not just anywhere but in the downstairs loo and this is where the real research took place, roughly working on the principal of one in, one out, that is, a recipe for each sitting. My poor Pa overran this once to his dismay. He used to smoke on the bog and, while deeply engrossed in a recipe, the end of his fag dropped off and landed in his pants, instantly setting fire to his trousers around his ankles, a most tricky dilemma. I am not sure how he resolved to get out with both his dignity and wedding tackle intact but, to his credit, he put in an insurance claim for the cost of a new 3-piece bespoke suit, as was the one he had torched the pants of. Remarkably the claim was paid without question. I feel that it was such a ridiculous story that the underwriters, once they had stopped pissing themselves laughing, had to believe it.
Since then I have been obsessed with collecting cook books, though less relevant now with the internet, your own personal library. Pre-web it was such joy to flick through various tomes, both ancient and modern, to discover new ideas for dinner, to then go out in search of obscure ingredients, spices and tools from all through the specialist shops spread across London and beyond. Amazon just does not have the same thrill.
I have had several collections of books, each time disposing of then only to start again, the greatest one reaching 992 in number just before I decanted myself to Spain, where, once again, I began over, only this time, apart from a few classics, they were Spanish or Catalan. My language skills are desperately inadequate but I can read a restaurant menu of the most obscure ingredients better than some natives. La Carta spoken here.
Bon profit.