Mancunian Kevin is one of Britain's greatest rock music photographers, famous for pictures of Joy Division, New Order, Oasis, Mick Jagger, David Bowie and hundreds of other stars. Actually, let me just amend that statement - Kevin is one of Britain's greatest photographers.
He was on the Mary Anne Hobbs show. The interview is on iPlayer at the time of writing, but will disappear in a short time, so I thought I'd put a transcript on here for anyone interested. Incidentally, you can view pictures mentioned here on Kevin's website.
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This month it's 35 years since I took the pictures of Joy Division on the bridge in Hulme and when I was taking them I didn't even think the NME would use those pictures because I was thinking more journalistically and I took those thinking in two weeks' time when we use them in the paper the snow will have gone and so nobody will use them - it will date the pictures.
And I said to my editor the day before, 'Shall I cancel the session because I don't want snow on the pictures?' And he said 'Well, take some indoors, but maybe do a couple and see if they work out.'
The original idea for the shot was to take a picture of them standing on the bridge looking south as if they wanted to get out of Manchester because in those days, and much has been made of Manchester and the mythology of Manchester, but it wasn't a great place to live, I have to say. They were standing on the bridge and I was about to go down to the side of the road to do the shot and they just looked at me so forlorn, so desperately miserable, that I took a couple of frames of it.
It's kind of grown its own mystique that picture because it's got a lot of space in it and it's very bleak. And you look at that picture and you know what that band are going to sound like. Over the years I think the relationship has developed between Joy Divsion and that picture. It's a picture people look at and think that's the Joy Division brand image almost.
I wan't conscious of taking a picture that I thought would last for ever. That picture would make you intrigued. If you saw that picture in a music magazine you would want to go out and buy their records to see what they sounded like. And I think that's the strength of a great rock photo.
The power of music photography is such that you should look at somebody and think 'I want to know what they sound like'.
I grew up on Penny Smith's photos in the NME. which were always nice and black and white and broody and I'd look at a picture of Bryan Ferry and know I'm going to like him. And that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to work with people and say, 'You're going to enjoy this. This is the band I like and this is why I like them'.
When I photograph a band it helps if I'm really into them because when you work with musicians there's a lot of hanging around waiting for them - maybe two days waiting for ten minutes' work. So you've got to like them.
You'd go into a session with a very fixed idea of what you want and sometimes that won't work.
Some musicians have a lot of ideas. I mean Morrissey, for instance, is a great person to work with because he does have a very visual sense, I think, whereas there are other bands that just can't be bothered.
A lot of musicians are very self-aware. They spent their formative years looking in the mirror and working out two or three poses and it's quite hard sometimes to knock that out of them and get the picture you want. I used to spend time on the road with musicians and maybe for the first couple of days not even taken the camera out so that they got used to me being there and it's very difficult to get that when you're just put in a room with someone for ten minutes and told to get on with it, which is all you get these days.
I think a lot of bands don't understand the importance of good photography because they all take pictures backstage and they've all got blogs. When I was shooting extensively for the NME the dressing room was sacrosanct really. That was their own space and now they're all taking pictures of it and there are no secrets anymore.
The beauty of rock and roll is that you don't fully understand it, whereas now bands destroy all that. They're forced into it too early. There are six people in the audience, five are blogging about it, someone's uploaded one of the songs on YouTube, a hundred people have said it's rubbish before they're even off stage and they've split up before they go home. That isn't great to me. I think that there's got to be some mystery brought back into it.
With photography, especially at gigs, I wish people would just keep their cameraphones in their pocket and enjoy the live experience. You've got a huge spectacle in front of you and you're looking at it on a 3in x 2in screen. Don't take pictures at gigs, but if anybody's interested in breaking into rock and roll photography - and I would imagine it would be very, very difficult to earn a living because there's less of a paid market for it - work with a band you like, develop a relationship with them and, if they're just starting, realise they've got no money and give them a few pictures because if you help them early in your career they might help you later in your career.
The picture of the Stone Roses covered in paint was a slightly obvious image because I wanted the Stone Roses to be painted by John Squire for a photograph. I thought if that relationship would work it would be a great balance. And it was a very conscious attempt to do a career-defining image and I think again that's the picture people think of when they think of the Roses. When they came back again a couple of years ago and people said, 'Would you like to shoot them, would you like to work with them again?' I thought, well, I would but I couldn't take a better picture of them than that. No pun intended, but I have painted myself into a corner with it.
There's too much mass media and there's too much social media as well and I don't think people understand the importance of a great picture.
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