The string of girls grew hugely at that point. If you were a kid with a guitar and you got up on stage, you were an attraction. That was when the bug bit, as a boy, and it’s never left me. I was eleven or twelve, singing and playing on guitar an old folk song called Tom Dooley in front of the whole school. When was the first time you played music in front of an audience? You can learn and get pretty good at it, but you’re never going to be better than the person who has it naturally. I could sort of create a good painting with oils, but I hadn’t got the ‘thing’ born into my hands. I finally stopped after five or six years because I realised it wasn’t natural to me. You can learn art forms, but there’s an inherent aspect you must have. I had piano lessons at the insistence of my mother. It’s a very melodic, lovely, upbeat piece. I saw the film it was taken from with Danny Kaye. It would be something like Wonderful Copenhagen. A real nature boy.Ĭan you recall the first piece of music that struck you, and why? I grew up by a beautiful river and a mill house. England was somewhat more rural and wilder then. So they would be typical of the time: playing in the woods and wearing cowboy outfits, hiding in trees and all that kind of normal stuff. What images from your childhood come to you most vividly? There must be some sort of hook for a photograph to come off, like a song. I leapt over the side of the boat, up to my chin in water too, and took a few shots of the guy and his horse. I immediately saw there was something extraordinary there, a picture. As we arrived at the beach, I spotted that guy leading his horse into the ocean. The only way you could get around to the spot we’d chosen was by boat. Me, Stewart and Sting were fudging around the edge of the island of Montserrat. The two subjects of the title are almost up to their necks in the ocean, together but facing in opposite directions. Tell me about an arresting photograph of yours titled Man Horse. I suppose you could say I have an eye for it. You can make the seemingly more ordinary appear interesting. The subject matter in a way is secondary to one’s visual sense. You can get shitty pictures of hotel rooms, or you can make them a bit more artful. It must be something that either catches me in a formal, photographic way, or in an emotional way. Also, I don’t want to take funny photographs. In many of your photographs there’s a sense of melancholy and loneliness, particularly in those of hotel rooms. He mentored me, and because of my friendship with him I got very deep into the inner circle of photography at the time. I was very lucky, I was in New York a great deal and I became friends with probably the world’s greatest photographer, Ralph Gibson. It’s like playing music, you get better at it if you do it a lot and if you study. I had no idea I’d any talent for it, but I became quite fanatical. Even at that point, I told myself: “I’m going to get good at this.” They’d all turn up dressed in black, shouting instructions. I started to get interested in their cameras and gear. We were surrounded by photographers all the time. In 1979, when I was relentlessly on tour with The Police. When did you start taking photographs seriously?
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