What Presence!

WHAT“In the midst of Scotland’s punk explosion, a Glasgow maths teacher hung up his mortar board and picked up a camera. His name was Harry Papadopoulos and his photos would come to define and inform Scottish popular culture in the 1980s”THE HERALD

“In a swift shutter’s click, he captured an era when the sound of Scotland echoed across Britain and the world … Relive the days when music fans would get black fingers from inky weekly music papers with this fascinating retrospective”THE SCOTSMAN

“An unmissable history lesson from a major artist”THE LIST

“Harry Papadopoulos is the great unsung documenter of post-punk, who, between 1978 and 1984, captured a crucial era in pop history”NEIL COOPER, WWW.THEQUIETUS.COM

“A testament to the power of photography as a tool of cultural, historical record”PERSPECTIVES.ORG.UK

street1eve1p h o t o w o r k s

WHAT PRESENCE!THE ROCK PHOTOGRAPHY OF HARRY PAPADOPOULOS

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd, West Newington House, 10 Newington Road, Edinburgh EH9 1QS

www.polygonbooks.co.uk

Text copyright © contributors 2013; images copyright © Harry Papadopoulos 2013

The right of Harry Papadopoulos to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978 1 84697 256 0

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.

Project management by Alison Rae

Design by Teresa Monachino

Printed in Spain by GraphyCems

Contents! FOREWORD by Peter Capaldi 7

INTRODUCTION by Ken McCluskey 9

PHOTOGRAPHS by Harry Papadopoulos 271978 27 1979 41 1980 55 1981 77 1982 103 1983 117 1984 133

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 141

INDEX 142

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To my late parents Harry and Margaret (Cox) Papadopoulos and my nephew and niece Nicholas and Anastassia Ioannou

H.P.

foreword by PETER CAPALDI!

The alternative Glasgow scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s was a world of energy and bristling creativity. Even the nihilists and anarchists had to figure out what to wear and what chords to play. It was a time when you had to be in a band. Or make a fanzine. Or do something. And thankfully for us Harry chose to turn his lens on this world. It’s no surprise that he himself was an example of the kind of artfulness and energy that his pictures so vividly capture. Of course Harry soon graduated to the big bands and the proper music press but it’s his pictures of the bubbling Glasgow scene that get me most because I was there, hustling and begging for a gig like everyone else, and watching while others soared. And I can attest to the fact that his pictures capture the excitement and the punky chutzpah of the time. I was at some of the gigs pictured in this book. The Cramps. We loved the gig so much we even travelled to Edinburgh the following night to see them again (where singer Lux Interior had a stand-off with the venue janitor on stage in front of a seething sweaty mob of embryonic goths). David Bowie. I could only afford three nights of the four he did at Glasgow’s Green’s Playhouse, renamed the Apollo for the space age generation. Everyone was there. Siouxsie and the Banshees at Glasgow’s Tiffany’s. Absolutely electric. And how effectively Harry captured the personalities of the time. Billy MacKenzie of the Associates, I remember news of his amazing voice reached us before we had even heard him. He was a legend before he even arrived. Clare and Altered Images suddenly moving from kids with guitars in bin bags to bona fide pop stars. The Bluebells led by the enigmatic rock poet/geek Bobby Bluebell (not his real name). Strawberry Switchblade, you couldn’t miss them walking down Sauchiehall Street and knew they should be picking up instruments at once. Nowadays celebrity photography is ubiquitous and strangely anony-mous, but here we have a collection of photographs that succeed time and time again in getting to the heart of the subjects and giving us a glimpse of the youthful dreamers behind all the noise. I’m so grateful to Harry for shooting this world with such class and sensitivity.

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Introduction by KEN McCLUSKEY!

This remarkable collection of photographs by Harry Papadopoulos, published here together for the first time, documents his work in the front-line trenches of the pop business between 1978 and 1984, especially in Glasgow and Edinburgh where he focused on new, native bands. It was an unparalleled period for Scottish music, creatively and commercially, and Harry worked diligently to capture the era’s frenzy, froth and fervour.

In the early days, Harry beavered away as an enthusiastic fanzine con-tributor and gig photographer before relocating from Glasgow to London to become a staff photographer for Sounds music weekly. Harry’s approach to his job invariably followed the same rules, whether he was taking photos of bands live on stage in sweaty wee clubs, under pressure of time and being elbowed by pogoing fans, or photographing a band at length for a feature and with more control over the elements. His strategy was simple: employ a minimum of fuss. Make the best of what’s available. Don’t complain about what’s wrong, and just get on with it. Don’t draw attention to yourself. Don’t limit yourself by imagining what the photo’s going to be like before you’ve got it. Harry put bands at ease with his laidback attitude. He seemed wiser – like a quieter, thoughtful older brother. He neither coerced nor cajoled, nor imposed arbitrary rules. Here, I speak from first-hand experience. I was a member of The Bluebells (younger readers can look us up on Wikipedia; older readers might care to reminisce on YouTube), and Harry’s plans for our early Glasgow photo sessions generally began with him saying, “Let’s all go for an adventure and see what happens.” One minute, you’d be up a tree in Kelvingrove Park, the next you’d be in a second-hand car showroom playing around in an open-top Triumph Spitfire. Oh yes, Harry was as pleasantly persuasive with second-hand car vendors as he was with bands.

HARRY PAPADOPOULOS!

Harry in New York

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The son of a Greek-Cypriot father and Scottish mother, Harry was raised in the scenic rural splendour of Garelochhead, Argyll and Bute. When he was seven years old, in 1961, the family moved to the grittier inner-city Glasgow suburb of Craigton. He was educated at Penilee Secondary School in Glasgow before heeding his dad’s concern that he should attain some qualifications for a “proper job”. Harry duly gained a degree in the cutting-edge trade of the time, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, from Paisley College of Technology. Harry’s adult career swiftly turned full circle: in 1977 he found himself back at his Penilee alma mater as a maths and physics teacher after qualifying at Jordanhill College of Education. Secondary-school maths back then was a dry and dusty subject. Harry had always possessed an abundance of artistic creativity, and this man-ifested itself in his classes where he encouraged his reluctant students to compile graphs based on the NME album and singles pop charts. While

his pupils appreciated this unorthodox approach, his fellow staff-mem-bers disapproved of long-haired Harry’s experimental attempts to ignite his pupils’ enthusiasm. From then on, Harry became a doer rather than a teacher, although he was eventually to return to teaching and make long-delayed use of his E&EE degree managing web design courses in various London colleges in the 1990s. It was Harry’s love of photography that provided him with a purpose and an escape, and led him to capture the energy of a vibrant, self-confident new youth culture emerging from post-industrial Scotland: punk rock. Punk’s fabled do-it-yourself ethos perfectly suited Harry’s entrepreneu-rial flair and his impulse for guerrilla photography – snatching pictures on the fly. As a cheesecloth shirt-wearing, loon-panted hippy, Harry had fre-quented most touring bands’ opening Scottish gigs, including Deep Purple, The Rolling Stones, Frank Zappa and Neil Young. He would take photos, develop the prints overnight and then flog them to fans queuing outside the next gig. Harry readily embraced the streamlined urgency of punk and post-punk as it rang out from an abundance of Central Belt record shops: Listen, Bruce’s, Graffiti, Bloggs, Echo, to name a few. These long-lost emporia were the prime hubs of the new music scene, and it was here that Harry found another outlet for his lensmanship by hawking black-and-white 10x8s for the princely sum of 45p. Although Scotland’s safety-pinned youth had fought the good fight in the punk wars of 1976/77, only Glasgow’s Simple Minds, The Skids from Dunfermline and Edinburgh’s Rezillos had made any headway and broken out of the student union and pub scenes. With the growth of independent record labels such as Glasgow’s Postcard (the self-proclaimed ‘Sound of Young Scotland’, indeed), and Fast Product and Pop Aural in Edinburgh, groups such as Orange Juice, Aztec Camera, The Fire Engines, Josef K and The Scars exemplified a vital freshness resounding within Scotland’s major cities. Likewise, fanzines proliferated overnight, and it was in one of these, The Ten Commandments, that Harry had his first photos published. Throughout the first six months of 1977 punk was semi-officially banned by Glasgow’s city fathers. Publicans, moreover, tended to prefer a more mature, rockier clientele, one content to sup a reflective pint to a backdrop of Yes and rhythm‘n’booze covers. Most of the punkier gigs were promoted in nearby Paisley in the Silver Thread Hotel and the Bungalow Bar. Paisley’s thriving but unhealthily named scenesters included XS Discharge, The Fegs, The Mentool Errors and the wonderfully named Groucho Marxist label.

Harry’s parents

12/13Harry’s earliest rock photography from the Glasgow Apollo: the Rolling Stones in May 1976

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This demand for new music was helped along by a new breed of in-novative live promoters, such as Edinburgh-based Regular Music, and forward-thinking social conveners such as Paddy at Glasgow Tech, Mark Mackie at Glasgow University, and Dave Scott and the late Allan Mawn at Strathclyde University. Where the new vibe was, so was Harry. The Tech, for example, played host to The Cramps and The Fall on 15 March 1980, and Harry captured the raw energy of the former band’s performance (along with the memorable raw energy of the venue’s 1970s-futuristic-swimming-baths horizontal-striped wallpaper). Glasgow venues such as Satellite City (above the Apollo) and Tiffany’s, Valentino’s and The Nite Club in Edinburgh began catering for a new audience inspired by the first wave of UK punk bands: The Clash, Buzzcocks, Subway Sect. And, of course, Harry was there to record the action on 35mm film. Glasgow pubs like the Griffin, the Mars Bar and the Grafton had by now become regular haunts for the new tribes springing up, and it was while performing at the Mars Bar, as a sixteen-year-old member of my school punk band, Raw Deal, that I was first interviewed by Bobby Bluebell of the aforementioned fanzine The Ten Commandments. Bobby introduced my brother David and me to his co-conspirators – Kirsty McNeil, who went on to write for the NME, Robert Sharp, a photographer who also contributed to the NME and The Face, to name only a couple, and, of course, the photographer rechristened Harry Pop. This connection led my brother and me into the wonderful, topsy-turvy world of Postcard Records, and eventually we were willingly press-ganged into The Bluebells by the bad-boy genius Bobby B himself. Postcard’s HQ at 185 West Princes Street was a hive of activity. Record sleeves were designed and folded while photographs and artwork were checked for upcoming releases as an eclectic mix of Chic, Al Green, The Lovin’ Spoonful and Creedence Clearwater Revival played in the background. An inquisitive Alan Horne, the Postcardian Warhol, would observe all from the dentist’s chair in which he camply reclined and ask, ‘So, what part of Easterhouse are you neds from?’ or ‘Are those Johnny Rotten shoes you’re wearing?’ We just laughed. The music released on Postcard, the sleeve artwork, along with the photos and the label’s abiding can-do-fuck-you attitude came as a breath of fresh air, then and for years to come, influencing generations of musicians up to the present day. Belle and Sebastian, Camera Obscura, Franz Ferdinand, The Pastels, Teenage Fanclub, Wake the President, Vampire Weekend and The Drums have all name-checked the label and its legacy as important elements in their own development. The Bluebells were fortunate enough to support Orange Juice and Aztec Camera on several occasions, thus gaining a toehold in the press and earning a recording deal. It would have been nice to have made

Harry’s business card Above: Photographer Robert Sharp and Harry Below: Orange Juice

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a Postcard record, as planned, but the label disintegrated, with Aztec Camera moving on to Rough Trade and Orange Juice to Polydor in 1981. But, at least, thanks to Harry’s photos, we look as though we could have been on Postcard: we had the right shirts and we ditched the Johnny Rotten footwear. David Belcher, Glasgow music journalist and Partick Thistle supporter, captures this notion of sartorial style in a piece specially commissioned for the brochure that accompanied Harry’s exhibition at Street Level Photoworks in Glasgow in December 2011:

Throughout this period, Harry’s photos regularly supported another of Glasgow’s great newsprint champions, Sounds writer Dave McCullough . . . McCullough was especially taken with the fact that, like the equally anti-macho Orange Juice, Aztec Camera had set their youthful, un-razor-slashed faces against all the old Glaswegian hard-man stereotypes: “Aztec Camera are a welcome feminisation of a rock band,” McCullough wrote, praising the band for wearing sensible good-boy shoes and the kind of down-home plaid shirts favoured by TV’s nicest family, The Waltons. As Harry’s photos attest, this look was a do-it-yourself Glasgow band trademark in 1980, happily combining assorted urges: thrift, a desire for unaffectedness, the disavowal of rock bombast and glitz. Harry thus records the elfin Clare Grogan emphasising her status as a kooky pop pixie by swaddling herself in an old man’s outsize jacket. Edwyn Collins, Alan Horne and Aztec Camera ape their elders – but not betters – by co-opting the uniform of the middle-aged drone: trilby, tweed, cast-off suits from Paddy’s Market, winter overcoats. Billy MacKenzie waxes tongue-in-cheek cherubic in a school jumper from the fashion shop that he ran at the time. Edwyn relives adventurous boyhood playtimes in a Davy Crockett fur-tailed hat. Elsewhere, captured against a variety of slightly ratty real-life public backdrops, other musicians favour army surplus trenchcoats, Fair Isle jumpers, stout outdoor wear from Black’s of Greenock, and in Peter Capaldi’s case the tanktop of contemporary TV comedy supernerd Frank Spencer (with something of a tad of irony). The overall effect might have been both twee and fey, but it was also loud and vigorous. Glasgow’s New Pop wimps were at heart street-wise city kids, after all.

With the music press championing this scene, it wasn’t long before Harry was invited to become a full-time photographer at Sounds. As his workload increased, Harry decamped to London. His flat in Willesden soon became a home-from-home for Scottish acts who were recording John Peel sessions or performing at the Victoria Venue, Le Beat Route, the Rock Garden or the ICA. Harry’s back garden and front room provide

the setting for several photos collected here. The moped forever parked outside Harry’s front door became a handy prop. As a touring popster in the early 1980s, I personally enjoyed the hos-pitality, accommodation and humour offered by Harry and his many friends on countless occasions. I have an especially fond memory of a raucous celebration in Harry’s flat as the famous David Narey ‘toe-poke’ goal for Scotland went in against Brazil in the 1982 World Cup. On a quieter note, I’d spend long periods watching in fascination as Harry developed rolls of film in his small darkroom, once receiving expert technical commentary as he deftly superimposed a picture of his parents’ wedding on to a New York skyline. Following his productive days at Sounds, Harry enjoyed a successful career as an editor for Marvel comics, working with somewhat unlikely titles such as Care Bears, The Flintstones and Star Trek magazines. However, in August 2002, Harry suffered a brain aneurysm, the effects of which left him in need of full-time care and rehabilitation. He returned to Glasgow in February 2006. By chance, shortly after his return, I met Harry’s younger brother, Jimmy. He invited me to visit Harry, who was recuperating in his Maryhill flat. It was great to see him again but it was obvious that his illness had had a profound impact. Nevertheless, Harry eagerly pulled out contact sheets and photographs by the dozen, whereupon it was immediately obvious that this huge body of work was in urgent need of physical preservation and cataloguing. The challenge became a labour of love for me as I spent evenings digitising thousands of Harry’s negatives with a basic scanner. (In some cases, because the negatives were unlabelled, we have had to make a best guess at dates and venues.) Here, I must take the opportunity to thank my long-suffering partner Fiona and our children Eugene and Stella for their tolerance and support during this period. What to do next to ensure that the photos found the wider audience they deserved? On the advice of a good friend, artist Mark Campbell, I took a selection of the photographs to Glasgow’s Street Level Photoworks Gallery where I showed them to Malcolm Dickson. Gallery Director Malcolm Dickson later wrote: “It was clear within minutes that our intentions for this body of work represented an enormous task. But it was one that had a personal resonance and a raison d’être for Street Level. This was definitely a substantial exhibition in the making, covering a critically important, still relevant time for music production and creation. “On the subject of personal resonance, much of Harry’s output was photo assignments with bands and artists for Sounds, which was without fail delivered by the paperboy through my mother’s letterbox from the age of fourteen (1976) and continued for four years after I left home for art school.

“More than NME, or Record Mirror, Sounds was an inspiration, and its writers were totally engaged with their subjects, whether complimentary or otherwise. It inspired me to write in my school fanzine on subjects such as Rock Against Racism: a real high-point was when a letter of mine was published in Sounds in the late 1970s – the fact that it kicked off a ‘Rat Brain of the Week’ award for the most ridiculous reader’s letter for several issues didn’t matter. From Sounds I ordered ‘How to be a Rock Journalist’, a booklet that, with weird coincidence, resurfaced in one of Harry’s folders that Ken dropped in.” It took over two years to get the exhibition up and running, but with much hard work and goodwill from the gallery and Harry’s family, it finally graced the walls of the Street Level Photoworks Gallery from 17 December 2011 to 25 February 2012. The well-attended exhibition

attracted positive press reviews, and also featured memorabilia, dis-cussion panels illuminated by several key movers‘n’groovers from the era, and live musical performances. Harry’s magnificent body of work has now been saved, and the exhi-bition is on tour. After a spell in Dunoon it moves to Dundee’s McManus Gallery in May 2013, and there are plans for it to tour to other galleries in the UK and elsewhere to reach as wide an audience as possible. The collection gathered here in this book will hopefully reach a wider inter-national audience and be treasured for years to come.

KEN McCLUSKEYCo-curator of What Presence! The Rock Photography

of Harry Papadopoulos exhibition