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It's an energy thing. It moves around a lot.

The process of identification is I'm right there with you.

In the height of the moment, I say, "Assassin."

Because that's what I feel like.

I'm locked in, I got my sights on you,

and I'm gonna take you out.

Early on, I tapped in to that instinct,

and that's where I want to go every time.

I want that feeling.

'Cause I'm just after that one thing.

I'm not after your soul.

I'm after your fucking aura.

Four-one-six, I need a notification to Bellevue.

I have a male patient in his 40s, Mick Rock.

Robert Oscar Charlie King. Patient is conscious.

Rule out acute M.I. Vital signs 140/80...

People often ask about, you know,

"When you nearly died, Mick, do you regret?"

I mean, technically, you know, on a karmic level,

I kind of regret

that I got myself into that state,

but the other part of me says,

"Could it have been any different?"

And every time I ask myself that question, I say, "No."

Mick! Mick! Mick! Mick! Mick! Mick!

I don't want to get too mystical about it,

but I do believe that everybody has a destiny,

but that not everybody grasps that destiny.

Mine was pretty clear when I look back,

and especially in the fucking name, Mick Rock.

Is that your real name?

It is Michael David Rock.

That was your dad's name?

Rock was his name, yeah.

It was just good timing, wasn't it, really?

Photographer, Mick Rock, joins us.

His photos make up a large part of David Bowie...

I just followed my instincts. I knew what I liked.

I was drawn, you know, to the good,

the bad, and the wicked.

I've lived a very wild life because, you know,

I've been hanging out with a lot of very wild people.

And the camera just kind of led me by the nose almost,

and I never looked back.

Just kept going and going and going.

- Legendary Mick Rock.

This is just, I mean, come on. Freddie Mercury and Queen.

- There it is, Lou Reed, my man.

I learned a lot from Lou, yeah.

Absolutely, yeah.

Not all my best habits, I might add.

I always knew

that this was the life I was meant to live.

I just had to, you know, make sure

in the final analysis that it made some kind of sense.

Yeah, I came back here in my dreams.

I even teleported once or twice

in a certain state of psychedelic inebriation.

Yeah, this place gets into your skull.

No doubt about it. It's a beautiful place.

In this environment, you could be in any century.

I think that enabled my imagination to run,

shall we say, a little frantically.

My mother fueled a certain insecurity in me

that the only way I could get an identity

was to get into Cambridge.

It wasn't easy to do for someone born of extremely modest means.

It did teach me something about projection.

If you project strongly enough,

and I sometimes in my early days, you think,

"Well, I got there 'cause my mother projected it."

That's where I got my head fuller with all these,

you know, great poets,

zoomed out of their brains, coming up with great art.

The symbolist poets.

The English Romantics.

And, of course, the American Beat poets.

Arthur Rimbaud was, like,

the ultimate realization of the symbolist poet.

He would go, like, for several days

without food and sleep

and then he'd whack a little bit of chemical inside himself.

He worked in a purely associative way.

The idea, the idea of these people

and the idea of the kind of lives they led

started to confirm my suspicions that,

indeed, there was...

There was a more interesting life

than the one I'd had as a child.

It wasn't a bad life.

The lysergic experience opened up my third eye,

you might say.

I remember the first time I went up to see this guy.

He was an artist.

He had a bottle of the liquid stuff with a dropper.

And he got out the blotting paper.

He couldn't have known how strong,

but this stuff, I remember.

Once it kicked in, the entire universe,

like, rushed through my body. I saw everything, everything.

It definitely, I mean, intensified all the colors,

intensified the frame. It intensified everything.

The altered state was something that was there.

I mean, it had become part of me.

The yoga fortified.

The practices of Yogi Bhajan enabled access.

You know, you could be in a non-chemical state

and you could still start

to get traces of this perception.

And then when you combine the two,

of course, whoopsie daisy.

Photography wandered idly into my life.

There was a chemical experience.

The chemical overload.

Well, I got the excitement of the...

Every time I pressed

that shutter, it was like an explosion.

It looked different every time I clicked it.

So, there was this world of entertainment in the camera.

And then about three days later, I was back in my friend's room

and I saw the camera, 'cause it was his, not mine.

And I said to him, "Oh, I think I, you know,

shot some film the other night. I bet that's interesting."

Apparently, there was nothing in the camera.

But still, that's when this word,

you know, you can put it in quotes,

"magic" started to get into my mind.

'67, that's the summer of love.

And here I am, you know, Fanny Golightly.

I had a habit of staring

at friends' faces under certain circumstances

'cause you could see the whole of the universe

since the beginning of time.

It would revolve and roll. I remember that so vividly.

I would take pictures

of lady friends or girlfriends of friends,

and it wasn't that long, and somebody offered me

a fiver to take photos of a local band,

and my brain went clunk.

Hello, hello, hello.

In the beginning was Syd. Psychedelic Syd.

Like nothing I'd ever seen before.

In fact, like nothing, really, anyone in England,

certainly, had ever seen before.

Had a band called Pink Floyd.

Syd had actually left Pink Floyd

and was living in relative obscurity.

He asked me to take the cover photo for his solo album,

The Madcap Laughs.

I didn't really have any plans. It was simply to shoot El Syd.

And Iggy opened the door in the all together.

All together, now, Miss Iggy.

She was holding company with Syd.

But, of course, the gift was the floorboards.

He had moved in not long beforehand

and he was painting the floorboards.

He used to paint over all the...

I mean, there were dog-ends buried in there.

He didn't clean the floors before he slapped the paint on.

I only had daylight film,

and that had to be push processed.

That's why they have this kind of painterly look about them,

because technically, they're fucked.

See, that should really have been the cover

of Madcap Laughs.

See the crop? That's what me and Syd wanted.

I saw him like a soft poet.

Like a Baudelaire or Rimbaud or these characters

that I'd been studying at Cambridge.

Not long before those sessions,

I took a fucking acid trip with Syd.

Just me and Syd,

listening to music, lot of laughing about.

I remember he'd roll around. He'd piss his knickers.

Syd Barrett on acid, he's such a gentle soul.

I was an outsider with this little group of hip characters,

and you'd spend all your time with these people

who wouldn't hang out with anybody that wasn't.

So, that feeling of being outside was also a warm feeling

'cause you're inside this other little cocoon

of like-minded people.

Very strange how it all turned out,

though, you know?

Syd in the garden.

Syd was out of London, was living in Cambridge,

when I was starting to write little bits

and pieces for different magazines,

and this I actually did for Rolling Stone Magazine.

Syd lost interest.

He never did another photo session,

he never did another interview.

He actually said all he ever wanted to do

as a kid was jump around and play the guitar,

but he couldn't get there anymore.

The tickets available

for tonight's performance are in the box office.

The box office is in the front foyer

on the right-hand side.

So, it was Marc Bolan of T. Rex who first popped up

with the makeup and the Vaudevillian clothes.

However, something more fascinating was looming.

It was also very unlikely

the carrot-colored hair-do and the jumpsuit,

the red plastic boots and the mismatched eyeballs,

no seasoned betting man would've backed this one.

But I knew what I liked,

and that was enough to make the first move.

And I remember the night

I peeked around his dressing-room door.

"I like your name. It can't be real," he told me.

There and then, he invited me back to his house

and we stayed up all night

and talked about all kinds of things.

There was a certain awareness

of being with that level of intelligence in the room.

You know, the pictures got elevated.

They acquired this other quality.

I remember taking them up to David's office.

His manager said, "David says that you see him

the way he sees himself."

It was a Friday night, I do believe.

Oxford Town Hall.

It's his biggest audience to date.

People were starting to notice him.

The encore was coming, and I ran 'round.

I had been up front.

You can see that from some of the other pictures

on the contact sheet.

I was just on the side of the stage.

David hadn't announced to me,

that he was gonna do anything in particular.

I don't think he did with anybody.

But what he was planning to do was simply bite Mick's guitar.

He said to me, "Did you get it? Did you get it?"

The timing couldn't have been better

'cause it was as the closets were opening up

and, you know,

there was David chomping away on Mick's rod.

That was a big deal,

in terms of a bigger audience for my personal work.

People started asking who took it.

I hadn't done a lot of performance photography

until David came along.

And actually, you look at the early pictures I did of David,

and you can see there's a certain looseness that later on,

you know, I could get great shapes in the shot.

We were engaging

in a certain amount of propaganda,

and I was a true believer.

I mean, this moment in time,

he did not need bodyguards.

It was all designed to give people the idea,

"Who's this guy?

We don't know who he is, but he's got these bodyguards

and a personal photographer. He must be a big deal."

He had a mission,

which he spelled out to me very early on.

Ziggy Stardust, as an album, is all about stardom.

I mean, he's had this whiff of it,

but he's not a star.

When the album is made, the album made him a star.

Let me put my best damn knickers on.

I remember talking to Terry O'Neill about this once.

We both did a radio show a few years ago,

and he said he never really hung out

with the people he photographed.

I was kind of like, you know...

Especially in these early years, but that's how it all grew.

I don't think they felt that I was an outsider.

- I was part of the fabric.

I was celebrating, and I think they all knew that.

So, I was a natural, organic,

you know, Joseph Goebbels for the piece and the time.

And I came very cheap.

This must've been shot in 1973.

I suppose minimalistic would be an inadequate description,

but, of course, I was particularly lucky,

as I was often, especially in those days,

to have this amazing subject.

I mean, what is he, you know?

Whatever it was, he gave off a certain kind of awareness,

and I fed off it.

I was open to it.

It was the encore,

and David had already been playing

"I'm Waiting for My Man" and "White Light / White Heat."

Anyway, come the encore, up popped Lou.

For whatever reason, I was near the back.

I didn't get any close shots of them.

Perhaps I'd gone out for a piss or something.

I don't know.

I remember noticing even though it was David's concert

and Lou had come on for the encore,

David left Lou alone. He did not go to Lou's mike.

He treated him with great deference.

I always saw them symbolically, the light and the dark.

They had a certain symbiosis.

New York, The Velvet Underground,

decadence, drugs, kinky sex.

This photograph, for whatever reason, reflects that.

A cold shiver went up me spine when he hit the stage.

He was sporting this huge Gibson guitar,

and the makeup, the white face

and all the darkness around the eyes.

He could tell even from this contact sheet

that there was something about that.

And then I made the prints, and that's, "Ah."

That was the coup de grâce

when it fell out of focus in the printing.

Bingo, there's the cover.

It's a performance image,

but a lot of people don't realize that

because it's so still,

as indeed is the Raw Power cover.

To me, they're a pair. Same place.

The Americans in the mix.

Woo!

He looked like a fucking iguana.

That worked because the way the light and the whole thing,

the motherfucker has the stillness of an iguana.

Where's the bugger? That one.

That one and the Raw Power cover.

Rock 'n' roll, nailed every centimeter of it

in that one shot. If that ain't rock 'n' roll,

then rock 'n' roll was a wank job.

"I wanna be your motherfucking dog."

"I wanna be your dog." He would sing.

I mean, it was a complete revolution,

and most people ignored it.

The way the audience was, they were sitting,

which as I look back, that's really weird.

He walked into the audience,

but there was no way he could really jump into the audience.

I felt like a big-game hunter.

I mean, I was so glued, you know, to the viewer,

and fucking you just keep at it.

I could get a fixation developed very early in me

that, you know, fixation thing.

The thing that nearly killed me.

I saw all those characters. They were always mythological.

They're always, like, shimrons.

Syd Barrett was a shimron, Bowie, Iggy, Lou.

They were almost not human.

They were almost like something

that come out of the woodlands, you know?

Something... They were magical to me.

He wanted it.

He was talking about the stardom.

Like my mother, I'd seen the projecting,

and somehow it had worked.

Mother projected me to Cambridge, though.

These...

...powers of concentration, I mean, who are you?

Really, who am I? Who am I?

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

But for a while, I'm this Mick Rock character.

I was so enamored...

So enamored of these auras and the way I saw these people,

and that was so strong.

And you look at the pictures, you go,

"For somebody who didn't have a particularly

well-developed personality, they are very strong."

It was just something about when I got the camera,

something else, some other trick happened.

You know, it's almost just using me as a conduit.

It was a mixture of all these things,

whether it's Oscar Wilde or Clockwork Orange

or the theater or Beethoven or all these...

...whatever.

This was, like, the advancing avant-garde,

the new, vitalia,

and a little bit of drag thrown in.

I mean, you could never beat a bit of drag.

It's so many different things,

but when they merge them together,

it has a certain ring, and it is an interesting,

good-looking, you know, clang.

When I came across these characters,

my own identity was only quite fragile.

I guess I had this little Mick Rock thing,

and rock 'n' roll was...

...you know, pumping. And whatever.

I looked the right way for the times, you know.

Spindly and long hair. Spindly, long hair, tight jeans.

I did wear lip gloss.

There are pictures of me with rouge on.

Yeah, you know...

Like a boy would in those days.

Just feminize himself.

Biba's was the place

if you were young and pretty and hip,

and I was like the in-house photographer.

Look at David, like a big girl.

Bryan Ferry and Amanda Lear.

He was rock 'n' roll, but it was smooth.

Roxy Music. Of course, they were around.

The rockers were the most obvious manifestation

of the glam sensibility and the people

who most readily understood its publicity value.

Even more seasoned performers such as Mick Jagger, Elton John,

and Rod Stewart adapted to the allure of glam.

Just a great time to be young

and to be in what people saw as the edge of the culture.

And I was like a big dog, you know?

Gnawing away right on that edge.

When I was born,

Mick Rock wouldn't have meant anything.

I think the name infiltrated into my psyche

and, like, tuned it in a certain way.

'Cause it is a bit like

if you wanted a rock-'n'-roll photographer,

what would you call it? You'd call him Mick Rock

and he'd probably be about 6' and he'd probably be English.

If you wanted a stereotype, you know?

There's prints back here, there's prints

and there's also books, boxes, fuck knows what.

I'm not sure if there's any Bowie there or not.

There might be.

Oh, it's like it's never ending.

I don't think this went into production.

Well, I don't know. It's a bit kitschy.

That's the only thing with photographs, they do hang about.

The bastard things, you know?

I've got the main contenders, including Rocky Horror.

I am the king of the glam-rock photographers.

Oh, Marianne, look. Looking very chaste.

The butter wouldn't melt in her mouth.

Patti LaBelle.

Mott The Hoople.

John Cale.

Thin Lizzy.

He told me he killed somebody. I don't fucking think so, Phil.

I love these reverse Mohicans. Very original, Peter.

I'm not taking you home to meet Mother, though.

Not looking like that, you can't.

Look what I shot in the summer of '72.

It's Jerry Garcia.

It was not that I got bored easily,

but I was just infinitely curious, you know?

Do you give a damn who Trickster are?

I mean, they had their moment in time,

but I can't remember what it was.

The Strawbs.

Certain images, whether it be

all those characters or Rocky Horror

or whatever, have a big cache nowadays.

Skin Alley.

You know...

Soiree.

And I couldn't have survived on the money

that I was making at that time.

I mean, Transformer got £100.

And how about this?

I know it doesn't look very moi, but it is. "Highway."

Yeah, look at that.

"What's that all about, Mick?"

I don't think I had a fucking clue where I was going,

but I was gonna be going there anyway, you know?

I was heading straight down the line.

You go, "Well, where the fuck are you going, Mick?"

"I'm going in that direction."

It's moving at a hell of a lick, you know?

But that Freddie picture, right? I mean, I look at it.

He looks like he's on his way to bloody Heaven.

But they approached me, you know?

Mick Rock, 'cause he's taking pictures

of famous puffs, you know?

I mean, they wanted to look the fucking part.

They got this first album out.

Nothing much is happening with it.

They wanted the glam-rock image.

I had a friend who had a collection

of old Hollywood stills.

I think it was the cover shot,

but it might've been from the same movie,

Shanghai Express.

He had a little book about Marlene Dietrich's films,

and inside was the shot that did inspire.

My brain just went...

And I showed it to Freddie and it was...

It was an instant sell.

Freddie Mercury, you can,

as it were, be Marlene Dietrich.

Of course, she was a total professional

and basically could light herself.

These guys, it's only the second time

they'd ever been in a photographic studio,

and they were in and out of that mirror.

There were up and... I was up and down this bloody ladder.

You can see from these Polaroids the development of that shot.

I don't know if I was super nervous about it or whatever.

I did not let go.

Freddie was the one I communicated with most,

'cause he... I don't know.

He was camp and he was, like... He was the visionary.

As Roger said about Freddie, I mean, he would,

even when he didn't have a pot to piss in,

he was crashing on your floor,

he'd walk in acting like he was doing you a favor.

Oh, he was already playing in coliseums in his mind.

We showed it to the band and they said,

"Fine, we'll do it,

but we're also gonna shoot this white shot."

See, look. Album gatefold, would've been.

And ended up being the middle of it anyway.

So these... They were like,

"Mm, I think maybe the white one."

Of course it would've looked like...

"Santa Claus is Coming to Town".

Love the hair.

Fucking fantastic.

You can be a swan.

It's like... It's like picking cherries.

The thing is, photography's just not complicated.

I mean, you can make it complicated if you want,

but where I'm coming from, it certainly doesn't have to be.

I do remember early on reading something by Horst.

He said he didn't understand modern photographers

and how complicated they made the lighting,

'cause he basically had one light

and he moved it around till he saw what he liked.

And I thought, "Uh... Yes, that's about me," you know.

And why it's doing it, I don't give a shit.

I want the pictures. I don't care about the why's.

I get to a session, make sure everything's in place,

then I fuck off for half an hour.

There's a lot of power breathing,

which is a Kundalini Yoga thing. Playing around with mantras.

And the brain machine...

...that brings me right down focused, opens me up.

It's like a meditation so your brain gets cleared out

so that the impressions can be fresh.

It's important for me, this body connection,

that I can almost take photographs with my stomach.

Stomach and the eyeball were like...

...locked in.

They bypass the rest of me.

I don't think I've ever done a session

without standing on my head beforehand for a bunch of time.

I've been doing that since, um...

...1970.

- Ah.

Let's get the long goodbye.

- Yeah. Ah.

Ah, sa, sa. Ah, sa, sa.

I mean, the name alone was enough to get me stimulated.

Stanislavski? Who's this motherfucker?

And then you find out he's the grandfather of the,

you know, the method school of acting.

But one thing he talked about was going into a raw space

with a bunch of people and building

the circle of concentration till at a certain point,

you know, it kind of takes off.

It takes on its own energy.

You're really more of a driver,

or you're steering rather than directing in that way.

You can see the way people's faces change

as the muscles relax

or they drop down into that, you know...

And in that moment, I'm like a...

I'm like a thief in the night.

Bling, bling, bling, bling, bling, bling, bling, bling.

What is it? What did Debbie say once?

I have a quote from her. And she said that,

"If Mick Rock were a drag queen, his name is Miss Direction."

"Oh, look over there," he says while he sticks

a knife in your back over here or takes your photograph.

If you're in front of my camera, you could be the world's

most fucking boring person off-camera.

The minute you're in front of my camera,

you are totally fascinating.

You know, so that's really where I'm coming from.

My instinct is, you know, once I got the bite on it...

...I'm not letting go.

Ah. It did get out of control, it's true.

There was a certain amount of,

what should we say, venal celebration going on.

I never felt like a voyeur. Never felt...

I was always on the inside looking out.

I think I also enjoyed the fact

that I'd had such a cerebral education,

a classic British education.

And the camera brought me into this intuitive world.

Cocaine was starting to creep into the culture,

but it wasn't what it became,

a raging snowstorm that swept out to the provinces.

Certain reprobates.

I'm not a fucking paparazzi,

but I just happened to be in this place at this moment.

It's the thing of Mick Jagger and Rod Stewart, Ronnie Wood.

It was raucous. What more do you want in life?

And the cops kept coming and no one was answering the door.

"It's the cops, it's the cops."

But eventually you had to let them in.

I mean, it's the cops.

And they came up to the attic and they're like,

"Whoopsie daisy.

The lads were having a bit of a jamboree."

I've got a lot of great party pictures,

I think, but there's something about the David, Lou, Iggy,

and the David, Lou, Mick moments.

They both denied they actually kissed,

but I know that's a fib 'cause I saw them, and why not?

Boys were being revolutionaries

by kissing each other on the lips in public.

Revolutionary gesture.

I know the little buggers do it all day long nowadays,

but back then, it was something, you know?

"Ooh, I kissed a fucking boy on the lips this afternoon."

You go...

..."Really, I've done that before."

Well, I was roaring.

I was on a blue tear,

and I didn't stop to think about the implications

of where I was at or even necessarily what I was doing.

I simply had to live out this, I suppose, fantasy life

of being some kind of mad symbolist French poet.

David was inviting me to go to Berlin to take pictures,

and Lou was inviting me to come to New York.

Even though David and Berlin were interesting,

New York and Lou Reed were irresistible, unfortunately.

I like the feel of the city,

and it was a bit ugly in places and grungy,

and it was nowhere near as pretty as London or Paris.

But it didn't matter. None of it.

You could feel the edge

the minute you walked into New York.

You know, you had to be on your toes,

and it was a good feeling.

It was torrid, and torrid, you know,

I needed to get it out of my system.

What can I say?

Had just landed in New York.

I hadn't slept for a week

and started shooting him that afternoon.

He wanted me to work with him

on these images for his new stage show.

He had just done all this wild and crazy feedback imagery.

The problem was it started out with 60,

but by the time we were about 12 drinks in,

it was down to 30.

Then we'd have to get to a location,

find some more TV sets. It was a bit of a...

But it was, you know, it was an original thing.

I mean, Lou Reed, man.

Just absolutely unique.

None of these sessions were designed for any purpose

other than for us to have some fun,

and then we'll see what we do with them afterwards,

and sometimes the record labels

would license for a couple of pennies.

Sally Can't Dance was based on one of the photographs

I took of him at Blakes Hotel,

and he had gone blond on me.

Of course, this session,

it looks like a carnival, a barker.

He's got that hat.

I got a friend of mine to retouch it,

make it a little bit candy-colored.

I did these great pictures of him and Nico,

and I've got a few frames later on

that I took of him and John together.

But never got them all in the room, which again,

for those of us that care, what a special moment.

She said to me,

"He was my little brother in a former life,"

'cause in fact, she was older than Lou.

Lou was almost like a little boy to her.

I think he liked the fact

that he had his own pet historian, if you like.

The best pictures of me taken in that period

were also taken by Lou.

Oh, well, there's a negative of one.

That's the one I've used quite a bit.

Blakes Hotel. Hadn't slept.

It was00 a.m. in the morning,

but the light's very nice at that time of day,

so it was quite flattering.

But these ones, there's something about,

as a session, this is...

He did, he looked like a bloody insect.

It was like the perfect rendition

of people's idea of Lou Reed.

The shiny, the black, the shades.

I mean, he looks fantastic. It's a pure image.

You know, he was Baudelaire,

a great artist, but a degenerate.

He fulfilled people's fantasies.

He used to get very irritated about it,

but I'd say to him, "But, Lou, you know,

you've kind of propagated this."

- Come about- 00 a.m. when the blood sugar drops.

That's when everything,

all the really crazy shit started to happen.

And I was kind of addicted to00 a.m.,

and they call that the hour of the wolf.

And I love that time

because you can get up to all kinds of antics then.

I was in the exploration biz.

I would check everything out.

I mean, anybody that was up to anything

a little bit saucy in New York, I was invited.

And also, the girls, man. Jesus.

You know, if you had a vial of cocaine,

you know, it's like whatever.

I didn't really want to be sensible.

I wanted to taste all the buzz

of the whole thing, up to a point.

I remember going to a couple of S&M clubs and going,

"These motherfuckers are too serious for me."

You know, "I need to get the fuck out of here."

I had, like, an instinct fully developed

by then for anything

that smelled like a big rodent, and this one did.

But, you know, a healthy, edgy rodent,

and they called it punk.

I went down to CBGB's in 1974. There were 20 people there.

These were taken at CBGB's,

but it's got all four original ones.

'Cause Tommy was only in the band

for the first couple of albums.

By the time I shot the album cover,

Marky was the drummer.

I spent a lot of time around that glam scene,

and this is the fucking Ramones.

I mean, you know, not the prettiest bunch alive.

In fact, they were, at that moment in time,

you could probably have called them the ugliest band around.

I remember the art director told me

they'd already done three sessions

and they hated the pictures. They didn't like photographers,

and if they didn't like what was going on, they'd leave,

and he didn't really have any money.

Did I want to do it? And I thought, "Yeah."

But meanwhile, over the water,

I tasted it a bit here and there.

Remember Johnny Rotten walking around calling everybody

a bunch of fucking hippies. "Fuck off, you fucking wankers."

He was busy imprinting himself on the underground consciousness

by touting his obnoxious vibes.

I remember Malcolm dangling some kinky underwear

in front of me, saying,

"You want some of this, Mick? Come and photograph my band."

Wasn't really about the music.

It was more punk as subversion,

which it definitely was an attitude promulgated in London.

Look at his eyeballs. He's very, like,

"What the fuck are you doing here, Mick Rock?" You know?

I mean, I would wear a bit of makeup in the glam days,

but I wasn't gonna get my fucking haircut chopped short

and have a Mohawk, and no. No, I didn't identify.

With the glammy stuff, I identified.

But, I mean, just look.

A lot of those fucking punks were really fucking ugly.

I'm sorry. They were interesting,

but, you know, I was into prettier stuff.

That was taken about a decade ago.

Look, that was a knockoff of one of my earlier images.

And there's Debbie.

People often ask me about, and I say,

"Well, it doesn't matter which way you twist the banana.

I don't care who it is." I mean, look at Debbie Harry.

She even photographed in certain ways

better than Marilyn, I think.

I mean... And it's really, some of the pictures,

and my pictures, you go... You know?

Just her glowing, you know,

and looking like the Marilyn Monroe of rock 'n' roll.

Yeah, 'cause the thing with Debbie is she was like David.

You couldn't really take a bad picture of her.

This became the cover of Penthouse.

Of course, the irony is she's not only wearing a jacket,

but also a scarf.

Actually sold more than any other issue

of the magazine that year.

She had fun with the group, too. You can see in a lot

of the pictures she's mucking about.

But obviously it's less the idea of glamour

and more the idea of camaraderie.

If it's just Debbie, I can concentrate

on that rock-'n'-roll Marilyn or Lolita,

as the case here.

If you do this type of identifying

when you're looking at somebody,

some kind of plasma sticks onto the photographs.

Talking Heads, they were "Children of the Damned."

The Dead Boys I wanted to give the vibe

of the second Rolling Stones album.

I love the stuff with Joan Jett.

She was Elvis Presley to me.

Often with the visual things, I mean, if you explain it,

it doesn't sound like very much,

but, I mean, you look at it...

it somehow works, you know?

Why do certain things stick in the mind?

I couldn't fucking tell you the answer to that.

It's a Youngian thing.

It's a truth that reverberates, that kind of defies itself.

It's a truth that you can describe up to a point,

but then you got to let it go and let it be unto itself.

And that's a bigger truth,

and that's what I discovered with pictures.

Beyond my words lay these more...

...profound...

Like, profound, more substantial proof.

Let's put it like that. Chunkier truths,

and whatever they mean, what you want them to mean.

What that's the result of, I don't know.

I don't know.

Quite often after a shoot, it was not like,

"Oh, the session's over.

Calm the fuck down and go home, Mick."

No, I'm ready for more.

And part of the problem was I was so indulged.

I was a young British photographer

and I had this association.

You know, "Mick Rock always shot David Bowie.

They're really good..." You know, if I'd shot nobody else,

that would've been enough for me to get invited

to every, like, orgy or God knows what

that was going on in New York.

Oh, this would be... This could be the Ritz.

There's Wayne Kramer and Stiv Bators,

lot from The Dead Boys. And Cherry Vanilla.

Say, "When did you have the time for all this, Mick?"

Well, I never slept.

If you don't sleep, you get about a bit.

What was that Ramones song?

I would play it, like,00 a.m. in the morning in my studio

on 32nd Street and Madison.

It would be, "I wanna be sedated."

Oh... Did I love "I Wanna Be Sedated."

It was... Looking back, it was probably a cri de coeur,

'cause I needed a lot of sedation.

It's a lot of my problem.

Sedate the bastard, you know?

I was so in love with cocaine. I loved it. Of course I did.

At one point, I knew 10 dealers in New York.

They were the only collectors of my pictures,

'cause, you know, the exchange policy.

I mean, I could get an eight for a fucking print, man.

High Times. Uh-oh.

That's how I got good at shooting still-lives.

You could take a long time

and it could work out quite expensive

because the material goods consumed.

You know, it would get out of control.

That's in a meat warehouse. Look, you can see the meat.

So, it was an interesting shoot, but heavily chemicalized.

I remember that.

Even when I did all that cocaine and speed,

I was also doing yoga.

Be up for three days, stand on your head for an hour.

I mean, wow.

Talk about the big fucking bang in the brain.

I do remember once not sleeping for seven days.

Anyone that cared knew I was, you know,

existing a bit beyond the pale...

in terms of being reliable in any sense,

in terms of, you know, being able...

Just being professional.

Just wasn't... Wasn't being professional.

I remember doing that Carly Simon shoot,

and she was the first person to say it.

She said, "Yeah, Mick takes great pictures,

but you can't find him after the session for days."

I was in a lot of denial, though.

I didn't get all the way to the bottomless pit.

But it would get -- I would get flashes of things

possibly getting bleaker.

Those were, like, very fragmented times I was living.

And I did a lot of different things.

It was hyperactive in my rampant insecurity.

And then there's Motley Crue.

It was glam metal.

I mean, it wasn't that I was working that much,

so they came and found me.

Couldn't tell them, "Oh, Mick Rock has a problem

and it will be an issue."

Just doing what they're doing.

The thing is it didn't matter what sort of state I was in,

where I was -- It mattered nothing at all.

The pictures would always work.

So, that kind of sat over here.

Over here, meanwhile, is the real Mick Rock,

and he's getting to be a bit of a bloody disaster.

Had to leave the city. I owed the landlord a lot of --

wasn't so much, but it seemed like a lot at the time.

Could be 10 grand.

I mean, I don't know.

Perhaps people stopped calling me

because I was too much of a loon.

I had not been getting enough

satisfaction out of photography for a while,

and I'd started to do some art direction

and a bit of collage work

related to the art direction.

You know, I don't know what I'm gonna do when I do it.

It just starts to form.

I do one or two things, and this suggests something else

and this suggests something else.

And then suddenly, whoopsie daisy,

you got this thing.

Was I high at the time?

Yeah, I was high at the time I did all this early work,

but I do it now without being chemically,

you know, altered.

When things started going badly,

I wouldn't go to David or Lou and ask them for work.

I've not exactly been that communicative with them

for quite some time,

although they've both tried, to be honest.

I knew I was too fucked up

to be able to face them properly, though.

I think there was...

always had some fantasy.

When I straightened out, then I could see them again.

I don't know if I really fell out with him.

I think I got very paranoid

because I missed his bloody wedding.

I was supposed to be there to take photographs and I...

I don't know, mate.

Just -- I got myself up a back alley.

It was hard to get down, really.

Tough to get out of it.

I think when the shit hit the fan, as it were,

when it all started to fall apart, I wasn't equipped.

And these were so strong, and my pictures were so strong

that that was my identity.

All of them had become a little bit of me.

Take it slow.

Did a shoot.

Yeah, I was actually out in the West Side

when the West Side was still very raw.

And it was cold, as well.

And, whew, this bizarre feeling.

I kind of wasn't admitting to myself what it fucking was.

They could see something was going on.

My heart started doing the kind of...

I was too stunned and too in a state of realizing that,

you know, somehow this had all been so inevitable

that I was sort of beyond being scared.

Oh! So this was the fucking end game.

I've been trying to figure out what the end game's gonna be,

and it was you on a hospital bed nearly dead.

And I was singing to myself over and over again,

"In pastures green, he leadeth me.

The quiet waters by."

And I was weeping.

My mother always says

we're all living on the edge of a precipice,

and that always comes to mind,

but I will not go lightly into that dark night,

that's for sure.

Yeah, I don't think too hard about it

'cause I don't really want to go quite back there.

I mean, I acknowledge it, but I don't, like, you know,

get into it too much

because that's not something you want to happen again.

No fucking way.

Three heart attacks followed by quadruple bypass heart surgery,

all in my early 40s.

So, at times in my life,

I've certainly felt like a failure.

Definitely. Woof.

Beyond being a failure.

I was dead broke.

I had a serious cocaine habit.

I had zero insurance.

And there were my saviors --

Andrew Loog Oldham, the original Svengali

of The Rolling Stones,

and Allen Klein,

who had been the business manager of the Stones

and the Beatles in the late '60s.

They paid for everything.

I think it's fair to say they in many ways saved my life.

I was just a child in my times.

I don't think --

I didn't know what I was, to be honest with you,

but I was something.

You know, something without being full of it.

Just something, and I'm looking for it.

It's there somewhere.

And it was buried deep, and it took me so long,

and I had to nearly die to get to what this Mick Rock thing is

other than some kind of parody.

Ugh. Phew.

Don't even know where to begin.

It's like a monster that I've been dragging around.

I even thought of making a movie about a photographer

who was trapped by his images.

I mean, look at it. I can't let go of a lot of it.

In fact, most of it.

My job is to protect it.

I don't know how it will happen.

It'll just, you know...

I was just Michael David Rock.

Joan Rock's little boy.

And then this Mick Rock thing took over.

Do you enjoy being a rock star?

Fantastic.

What do you think you are at heart?

I'm an object.

But you live with other people's ideas.

I think I make good use of this. I tell you.

I'll take everything it's got.

It's difficult. But you could've had it.

You could've had those things a long time ago.

Why now?

All right, lads.

Eyes down for England.

Let's get rolling.

I got to work this back a bit. Very high.

Switch that one off so it doesn't distract me.

Switch off the overhead lights.

Let's get some drama.

It's the mood.

Have a seat, sir.

I hate to say it --

well, maybe no, I don't. Head up a bit.

- I got a dash of Rasputin. - Oh, yeah.

- He's plenty -- - More than a dash.

Yeah, okay.

Ah! Ah! Ah!

Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!

Now, if you'll stand up for me against the backdrop,

it's gonna take a little bit of patience.

Move that a little bit.

Doesn't have to, like, disappear, but...

Just come right up to here.

Bring that light around.

Come right back against this now.

You want -- keep the jacket. I like it.

No, but I like it down if you want.

I was gonna give you one of these.

Yeah, yeah, give me one of them.

Yeah, yeah. Give me four of them.

Mm-hmm.

I've done this before.

Listen, I'm not expecting originality.

Well, I fucking --

I knew one shot that I felt the love.

Oh, yeah.

Every so often, I nail one.

Ah! Ah! Ah!

Right towards me, Josh.

Push them right out at me.

There, and up a little.

Yeah, yeah, whatever you want to do.

That's fine. Okay, okay, okay, okay.

Aha, aha, aha, aha, aha.

Did I get off? Nearly.

I know I need to do these things for therapeutic reasons.

I'm better and healthier when I do them.

There's a lot of different pressures,

but really, once I'm in the open field

where the creative part is happening,

whatever the fuck else is going, that, you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Beautiful, beautiful,

I love it, I love it, I love it.

Yes, stay. Stay with me.

There's a certain hunger

comes over me when I pick up a camera.

Sometimes I joke about, you know,

being a bit of a vampire,

and especially shooting younger people

'cause the blood tastes better.

The hands -- move the hands around.

Like, very -- I mean, the robot,

but -- ah, super.

This is one for the fucking ages.

The only control you have is in the doing

of what you're doing.

You can't dictate what will have resonance.

The thing that used to irritate me is, you know, he --

"Oh, the man that photographed this person or that person,"

but after a while,

you're gonna stop being called the man who shot the '70s.

It's just a tag, right?

But whatever. It is what it is,

and it's better that you're thought of in some way

that is, like, not so awful

than not to be thought of at all.

Of course, the amazing thing for me nowadays

is that this rock 'n' roll photography stuff

is in museums and galleries

and cultural institutions all over the world,

and I keep thinking something went very wrong.

We were supposed to be rebels and outsiders,

but nowadays,

we have been absorbed by the modern establishment.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mick Rock!

I got lucky a lot. Didn't I, Lou?

I got very lucky at times. Let's be honest.

When you have that much luck, at a certain point,

you have to say there is more involved.

You know, continuously in the right place

at the right time with an instrument

that continuously takes beautiful pictures.

So, granted that -- that Rock has no talent.

You know, I just think

if you have the right obsessive nature,

you know, could be a sick obsessive nature,

but you have to have the capacity

to be fascinated.

And I think you can fascinate me.

I'm like, you know, a baboon with a banana.

And a camera, of course.

The mystery of it all.

That's what excites me,

is how mysterious so much of this is

and how these things happen and why they happen,

and the fact that, you know,

you can kind of smell this stuff,

but you can't really describe it.

I mean, I love --

I love to take pictures.

Yeah, crank it up a little bit!

Liven it up just a little.

Little bit. Yeah.

This guy's a right fucking cunt and he's mad as a hatter.

I thought, "Send him over immediately."

Where is he? Is he doing yoga somewhere in the building?

Come on in, gentlemen.

Fucking Motley Crue come

for a spanking session with Mick Rock.

No laughing, you cunts.

Watch the birdie.

Keep -- keep your eyes on the prize.

Keep your eyes on the prize.

Hold your horses.

Yeah, you can do it, too.

Helps if you're high, of course.

No, I want to fucking feel it. Can I feel it?

Oh, dear. A bit too old for this.

What's my name? What's my name, Lenny?

Mick Rock.

Final roll.

You know what he said working with me was like?

Tell 'em. Tell 'em.

- You said it. - It's like doing crack.

It's fucking like doing crack.

Everybody scream. Can't keep it straight.

You smell good.

Kisses all around.

Oh, oh, oh.

Oh, yeah. One more.

One more.

- You're fabulous. - Oh.