Viva Brighton Issue #45 November 2016

PHOTOGRAPHY
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Ian Dickson
Punk’s not dead, just middle aged
Ian Dickson gave up photographing
bands about ten
years ago, when he came to
the conclusion that, after
nearly 40 years in the business,
he had “lost his muse”.
He then entered “phase
two” of his career: documenting
and marketing his
photos. “I make much more
from my archive than I
made taking it,” he says, and
cites the eye-watering price
he gets for an original print of one of his photos
of, say, The Clash in 1977, when it sells in a Los
Angeles gallery.
The idea that his photos of punks have become
considered ‘fine art’ makes him smile, and he
winces at the way he treated his negatives back in
the days when he would rush back from a sweaty
concert to his dark-room off Regent Street to
develop and print his photos in time to deliver
them to the printers by 4am. Ian worked as a
stringer for the NME - then selling 270,000 copies
a week - between 1972 and 1974, then got a job on
rival weekly Sounds. It was there he bumped into
the punk movement, with which he has ever since
been associated. “It was ‘lucky’ really: a case of
being in the right place at the time,” he says, doing
finger-gesture inverted commas around ‘lucky’ to
show that there was a bit more to it than that.
He reckons punk as a significant musical movement
was all over by 1980 (“once Thatcherism got
going and Adam Ant took over”) but its ethos - of
rebelling against the establishment and not being
afraid to do everything on
your own terms - is still
with us. He’s full of great
nuggets about the bands
and what they stood for. “A
lot of the punk-rock bands
stepped off the pub-rock
scene stage, then stepped
straight back on again with
shocking hair and different
clothes,” he says. He often
found that photographing
the audience was as
rewarding as photographing the bands: many of
the punters were in a punk band themselves.
I speak to Ian in his Brighton house - he moved
here in 1999 having been recommended to do so
by his mate Brian James, of The Damned - and
the black-and-white prints which adorn his living
room and hall remind you that the punk explosion
was just one of many different styles of music he
covered: subjects include BB King, and Ray Davies
of the Kinks. “I was the official tour photographer
for Roxy Music in the 70s,” he says, “and for
Frankie Goes to Hollywood ten years later.”
But it is for his still-immediate punk-related photos
that he will always be best remembered, hence
the timely exhibition of a selection of his prints
- alongside others by the NME’s Kevin Cummins
- at Brighton Museum this winter. Punk, definitely
not dead, is turning forty: here are some intimate
images from its infancy. Alex Leith
Photo-punk - 40 images from the birth of punk by
Ian Dickson and Kevin Cummins. Brighton Museum
& Art Gallery, 22nd Nov - 5th Mar 2017
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