What Presence! The Rock Photography by Harry Papadopoulos

Named after an Orange Juice single from 1984, What Presence! started life as an exhibition in Glasgow gallery Street Level Photoworks late in 2011 and has since toured to Dunoon and Dundee. It opens tomorrow in the Clydebank Museum and Art Gallery, where it will remain until the 26th of October.

What Presence! the book was published in April this year by Polygon with a foreword by Peter Capaldi and an introduction by Ken McCluskey of The Bluebells, a man crucial to the exhibition being mounted in the first place. In fact, it might never have happened but for an electrical problem in his house that required a qualified spark to sort out.

The spark happened to be Jimmy, the younger brother of his old pal Harry Papadopoulos. Ken had lost contact with Harry and was informed by Jimmy that Harry had suffered a brain aneurysm in 2002 that meant he required full time care.

Ken went to visit Harry and, as he wrote in his introduction, ‘It was great to see him again but it was obvious that his illness had had a profound effect.’ During the visit, Harry wanted to show Ken some of his old prints and contact sheets. ‘It was immediately obvious that this huge body of work was in urgent need of physical preservation and cataloguing.’

This proved to be no small task, with McCluskey spending night after night digitising around 10,000 of Papadopoulos’ prints before contacting Street Level’s director Malcolm Dickson, who immediately saw the potential in the work for a major show.

A self taught photographer, Papadopoulos began snapping visiting rock stars at local Glasgow venues and quickly earned a reputation for himself as one of the country’s finest rock photographers. By the late 70s, Harry secured a post as a staff photographer for Sounds and continued working there until 1984.

His photos helped define what could loosely be called the Post-Punk and New Pop era and if you enjoyed Simon Reynold’s book Rip It Up and Start Again, this is maybe the nearest thing that you’ll find to a visual accompaniment: there’s Vic Godard, The Slits, ABC, Scars, Simple Minds, Siouxsie, Cabaret Voltaire, Gang of Four, Dexys, Altered Images, Madness and Magazine to name only some – although there’s also a smattering of international superstars like The Rolling Stones, Marvin Gaye, David Bowie and even novelist Stephen King.

It really is very enjoyable show and publication – look, there’s a young Alan McGee looking snotty while bass player with The Laughing Apple, there’s a very fresh faced and floppily fringed Edwyn Collins ice skating, Dreamboy Peter Capaldi in his Frank Spencer tank top – what would Malcolm Tucker think of that?

Many of his compositions have a neat but satisfying simplicity about them, Clare Grogan holding a white umbrella diagonally so that its outer tips at both ends divide the photo in two, a little visual trick also utilised for another shot of Edwyn Collins, the singer standing in front of what looks like pages of a Letraset catalogue stuck to a wall and it’s his guitar this time that divides the picture.

Formally many are conventional images, though often with a twist, like some stripes of light playing across half of Bernard Sumner’s face as he plays guitar. Few are overly stagey, although when they are, like Aztec Camera puffing away on pipes, they tend to be comical – three teenagers from the new town of East Kilbride attempting to mimic some old fogeys from the shires.

In his pictures of Vic Godard and Kevin Rowland, Papadopoulos shows a fine appreciation of composition: it’s not just the subject that is important to him, it’s the space surrounding the subject.

Like (most of) the musicians he shot, Harry obviously had a great sense of timing and as another photographer Mick Rock once observed, ‘Photography is about timing, very much about timing’. Both Rock and Papadopoulos certainly had the knack of capturing the moment. One of my own favourites is an extraordinary photo of Mick Jagger pouring a bucket of water over himself on stage at the Glasgow Apollo in 1976 that, by the looks of things, even took Ronnie Wood by surprise.

By all accounts Harry possessed another quality vital to the successful portrait lensman – the ability to put his subjects at ease. As Josef K’s Malcolm Ross explains in the book, their early photo sessions had been ‘tortuous ordeals’ until being shot by Harry (I know the feeling, even stepping into a photo booth is tortuous for me nowadays). Harry, though, put the band at their ease to the point where they would all forget they were even involved in a photo session.

OK, I might be slightly biased and some of the pleasure for me in seeing these photographs comes from the fact that I was part of the audience when a good number of them were taken, like the infamous and very violent Clash gig at the Glasgow Apollo in the summer of 1978; the Rock Against Racism event at Edinburgh’s Craigmillar Park a few months later; Iggy in 1979, again at the Apollo and the1980 Loch Lomond Festival; I think Harry even included me once in one of his photos that thankfully isn’t included here (myself and others behaving rather badly at a Sham 69 gig at Satellite City if you must know) but I’m sure that anybody paying a visit to the What Presence! exhibition or looking through the book would appreciate the man’s fantastic talent.

What Presence! The Rock Photography of Harry Papadopoulos

Clydebank Museum and Art Gallery

Garden Gallery

October 2nd – 26th

Opening Hours: Monday to Saturday – 10:00 am to 4:30 pm

* An earlier version of this piece was published in the e-Fanzine Positive Noises.

 

Newspeak and the Dawn of Creation

This week saw the first release from Alan McGee’s new 359 label, John Lennon McCullagh’s North South Divide, and with FMO about to start a new An A to Z of Scottish Fanzines feature, I thought now would be the ideal time to run a live review of one of McGee’s early bands, Newspeak, from Fumes fanzine #4 – and look out for the mention of Peter Capaldi’s band The Dreamboys dancing along to the band as they played.

A couple of years earlier, the young Alan McGee had joined local outfit H2O as bassist but was never really at home there so left along with their guitarist Andrew Innes to form Newspeak, who gigged frequently on the Glasgow area circuit in venues like the Countdown and Doune Castle during 1979 and 1980.

According to David Cavanagh’s epic The Creation Records Story (My Magpie Eyes are Hungry for the Prize): ‘McGee made 35 copies of Newspeak’s demo tape and sent them to all the English record companies he could think of. None of them replied.’

Future Primal Scream guitarist Andrew Innes then decided that the best way forward for Newspeak would be relocating to London and singer Jackie Reilly agreed. McGee staying in the band and in Glasgow was impossible so the bassist, reluctantly, agreed to move south, his employer British Rail transferring his job. After about a month he realised he’d made the right decision.

In the capital, Newspeak became, with an altered line-up, The Laughing Apple and before 1980 was out, they had recorded four tracks back home at the Sirrocco Studios in Kilmarnock, which came out early the next year as The Ha Ha Hee Hee! EP on their own Autonomy label in an edition of 1500.

H2O also set up their own independent, Spock Recordz, to release their debut, Hollywood Dream. Recorded at CAVA in Glasgow and produced by Kenny Hyslop, this picked up airplay on Radio Scotland and Clyde and helped win them a deal with RCA.

Their commercial breakthrough then came with Dream to Sleep, a soothing, would-be sophisticated, slice of slickly produced synthpop which made the UK top 20 in the summer of 1983.

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Listening again to Dream to Sleep it’s hard to imagine that H2O could once have been loosely described as punks or that Alan McGee could possibly have ever been a member of the group. I bet he detested the single.

By this point, he was coming to the conclusion that he was never going to be a success as a bass player although he wasn’t yet ready to give up and quit.

As Top of the Pops and Smash Hits beckoned for H2O, a double A-side flexi disc shared with The Pastels was to be The Laughing Apple’s fourth and final release, which McGee put out on a label he christened Creation Artifact and this was soon followed by the very first official Creation release, 73 in 83 by The Legend!

Going back to 359 Music, I can’t claim to be a fan of North South Divide as it’s undeniably Dylanesque and I’m undeniably allergic to Bob; I should also point out that McCullagh is only 15 so I wouldn’t want to be too harsh on the lad, therefore I’ll just say on the plus side that it is unquestionably a much, much better listen than CRE 001 ever was, as is, now I think of it, Dream to Sleep.

Doctor Who and The Dreamboys

The idea of writing about Doctor Who in my first blog isn’t something I would ever have imagined doing until last week when Peter Capaldi, who unlike me, is a lifelong fan of the show, was confirmed to be replacing Matt Smith in the lead role. 

I first became aware of the new Doctor back in the late 70s and early 80s when he sang and played guitar in a Glasgow new wave outfit called The Dreamboys, who for a while could also count in their ranks as drummer Craig Ferguson, currently one of America’s most popular chat show hosts.

Nowadays Peter tends to downplay the idea of him ever having any chance of making a success of his musical career when he discusses his days as a Dreamboy and jokes about them being the only Glasgow band of the era not to be invited to do a John Peel session but back then I’d guess he took the band idea very seriously; they certainly gigged across Glasgow on a very regular basis and several fanzine writers tipped them for big things including a guy called Daniel Easson, who edited a very fine fanzine that he ran from the south side of the city called Fumes.

Unfortunately my copy of #4 from April 1980 doesn’t score too highly in the legibility stakes, especially the photos, but I’ve reproduced a page anyway, with a review of a show The Dreamboys played in March 1980 in a Glasgow venue called the Doune Castle, a hastily arranged gig where the lads replaced another local act Newspeak – who I was actually hoping to see that night – after they were forced into cancelling owing to their drummer catching glandular fever.

Obviously the situation wasn’t ideal and some of those there to see Newspeak left before or during The Dreamboy’s set (but not me, honestly!) which must have pissed off the future Malcolm Tucker, who didn’t, though, explode into a potty mouthed tirade at those joining in the exodus.

Gradually many of the audience were won over and the cheering increased as the set progressed, or at least I seem to remember that being the case but it was a long time ago.

If only I had a Tardis style time machine to take me back to that night.

‘If you have not seen them yet get to the next gig,’ the Fumes reviewer concludes, ‘and in particular look out for ‘cowboys’ ‘peggie sue’ and iggy pops ‘passenger’… you should not be disappointed…….’

As for Newspeak, if anybody’s wondering what happened to them, I’ll have to inform you that like Capaldi’s group, they also failed to make any kind of significant breakthrough. Come to think of it Peelie never invited them in for a session either.

I’m told, however, that a combo that the guitarist later joined are still proving pretty popular and that the former bassist is currently putting together a new music label which is currently gaining more than a little media attention.

So well done to Andrew Innes for his part in Primal Scream’s recent More Light album and good luck to Alan McGee with his new 359 Music label.