“The Kinks always hated photo shoots,” says Ray Davies. “When we first came into the music industry, photographers were strictly old school, with collars and ties and suits. It wasn’t until photographers like Barrie Wentzell sussed out that it was easier to dress like one of the band to find themselves included in the new era of rock’n’roll. He managed to be absorbed by the band. We talked about the music we wanted to make and he could reflect that in his shoots.”
Barrie wasn’t simply the first music photographer to look and dress like his subjects, he was the first dedicated, independent rock’n’roll photographer in the UK. Until his arrival, the photographers who took pictures of the acts in the charts also took pictures of politicians, film stars and sportsmen and women, anyone who was newsworthy. They worked for newspapers or agencies; John Lennon today, Harold Wilson tomorrow, or maybe an afternoon on the boundary at Lords snapping cricketers.
Barrie, on the other hand, came from somewhere else entirely. His background was in design and he was interested in creative, artistic photography. He played the guitar well, dressed in faded jeans and wore his hair long. Somehow, one day in 1965, he was invited to a Diana Ross press reception at the BBC and he took his camera along. He photographed Ms Ross and took his pictures of her to Bob Houston, then assistant editor of Melody Maker, who used one on the following week’s front page. Barrie had found his vocation.
The fruits of that vocation – ten years as MM’s staff photographer – are to be found in Should’ve Been There, a new book of Barrie’s remarkable work, 392 pages featuring everyone who was anyone in rock’n’roll during the decade spanning 1965-75. They’re all here: wonderful shots of Beatles, Stones, Zep, Who, Dylan, Bowie, Faces, Elton and many more. Most of these shots haven’t been seen for years because unlike most R&R photographers Barrie saw no reason to commercially exploit his work to any great extent in the decades that followed his retirement. Some might be familiar to older readers of MM – he and I logged a bit of time together, of course, and, indeed, I helped with the editing of this book – but what we have here is a treasure trove that in actual fact represents a tiny proportion of his work.
Barrie worked in an era before digital or mobile phones with built-in cameras, so Barrie took hundreds of pictures that weren’t used, all of which are on contact sheets. Below is a contact sheet of shots of Robert Plant in a limousine being interviewed in 1970 by Richard Williams, MM’s assistant editor. He has hundreds of similar contact sheets at his home in Toronto.
It’s important to realise, too that Barrie’s photographs gave Melody Maker a look that all the other music papers would have envied. Before he joined MM’s editorial team all the music papers, MM included, used either photographs supplied by agency photographers, record labels or PR companies, so the same shots appeared everywhere and were used over and over again. Barrie not only supplied MM with original shots but his personable nature and empathy with musicians enabled him to visit them off duty, often at their homes, and achieve results not seen elsewhere.
The photographs in the book are accompanied by Barrie’s story in his own words, his take on what it was like to do what he did, and captions in which he recalls his thoughts on the musicians he photographed. Some, Jimmy Page and Pete Townshend – “Fucking amazing work,” says Pete – amongst them, offer their thoughts on Barrie’s work too.
Barrie lost his appetite for taking rock shots after a Rolling Stones concert in 1973. “At this gig Mick announced that that photographers would only be able to shoot the first three numbers and then they’d be thrown out,” he writes. “The band had an official Rolling Stones photographer, so as to control their image. This practice seems to have become standard now with photographers being restricted to, in some cases, taking picture of only the first song or even less. Shame, as nowadays the audience has become the photographer: freely taking videos and pictures with their cell phones, while professional photographers are restricted. Thanks Mick!
“When I first started taking photos at live shows, I was sometimes the only photographer there. But by 1975, there were dozens of photographers vying with each other to get shots of the artists and bands… access was becoming more difficult, uncomfortable, and unpleasant.”
Disenchanted with the profession that he can claim to have invented, Barrie moved to the Isle of Wight to run a greengrocers’ shop with his brother.
Should’ve Been There is published by Rufus Publications. Here is a link to a video all about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fNKoPslqxs
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