BARRIE WENTZELL: SHOULD’VE BEEN THERE… A Rock’n’Roll Retrospective 1965-1975

“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 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. 

CC with Barrie, Lincoln Festival, 1972. 

Photo by Jill Furmanovsky. 

        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 lay 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

BOB GRUEN & LEEE BLACK CHILDERS

To the D'Stassi Art Gallery in Hoxton to see my old pal Bob Gruen who has generously agreed that his pictures share wall space with a selection by Leee Black Childers, another old photographer pal of mine who sadly died in 2014. That’s not a typo: Leee really did spell his name with three e’s, though I think he was christened with two. 

        Leee was as camp as a Butlins holiday, a flamboyant gay man who died his hair blonde and didn’t need to came out because he was never in. He was drawn to Andy Warhol’s Factory crowd and the drag queens who assembled there, and he photographed them all. This led him to become involved with Warhol’s Pork, a sexually provocative play staged at London’s Roundhouse that enticed David Bowie. Before anyone knew it Leee found himself employed as a photographer-cum-tour manager at Mainman, the company formed by Tony DeFries to manage Bowie, where he was in his element.  

Lee with three e's

        Iggy and Mott The Hoople inevitably entered his orbit but, like everyone else among the colourful crew that manned Mainman, Leee was jettisoned when David realised how much this was all costing. Next, Leee found a natural habitat amongst the punk and new wave bands that followed, not least Jayne County, whom he managed, pre-Blondie Debbie Harry and the Sex Pistols. In mid-stream he befriended the Dolls, and many pictures of these acts, taken by Leee, can be found at D’Stassi. 

        As for Bob, a handful of his pictures – probably 0.0001% in reality – have been enlarged to what he described in an email to me as versions of “images I've printed on large scale canvas”. He’s not kidding, they’re huge and there’s three of them: John Lennon in his New York shirt (perhaps Bob’s best known – daughter Olivia sent me a PC from NY with this image not so long ago), Led Zeppelin (by their plane) and The Clash (live, looking like they mean business), all classic photos but they’re on the pricey side so you’ll need to start saving now if you want them to hang on your wall by Christmas. 

        One of Leee’s is pretty big too, a shot of Bowie, seen above, but I was more impressed by a series of Elvis, taken during his New York Press conference on June 9, 1972. This was a year and a bit before I became Melody Maker’s man in NY, but my colleague Roy Hollingworth was there to report on it. I was in London, green with envy. Here’s my favourite shot of Elvis by Leee.

        Last night Bob was on hand to sign copies of the catalogue and his own book Right Place Right Time, published last year, in which I make a cameo appearance. “I went to see The Stilettos, the band Debbie Harry was in before Blondie, with Chris Charlesworth, NY correspondent for the British weekly music magazine Melody Maker,” writes Bob. “Television as also on the bill that night, which means Chris was one of the first journalists to catch the new scene that was happening in New York City.” 

        I remember that night as if it was yesterday, but I’m a bit confused. We first saw Debbie in The Stilettos at the 82 Club in April, 1974, and she was a platinum blonde, her hair bouncy and covering her ears, but at this exhibition there’s a pic by Leee, dated that same year, that shows her with short dark hair. See below. 

        Maybe it was taken earlier in 1974, before blondeness became Debbie’s destiny. Next time I see Bob I’ll ask him about that. The exhibition ends on August 19. 

ICON – Music Through The Lens

Last night I learned that the most valuable rock photograph in the world was taken in North London by the late Iain Macmillan on August 8, 1969, during a ten-minute session, for which he was paid £75. It was, of course, The Beatles striding across the zebra crossing that is almost opposite Abbey Road Studios in St John’s Wood, famously chosen by Paul McCartney as the cover of the LP that was named after the studio in which the group recorded almost all of their work.

        To be precise, what we are talking about here is a limited edition set of the seven photographs that Macmillan shot that day, six of the fabs walking one way or the other over the crossing, now one of the most visited tourist destinations in London, and one of the street sign that, tantalisingly, features the blurred legs of a girl in a light blue mini dress, which was used on the reverse. 

        The shots in question were a topic for discussion among gallery curators during the fifth episode of Icon – Music Through The Lens, a six part documentary on rock photography that is being shown on the Sky Atlantic Arts channel. One gallery curator told viewers a limited edition set of the seven Abbey Road photographs, signed by Macmillan, was sold for £40,000, another said the price quickly rose to £60,000 while a third said the price was now £900,000. It was left to a fourth curator to announce that a set was now being offered for £1.25 million. “Ouch,” said the first curator. 

        I was slightly confused as to how many such sets exist but it isn’t many. Macmillan, from Carnoustie in Scotland, died in 2006 so no more genuine signed sets will ever be produced. The key to the riches is that each photograph in a set must have the same number, which precludes the inclusion of photographs that may have been numbered but sold individually – unless, of course, a rabid collector takes the time to seek out every one to complete an identically numbered set, a task of Herculean, not to mention mouth-wateringly expensive, proportions.

        I am told by my friend Dave Brolan that once upon a time Macmillan was selling 8x10" prints of his Abbey Road shots for pennies in the kiosk at St John’s Wood tube station where all manner of Beatles artefacts were available before rock merchandising became the big business it is today. Dave, who once worked for me as the photo researcher at Omnibus Press, now acts as an agent for many top rock photographers, or their estates, from around the world, and he acted as a consultant on Icons. It was his involvement that brought me into the project. 

        I have now watched all six episodes of Icon and must declare my interest. I am one of only two music writers to have been interviewed for the series – the other is former Mojo editor Phil Alexander – but as is so often the case when I am offered the opportunity to address the nation, blink and you’ll miss me. I appear briefly – eulogising, quelle surprise, The Who – in episode two, devoted to shots taken on the road or at concerts; in episode four, about photography in rock magazines, my natural habitat; and episode five, which is about how rock photography has become an art form in itself and is now very collectable, hence the references to Iain Macmillan’s Abbey Road shots. In this I am a bit of a grumpy old man, declaring: “I wish I could sell my old articles that I wrote for Melody Maker for the same kind of money but unfortunately you can get them on line for bugger all.”

        The other episodes in this excellent series deal with the culture of rock photography generally, LP cover work and how digital cameras have changed the profession but, inevitably, the topics blur into one another because each episode deals essentially with the same subject. Many of the world’s best-known rock photographers are interviewed, among them old friends of mine like Bob Gruen (with whom I worked during my stint as MM’s man in New York), Mick Rock (who, as ever, swears like a trooper), Neal Preston (who flew with me on the Starship with Led Zeppelin), Adrian Boot and Jill Furmanovsky who, very early in her career, brought an on-stage photo of Roger Daltrey into MM’s offices. When we told her we’d use it on the front page she’d have done a cartwheel if only there was room between the desks. Gruen, famous for his shots of John Lennon, gets more screen time than most and is genuinely entertaining, as is Ross Halfin, the occasionally combative HM specialist. Gered Mankowitz, famous for his photographs of The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix, acts as executive producer and is also interviewed at length.

        Another who is featured prominently is Baron Wolman, Rolling Stone’s first staff photographer, who sadly died earlier this month. I got to know Baron when I published and edited his book The Rolling Stone Years, and wrote about him here: http://justbackdated.blogspot.com/2015/04/baron-wollman-rolling-stone-years.html. Elsewhere on Just Backdated I’ve written about Gruen, Rock and Boot. I was disappointed that Barrie Wentzell, MM's chief photographer from the mid-sixties to mid-seventies, wasn't included, doubtless because he lives in Toronto now and was unavailable to be interviewed. Barrie was a pioneer, of course, arguably the very first independent rock photographer, but the series concentrated primarily on more contemporary photographers, many of them unknown to me.   

        Musicians, among them Nick Mason, Alice Cooper, Nicky Wire, Craig David and Julian Lennon, are also interviewed. And, of course, hundreds of pictures, perhaps even thousands, flash across the screen over the six-hour series, many of them instantly recognisable and genuinely iconic. All of which made me wish yet again that I’d carried a camera around with me during the seventies. 

ASTRID KIRCHHERR

Astrid Kirchherr, whose death aged 81 was announced at the weekend, was the first photographer – maybe even the first person – to recognise the aesthetic appeal of The Beatles. I have always thought that the pre-fame pictures she took in Hamburg of John, Paul, George, Stuart Sutcliffe and, to a lesser extent, Pete Best, reflect not just the innocence of young lads away from home for the first time but also a hunger, not just for food, which wasn’t plentiful, for something better in their lives. Perhaps Astrid instinctively knew that something better, something beyond their wildest dreams, lay around the corner. 

         Astrid’s most famous early photograph of five Beatles was taken in November of 1960 at Heiligengeistfeld, an open space in Hamburg where a travelling funfair has just set up for a month’s residence. None of them are smiling and though Pete and George look at the camera, the other three look distracted, detached, as if something in the distance has caught their eye. Four of them are lovingly cradling guitars: George his Futurama III, the nearest cheap guitar to a Fender Stratocaster; John his first Rickenbacker, newly bought in Hamburg; Paul the Hofner Club 40 that belonged to John, strung left-handed so he appears to be playing it upside down; and Stuart in ever-present shades with the Hofner 333 bass (aka 500/4 or 5) he bought with the proceeds from the sale of one of his paintings. On the left and slightly apart from the others stands Pete Best, his sticks in his hand, his snare drum on a stand.

         I and many others saw this picture for the first time in Hunter Davies’ 1968 Beatles biography. Accustomed only to seeing them in their early years with fringes that covered their foreheads, I can remember thinking, ‘Wow! I never realised they once looked like this.’ The Beatles’ premier archivist and biographer Mark Lewisohn identifies this picture as, ‘The definitive image of the group before they attained fame.’ On his Twitter feed Mark wrote of Astrid: ‘Intelligent, inspirational, innovative, daring, artistic, awake, beautiful, smart, loving and uplifting friend to many. Her gift to The Beatles was immeasurable.’

         Astrid took many more pictures of The Beatles, both collectively and individually, all of them in black and white, her favourite medium.* There’s another from that fairground of George and John sitting on the bonnet of a truck with Stuart in front of them, holding his bass at an odd angle, pointing to the ground. Then there’s the one of Teddy-boy John in the foreground and Stuart, unfocused, behind him, and a similar one with Paul in the foreground, as well as individual shots of George and John at the same location. Astrid also took many moody shots of Stuart in her bedroom-cum-studio, including several with herself in the frame. Stuart, of course, became her lover and would subsequently remain in Hamburg with her following The Beatles’ second visit to Hamburg, at the end of March 1961. 

Astrid and Stuart

Had it not been for a tiff with her boyfriend Klaus Voormann Astrid’s lens might never have settled on the group that in 1960 spent three and a half months in Hamburg, the final two at the Kaiserkeller. After the row Klaus mooched off on his own and heard The Beatles as he passed by outside the club. Intrigued, he went inside, liked what he saw and heard, and brought Astrid and another friend, Jürgen Vollmer, to see them the following night. By all accounts this trio of young Germans, art students all, became fixated by the group and over time influenced them in other ways, most notably in the clothes they wore and by persuading them to abandon their quiffs and comb their hair forward, a look Astrid first gave to Stuart.

         These three friends were unquestionably the first people in the world to see something in The Beatles that went beyond the music they played, an attraction that in the right hands would translate into a perception of physical male beauty that defied the conventional norms of the 1950s, upsetting the world in the process. It was a secret they shared between themselves, at least until Brian Epstein walked in on The Beatles at the Cavern almost a year to the day after Astrid photographed them at that fairground.

         Stuart Sutcliffe, whose talents as a painter far exceeded his skills as a musician, died from a brain haemorrhage in Hamburg on April 10, 1962. Astrid was heartbroken but maintained her relationship with The Beatles, photographing them on the set of A Hard Day’s Night and visiting Liverpool where she took photographs of fans waiting outside the Cavern. On that same trip she took pictures of George and Ringo in their shared London flat and at John and wife Cynthia’s flat in Emperors Gate in Kensington. The first real holiday Paul, George and Ringo had as their star rose, in April 1963, was a trip to Tenerife to see Astrid and Klaus, while John went to Spain with Brian. Astrid caught up with all of them when they came to Hamburg on the German tour in June 1966, and with John when he was filming How I Won The War in Germany in September of that year. A new portrait she took of George, with whom she maintained the closest contact, appeared on the back cover his album Wonderwall Music in 1968.

         Astrid later worked as an interior designer and in a restaurant. For many years she earned nothing from her widely published photographs but eventually secured copyright, held exhibitions and published three books.

         “The most important thing I gave The Beatles was my friendship,” she said.

* Interestingly, the well-known image of John, Paul and George in black leather jackets and western-style boots, shot against the skyline on a Hamburg rooftop, was not taken by Astrid. The photographer is unknown. 

BOB GRUEN - New York's Smartest Rock Photographer

In the early evening of Friday, May 7, 1976, I was the passenger in a rented car driven by a dude whose blue jeans, small moustache and frizzy hair gave him the air of a Mexican bandit. We were on a freeway in Detroit, our mission to see Wings, Paul McCartney’s band, the third date of their big US tour that year, and we were snarled up in traffic.

         Maybe it was the rush hour, maybe there was a glut of Macca/Beatles fans on their way to the Olympia arena. Either way it looked like we might miss the start of the show. We crawled along nose to tail until my driver spotted an on-ramp, that is one that enabled cars to join the freeway not leave it. Without much thought for the consequences, he edged the car into the nearside lane, braked suddenly at the point where the on-ramp joined, slammed it into reverse and sped backwards up to a point where we could find an alternative route.

         “Fucking hell Bob,” I said. “I’m paying for this fucking car.”

         “Don’t worry,” he replied, coolly lighting a cigarette as we eased our way through uncrowded streets. “We don’t wanna miss the show, do we? It’s cool. We’re in Detroit man. No one gives a fuck what you do in this town.”

         Fifteen minutes later we were in the arena. Here’s the proof.

        

Bob was, and still is, Bob Gruen and yesterday I was at Somerset House in the Aldwych to reconnect once again with my old pal. He’s New York’s smartest rock photographer, an honourable position he’s held since before I first got to know him around 1974. Nowadays his frizzy hair is turning grey and the moustache went long ago but he’s still as laid back as Louisiana in August. He was in town for an exhibition of his pictures in The Music Photo Gallery and to give a talk about his work, egged on by Dave Brolan, once my photo researcher at Omnibus Press and now the UK’s premier go-to man for publishers who need the best rock shots between their pages.

         The exhibition is called Rock Seen, a play on the name of the magazine Rock Scene that during the seventies, under the editorship of Lisa Robinson, strived to show fans rock stars at work, rest and play. Every other rock mag just showed them on stage or posing in a studio but thanks to Bob’s streetwise ways and ability to find out what was happening, and where and when, Rock Scene showed them hanging out, with their friends, with their WAGS and with each other. Anyone could shoot the Ramones doing a gig but only Bob shot Joey with Iggy and Debbie, or Dee Dee with Bowie and David Jo, or any combination of any of those and dozens more. What made this possible was Bob’s easy going manner, the way he slotted right in as if he played camera while Clem hit the drums and Joey sang. He was as much a part of the scene as all the musicians and although the Rock Seen exhibition veers more towards his shots of the superstars – John L, Led Zep, Bowie, Mick’n’Keith, Elton and the like – the reality, as seen in the accompanying book, is that if a scene was happening, then Bob and his Nikon were right there in the midst of it.

         It didn’t take me long to realise this. It was Bob that introduced me to CBGBs and Club 82 where I first encountered the now legendary New York Bowery scene, and in return he became my photographer of choice, whether it was shooting Robert Plant in a hotel room while I interviewed him, or Debbie in the Stilettos before she and Chris assembled Blondie, or on the road with Dylan as we chased him around New England on the Rolling Thunder Review. Or Paul in Detroit, of course.

         Chatting with Dave Bolan yesterday Bob talked about his first ever rock pic, one of Tina Turner. He’d been invited along to the gig and just happened to have his camera with him so he took a few shots and back in his darkroom developed them. One in particular took his fancy so he somehow found his way back to where he could find Ike & Tina and showed it to Ike who loved it, and from then on he took some more and found himself a life. The picture, below, is exactly how it was on his negative. “It wasn’t photoshopped,” he said to mild chuckles from his audience. Nowadays anyone looking at it would naturally assume it was a double or triple exposure and photoshopped to hell.

Bob, who now has plenty of staff to curate his archive, has never thrown away a negative, not one. I asked him whether, in the digital age, like everyone else with a camera/phone he deletes all but the prime shots. “No, never,” he replied. “I keep ‘em all just as I always did.” And asked how he feels about the present day trend for limiting access to photographers, he just shrugs. “Me and bunch of photographers were in the lobby at the Beacon arguing with some manager about this,” he said. “I just opened the doors to the theatre and told him, ‘Every single fan in there is taking lousy pictures that’ll be on the internet in hours. Wouldn’t you prefer decent pictures of your act?’ I think the message got through.”

CC, centre, with Bob & Elizabeth Gruen

Bob’s show, all high grade framed prints, mostly from the seventies, is on at the Music Photo Gallery at Somerset House until May 19.

MELODY MAKERS, SHOULD’VE BEEN THERE

To London’s Regent Street Cinema for a showing of Melody Makers, Should’ve Been There, a documentary about the music paper where I sowed the seeds that nourished me thereafter. The film was followed by a Q&A session in which I took part and for which I prepared myself by spending a pleasant two hours in the morning leafing through a dozen or so old copies of MM that I bought from a trader in old newspapers many years ago. I don’t often do this but whenever I do it becomes very moreish and I don’t want to stop because when that period of my life, from 1970 to 1977, comes back into focus, I wish I could turn back the clock, if only for a day.

The film has that effect too. It started life as a celebration of the work of our chief contributing photographer Barrie Wentzell who now lives in Toronto, the home town of its director Leslie Ann Coles. Somehow the two met and Leslie was shown Barrie’s archive, without doubt one of the richest rock photo archives in the world, at least for the period when he worked principally for MM, which was 1965 to 1975. Leslie proposed making a film based around Barrie’s photographs and Barrie suggested expanding the project to tell the story of the rise and fall of MM, which the film attempts to do. This, of course, is a big story in itself, Melody Maker having first appeared on newsstands in January 1926 and lasting until December 1999. Although its demise and, to a lesser extent, its beginnings are discussed by the movie’s interviewees, this premise is actually secondary to an analysis of Melody Maker’s importance during what many of us consider to be its golden years, roughly the period of Barrie’s involvement, especially in the early seventies when its circulation soared to around 200,000 a week, the highest it ever reached.

(The author and Barrie, at the Lincoln Festival, May 1972, photo by Jill Furmanovsky)

For one hour and 37 minutes the film flips back and forth between Barrie’s pictures and about 20 talking heads, among them former MM staff, musicians and industry figures, discoursing on MM’s role in the scheme of things, the way the music business has changed and how rock’n’roll journalism ain’t what it used to be. In this respect the film’s ambition is a bit too lofty to occupy its time span and some interviewees stray off the subject of MM and, inopportunely, into the counterculture in general, especially those with an agenda of their own to promote, but by and large it’s an entertaining movie about an entertaining era with many entertaining, occasionally funny, moments.

Barrie is unquestionably the star of the show. Without doubt, his pictures gave Melody Maker a look that all the other music mags must have envied. Before he joined MM’s editorial team all the music papers, MM included, used photographs of stars supplied by record labels or PR companies, so the same shots appeared everywhere and were used over and over again. Barrie, then working in design but with ambitions to express himself with a camera, somehow obtained access to a Diana Ross press event at the BBC, photographed her (superbly) and brought the results to MM’s then editor Jack Hutton who used the picture on the front page of the issue dated October 16, 1965.

(Barrie with his photo of Diana Ross, his first MM cover)

Thereafter Barrie’s pictures of every rock star of note graced MM’s front page most weeks for the next 10 years, and hundreds of these photographs, almost all of them in sharply contrasting monochrome, flash across the screen throughout the movie, a visual feast that applauds Barrie’s uncanny ability to capture the moment with his black Pentax. Both on stage and, often, in the homes of the stars, Barrie’s pictures stray into the realm of art, homages to his hero Henri Cartier-Bresson; like the shot of three cats and a bowl of fruit on a table while Roger Waters looks wistfully on, or the quizzical expression on Dylan’s face as gazes into the lens in a pub over pints of beer, or Bowie grinning with fans, wearing a jacket with lapels that reach way beyond his skinny shoulders. 

Barrie, it seems, has kept every single one his negatives and the point is made that had he been working today, in the digital era, he would have discarded hundreds of photos just like we all do when we use our mobile phones to take snaps and delete all but the one that is worth keeping. A poignant moment in the movie sees him at work in his darkroom, recreating the working methods he used back in the day, watching Jimi Hendrix, a favourite subject, emerge on printing paper in his developing tray.

Those of us interviewed for the film who worked on the paper, Chris Welch, Richard Williams, Alan Lewis, Allan Jones, Barrie and myself, talk about what it was like to be in music journalism in an era when we could often circumvent PRs; when the music industry was less controlled, less formalised, than it is now. Barrie, whose congenial personality not only put his subjects at ease but enabled him untold access to stars that today’s rock photographers can only dream about, bristles with indignation when, towards the end of the film, he recalls being informed by a Stones’ minion that he and others can photograph the group only during the first number of a show at Wembley Arena. It was, he feels, a key turning point, the beginning of the end, and not long afterwards he hung up those black Pentaxes, which he still has, and went to work in his brother’s greengrocers on the Isle of Wight. I couldn’t help but feel that the Stones were the losers here, especially after having just admired Barrie’s outstanding portraits of Jagger. I mean, didn’t these guys want great pictures of themselves in the papers?

After the movie Leslie Ann Coles, Chris Welch and myself answered questions put to us by Steve Chibnall, Professor of British Cinema and Director of Cinema and Television History Research Centre at Du Montfort University, Leicester, where the film is being shown on April 14. I always feel a bit like the junior partner at these affairs when I’m alongside my namesake Welchy for he joined MM in 1964, six years before me, and lingered on for a good few years after I left, so he took the mike for the most part, closing his remarks by stating that were he to win the Euro Millions lottery tomorrow he’d spend the cash relaunching MM for the 21st century. How could I not join him in such a splendid enterprise? Here we all are, photographed by my daughter Olivia who chided me afterwards for expressing a pessimistic outlook for the future of music journalism. “It might not be in print but it will flourish on line dad,” she said. I hope she’s right.