Music: The Father of the Blues, Golden Age of Jazz, and David Bowie | History in Photos

Hi everybody, it's Dominic here from The Rest Is History. So we are in the middle of an

exclusive miniseries for our restless history club members about photography and the way it has

been interwoven with the story of history. And in today's episode with a great photographer,

Chris Floyd, we are looking in particular at music. So we'll be talking about the great

bluesman, Robert Johnson, who sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in Mississippi. We'll be

looking at the great titans of jazz assembling in Harlem in the 1950s for a group portrait.

We were talking about the career of David Bowie and we are talking about an iconic image of

Grace Jones from the 1980s. Now if you don't want to miss out on this, all you need to do is to go

to The Rest Is History.com to sign up and not only will you get this exclusive miniseries,

but you'll get a host of truly unbelievable benefits. So we hope to see you at The Rest Is History.com.

And in the meantime, here's a little clip of the episode.

So our third image that Chris has chosen and Chris, this is somebody that you photographed

yourself, but you didn't choose your own picture of him and that's David Bowie. Because before

you talk about the picture, photographing David Bowie, was it fun? Uh, stressful because again,

you're with someone who's worked with the very best and also not only with the very best,

but also done it a lot. Right. And has probably limited patience for any

faffing around. But it was good. He was surgically funny about other famous people.

Oh, that's always good. And their foibles. Right. Yeah. Right.

Was anybody particularly disliked? Well, I wouldn't say disliked, but he made a very pointed

and amusing comment about Brian Ferry. Well, okay. And other 70s glam rock kind of product.

So this is a picture. It was an album cover. It's Aladdin Sain.

Aladdin Sain. Yeah. And it's taken by a great 60s photographer, actually. Brian Duffy,

one of the kind of, um, one of the Alfonso Rebel of kind of 60s photography.

Yes, there was Duffy, Terence Donovan and David Bowie. And they were given, they were known as

the Black Trinity. Right. Um, all from the East End, all, you know, classic 60s working class

boys who did good. You know, high-end photographers had been involved with

album covers since the Beatles, I guess, and see how the mid 60s, 64, 65.

And Brian Duffy being invited to come in and do David Bowie. I mean, it's a sign of how successful

David Bowie is at this point. Because what year are we in? We're in 73. So Bowie's at his peak?

No, he's not at his peak, actually. So there's a great story about this. So Bowie's manager,

it was called Tony DeFrice, operated on the theory that if he made the record company spend a

lot of money, then they would be committed because they would, they would have spent so much money

on a project that they would have to put the effort in to make their money back. This album cover

in particular, he said to, he went to Duffy and said, this, we got to make this album cover as

expensive as we possibly can. And Duffy said, well, no problem. He's delighted by that.

So he hired one of the best makeup artists in the world. The printing of the image was done

using a codec process called die transfer printing, which was the most expensive process by which

you could print an image in those days. So I was going to ask about this because there's a

technical story behind this picture. So for people who can't see it, I mean, you should have a

look that you can google it or you can watch the episode on the website or whatever. So the

image is a kind of whiteened pale David Bowie shot from kind of shoulders upwards. He's got this

kind of shock of red hair and he's got this zigzag pattern on his face, the kind of red and blue

zigzag. And the technical skill that was brought to this. So Duffy had just done the Pirelli

calendar, was that right? He's using the same techniques that he'd used on the Pirelli calendar.

Yeah. So it's die transfer. So you make a plate, a printing plate for each color in the,

so red, green and blue, you make a separate plate for each, for each color. It's extremely

expensive. And it was done in Switzerland, which made it triply expensive, having to go to Switzerland.

Yeah. So there's a documentary about him actually called the man who shot the 60s. He quoted

Tony DeVrice wanted to make the most expensive cover he could possibly get a record company to pay

for. If it cost 50 quid, then they could say, so what? But if it cost 5,000 pounds, the record

company, we're now having to pay attention. The record company couldn't have come to a better

con artist than my good self. Okay, good line. So he does this extremely expensive process.

It's all part of Bowie's, I mean, Bowie's famous, isn't he, for pioneering the idea that a rock

style or pop star has a kind of, has a malleable image that is constantly changing between each

incarnation. He will assume different personalities. So Ziggy starred us, or Aladdin, saying, or

the thin white juice, or whatever. And this is all part of the image making that goes hand and

hand. It's actually very different from the, you know, the Robert Johnson pictures. He is, he is

unconscious of his image. He's not even thinking about his image because he's not conscious of

himself as a musical celebrity, of course, he's just a jobbing musician. Well, Johnston's in a

pre-image era, isn't he? He's a pre-mass media era, really. People are not selling music based on

on an image in the way that they work by the time we get to Bowie here. So even the jazz musicians

in a great day are Harlem. There was an innocence, I suppose, to that image. They're all quite,

they're all very smartly dressed, aren't they? They're sharp. They're sharply dressed. But there's

no sense, I would say, of it being a contrivance. Whereas the Bowie image is pure contrivance, no?

Yeah, they've all thought about what they're wearing. Yeah. And they've all put effort and

consideration to it because it was important to them to look good, but they've all done it in their

own, their own individual personal way. With Bowie, you have elevation of the individual to superstar

status, rather than simple, old fashioned star status. He's sort of going, it's superstars,

you know, the idea that he's from another planet and he's an alien and all of that stuff.

And there's a great interesting background to the lightning flash on his face. So he got that

from Elvis. You know, the Memphis Mafia, Elvis's buddies, that is sort of posse. So they were the

Memphis Mafia and he had this logo designed for them, which was a lightning flash and the letter's

TCB, which stuff a taking care of business. But Elvis actually stole that from the Templar Christian

Brotherhood. TCB, he took the TCB of the Templar Christian Brotherhood, changed it to taking

care of business, stole their lightning flash and made it his own thing. And then Bowie stole

the lightning flash from Elvis. So there's this lineage of it all comes from the Templar Christian

Brotherhood. Wow. Actually, as Bowie, you could argue, his fascination with image leads him

down some dark path, doesn't it, in the 70s, the point at which he's giving interviews saying,

oh, Hitler was a rock star, all of this kind of thing. Well, later on in his career, he said,

oh, yeah, I was carrying too far the idea of playing a part, I suppose. And as a photographer

yourself, so here, when you're, I mean, obviously this is all contrivance, this picture. And when

you're taking your portraits of people, when someone says to you, will you go and photograph,

I don't know, Paul McCarney or Bill Gates or however, how much are you as a photographer colluding

in the creation of a infected image or how much are you trying to instead get to the truth?

I mean, that's just two totally different things here. They're creating, it's an album cover.

That's what they're doing. They're creating an image, a two-dimensional image for an album cover.

The things you're talking about with the things I have, those things, I'm doing a portrait for

an interview in a magazine or something like that. Yeah. And really, you're trying to

capture some element of them that is compelling on the page, not necessarily any truth,

but just an image that makes people stop and read their headline.

Thank you so much for listening to that. So if you want to hear the rest of that episode,

which is of course all about music, then just head to therestishistory.com to join the club and

to get all the other benefits. So please do join us at therestishistory club. We would love

to have you with us. And on that bomb shell, bye-bye.