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

0:00Hi 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.

1:03And 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.

2:03Aladdin 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

3:07in 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,

4:09so 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

5:14unconscious 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

6:15from 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,

7:18I 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.