David Bowie at Birmingham Town Hall, 17th March 1972

Description

Text taken from Facebook - Bowie Day by Day Page - 12 February

Re: backstage and concert photo of Bowie at Town Hall by Mick Rock (Michael David Rock) 21 November 1948 – 18 November 2021

Bowie's History
March 17 1972.
Live at Town Hall, Birmingham.

The audience at Birmingham Town Hall were among the first people in the UK to experience the life-changing delights of the Ziggy Stardust stage show. In preparation for the Birmingham show Sue Fussey took the Ziggy hairstyle to its next stage, feathering it.

Photographer Mick Rock was covering the show for the Men Only magazine. Before the show, he looked in on the dressing-room and introduced himself. Bowie responded, “I like your name. It can’t be real…”

They clicked straight away and Bowie invited him to come back to Beckenham after the show to do the interview. Rock shot his first frames there in the dressing room.

Mick Rock (2002): I didn’t know how to shoot a live concert then, so there is a certain looseness of framing. It was actually through David that I learnt how to shoot live.On the train back to London, Bowie and Rock found they shared a fascination with outsiders like Iggy Pop, Lou Reed and Syd Barrett, whom Rock befriended at Cambridge and photographed on several occasions including the cover of his album, The Madcap Laughs.

Mick Rock (1999): So we kind of swapped stories. I swapped him Syd Barrett stories and he swapped tales of Iggy and Lou. So that was probably the first bonding with David when we found a certain taste in common. It tended to me the more esoteric and extreme variety, these two of course among the manifestation of exactly that attitude and philosophy

Mick Rock (2000): “Taking the pictures happened very fast. There was very little planning; it was all action, all about interchange and interplay, a fast-paced intuitive thing. The control of the look was not contrived. It simply amounted to not letting photographers in so that they wanted to come in even more! I think he was the first to play that one, and I became part of the game. I was the exclusive photographer because no one else was really interested at the time. Then all that changed and it became, ‘Only Mick Rock can shoot him’. And that worked very well.