https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1924630/David-Bailey-the-sixties-and-bloody–feminism.html
Models, film stars and now Westminster’s movers and shakers… David Bailey’s lens has caught them all. He tells Roya Nikkhah about his life.
David Bailey directs a model during a photoshoot in 1967
David Bailey makes Gordon Ramsay sound like vicar giving his Sunday sermon. Such is his love of expletives, barely a sentence is delivered without three or four them blasted out in quick succession.
“I’m bloody dyslexic, so the short rude ones are the only ones I know how to spell,” he says, with a wheezy, deep chuckle. “Anyway, it’s a bloody good trick because you won’t be able to print any of this,” he says, dancing about the sofa in his studio, reluctant to sit down.
“Honestly, I’m not very good at this,” he says. “I’ve really got f*** all to say,” he insists, before barely drawing breath for the next hour.
Best known for his iconic images of the swinging Sixties and glamorous fashion shoots, Bailey has just produced his first ever “political portfolio” – a collection of pictures of the current crop of political movers and shakers for the men’s style bible, GQ magazine .
And politicians have never looked so good. There is Gordon Brown, beaming at the camera with the most winsome of smiles and David Cameron looking very much at home in a sharp suit. Turn the page and Foreign Secretary stares broodily into the lens like a Hollywood film star. Even William Hague looks quietly handsome.
“Politicians aren’t normally big on my agenda because it’s too easy to go for them – too easy to stitch them up and make them look bad,” he says. “But with this lot, I just did them how I found them.”
So, how did he find them? “I was pleasantly surprised actually, because modern politicians are usually so up their own arses,” he says in his strong Cockney accent, recalling an incident when “Hillary” (that’s Clinton) “invited me to tea with that Mo Mowlam. God, she was so bloody la di da – full of it she was – nightmare.”
I ask him if it’s true that he broke the ice with a nervy Prime Minister by asking him which one was his dodgy eye? “Yeah, I did, why not?” he laughs. “He was charming, actually. Bit of an introvert, but charming. When I got in the car afterwards, I said to my wife “I think I’ve just been screwed, this bloke has charmed the backside off me” because he really had. But I told him that I hate socialism because it’s just like using digital – it reduces everyone to the same.”
As someone who has photographed some of the most glamorous women in the world, Mrs Brown may be pleased to know that she passed the Bailey style test. “She was much better dressed than most women in politics,” he says. “Especially the lefty women – it’s like where do they get those suits from? And the more successful they get, the worse the suits become.”
Cameron, he says, was a “sincere, easy-going kind of guy”, but did Bailey, who has previously photographed Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher, think he had the makings of a Prime Minister? “Well, he has the makings as much as Blair ever did – he looks good – he just needs to be a better actor than Blair. You could always tell when he was lying.”
He was, however, somewhat puzzled by the Liberal Democrat leader, who gets the smallest show in the portfolio. “Telling everyone how many women he’s been with, what’s that all about?” he asks, referring to Nick Clegg’s recent admission that he had slept with “no more” than 30 women. “I mean, do I really want to know what an underachiever he is,” he says, nudging me in the ribs and roaring with laughter.
We meet on Friday morning, as votes for the mayoral election are being counted. Born and bred a Londoner – he works from his studio in Clerkenwell and lives in Kings Cross – he voted for Boris Johnson simply because, “I like someone to have a bit of a sense of humour.”
He has met Ken Livingstone several times and remains distinctly unimpressed. “I’ve taken some charming pictures of Ken but he certainly doesn’t ooze charm,” he says. “He’s just a bit of a dictator isn’t he? And I object to being lied to – all that talk about the Olympics only costing £4 billion pounds when he knew it would be loads more. Makes you wonder what else he has lied about.”
Now 70, though he doesn’t want reminding: “Christ, don’t rub it in, I don’t need viagra or surgery yet,” Bailey first started taking pictures when he was posted with the RAF to Malaysia and Singapore as a teenager doing his National Service. Demobbed at 20, he returned home to the East End determined to avoid the career paths of “gangster, car thief or boxer”, and found work as an assistant to the studio photographer, John French.
Nobody was more amazed than Bailey himself, when, aged 21 and relatively inexperienced in fashion photography, Vogue offered him a job. After all, those were the days when only the most clipped and polished accent would do in the corridors of Vogue.
“You’re probably too young to remember the class thing, but you cannot imagine what it was like,” he says. “If you had a Cockney accent, you were f*****. I don’t know how on earth I managed to slip through the net. The amount of stunning models I saw who just couldn’t get a job because of the way they spoke was unbelieveable.”
Bailey recalls early on his career, taking some pictures to Jocelyn Stevens, then editor of Town magazine, who mistook him for the messenger. “”Tell Mr Bailey we’ll call him” he said”. It’s all so much easier now – it’s not about birth any more, just money, although I’m not sure which is worse.”
Together with fellow snappers like Terence Donovan and Patrick Lichfield, Bailey captured, and in many ways helped create the dizzying glamour of sixties London, dominated by high fashion and celebrity chic, where photographers rubbed shoulders with actors, musicians and royalty.
In 1964, Bailey’s Box of Pin-Ups, a box of poster prints of 1960s celebrities and socialites including The Beatles, Mick Jagger, Terence Stamp and the notorious Kray twins, secured his as the Sixties icon-maker. Two years later, the film director Michael Antonioni immortalised Bailey in Blowup, a film about the work and sexual perks of a London fashion photographer played by David Hemmings and largely based on Bailey, who dated almost all of the great beauties of the day, including the models Jean Shrimpton and Penelope Tree.
Were the Sixties as much fun as they looked? “They were fabulous, God yeah, but only for about 500 people in London,” he says. “I don’t know how much fun they were for the coal miners in Yorkshire. And the good thing is I can remember them because I was never into drugs or anything. I drank a bit, but I reckon I only smoked about three joints the whole time.”
Back then, he says, celebrities were a different breed to the “vacuous hordes” he so often comes across today. “Well, most of them were famous for actually doing something – singing, painting, creating – whereas today everyone’s famous for being famous and they don’t have much going on up here,” he says, prodding his forehead. “Take her, for example,” he says, pointing at polaroid of Jordan, aka Katie Price, pinned on one of his walls.
“Nice girl and all, but it was literally like knock knock, anyone at home?” he says, rapping the table twice for emphasis. “And guess what? There was nobody in,” he laughs.
The big names of the Sixties, says Bailey, were also much more “normal” than the modern-day A-listers. “Now they bring their PRs and all that crap – actually it tends to be the second-raters who do that. The likes of Jack Nicholson and Johnny Depp still turn up on their own. But I have to deal with some characters, like that man in black fellow.”
Man in black fellow? “You know, Mark, who was that pain in the arse?” he says, quizzing his assistant who chuckles in agreement. “Tommy Lee Jones from Men In Black?” I ask. “Yeah, him. Real w***** he was. I turned up wearing something like this and he dismissed me as a squirt – thought I was the janitor or something,” he says, gesturing to his scruffy combat trousers, blue shirt worn over a t-shirt and desert boots. “He was bloody awful. And that Winehouse girl. She never bothers to show up.”
The only downside to the Sixties, says Bailey, was “that whole bloody feminism thing”. “I mean, what was all that about?” he asks. “I was brought up by two women – my mum and Aunt Dolly,” (Bailey’s father walked out on the family when he and his sister were young).
“Tough as an old gypsy, mum was, she scared the s*** out of me, but I was surrounded by strong women so it had never even occurred to me that women were anything other than equal to men. Then all those bloody feminists started attacking me, the silly uptight cows, having a go because I slept with more than one woman.”
Bailey has certainly had his fair share of women, with no less than four marriages under his belt. Former wives include Rosemary Bramble, Marie Helvin and Catherine Deneuve. The actress and model Catherine Dyer is wife number four to whom he has been happily married for 25 years.
“Yes, I’ve been a lucky boy,” he says, rubbing his hands together at the memory of so many beautiful conquests. “They were all great, but my wife now is just about the best thing that ever happened to me, aside from being born.” The couple have three children – Paloma, 22, Fenton, 20 and Sascha, 13. “Look at his,” he says, proudly showing me a nude photograph of his wife he took recently. “Not bad for 46, eh? Haven’t I done well?” he asks. Looking at the short, greying man in front of me whose considerable pot belly is pushing every button on his shirt to its limits, I agree that he has done very well indeed.
Despite his track record as a serial lothario, Bailey has managed to stay on remarkably good terms with all of his former flames. How does he do it, I ask? “Let me look at your hands, not married yet, right, let me tell you something,” he says knowingly.
“Marriage or no marriage, you need to keep a sense of humour – that and curiosity are the most important qualities in a woman as far as I’m concerned,” he says, citing the time Deneuve told him of their divorce.
“We barely ever saw each other, we were both so busy, and one day she called me in the studio and said, “Bailey, do you know we’re divorced?” Are we, I said. “Yes,” she said. “Now, we can be lovers”. See, even then she was making a joke.”
Even Marie Helvin, who in her recent autobiography painted a picture of Bailey as a bit of a bully – a husband who cheated on her, pointing out his conquests to her at parties and describe her 5ft9, size eight frame “mighty meaty” – says that they are still great friends.
These days, though, Bailey shoots fewer models than during his heyday, preferring classic portraiture to modern fashion photography, of which he is somewhat scathing. “The problem is bloody digital,” he laments. “It makes all the girls look the same. I mean, [Steven] Meisel is a great photographer, but I don’t want to go to bed with any of his women,” he says. “They all look like something from outer space – like they’ve been created on a computer. And guess what? They have been.”
He continues, however, to make an exception for Naomi Campbell, his favourite supermodel, with whom he has just shot “the most fabulous series of nudes”.
“She took me to breakfast with Nelson Mandela once, so I can forgive her almost anything,” he says. Not that he needs to, according to his assistant. “Bailey controls, he doesn’t take s*** from anyone, not even Naomi, so she knows her place with him,” says Mark.
While nude photographs of supermodels are not exactly incentive to hang up his camera, at 70, how much longer can he plan plough on for?
“What, you mean think about giving up? Why should I? No, never,” he says. “Well, not until that white feather lands on my pillow.”
