Harry Borden looks back on two shoots in the early 1990s with the then-upcoming Britpop band
Back in 1993, I was in my late 20s and in the early part of my career. I had established myself as one of the photographers at the iconic ’90s magazine, Select, and one of the commissions was photographing an upcoming band called Blur.
Blur had recently released their second album, Modern Life is Rubbish. They were getting a lot of attention from pop and indie magazines because they were very photogenic, particularly the frontman, Damon Albarn. They hadn’t yet become a really big band but were on the road and heading in that direction.
In a way, Select was a precursor to the later ‘lads’ mag’, Loaded. There was a hedonistic attitude to what we did and it was just as important to have a good time as it was to bring home the bacon photographically. For this shoot, the picture editor Steve Read thought it would be a good idea to get both of us to have a Select vs Blur pool competition and take the photos during the game.
We convened in a sleazy late-night snooker hall in Crouch End, London, where there were some pool tables. I used a Nikon F601 35mm film camera and shot using the overhead lighting for the pool tables in the venue with Scotch Chrome 640-T, a tungsten-balanced transparency film.
One of the features editors had suggested we bring loads of champagne on the shoot and there was a lot of smoking and drinking. It got quite rowdy, chaotic and difficult but I went with the flow, observing rather than controlling the situation. As far as the pool game went, Steve and I gave Blur a thrashing. They were very competitive and not particularly happy about losing.
The resulting images are very much a record of what happened on the night. I just had to pick out these little moments, and sometimes when you do that and don’t get too involved, you end up getting something more interesting and more authentic. I don’t really remember how the evening ended and it does feel strangely amateurish that I didn’t get anything on medium format or at least seize the opportunity to take other kinds of pictures.
Given the circumstances of the shoot, I was surprised by how well the resulting pictures came out. They’re quite grainy, but they have a really nice atmosphere. My favourite is one of Damon looking directly at me, which I think is a really strong picture. There’s a kind of power to it and it’s very different from one I would take in a studio.
Second shoot
The second shoot, also for Select, took place less than a year later, in March 1994. The band were just about to release Parklife, the album that really took them to another level of fame and fortune. I remember during the session, the record company people brought in the artwork for the album, which had that extraordinary picture of greyhounds during a race. We were all marvelling over what a startling cover it was.
We convened at a photographic studio in Beaufort Street, London SW3, just north of the King’s Road, a venue that was later converted into Terence Conran’s Bluebird Gastrodome. By this time, the band members were more truculent and difficult to work with. They were kind of at war with the world, hunkered down in their own kind of cocoon and bored with being on the conveyor belt of having to do interviews and photo shoots to promote their music.
I felt that Damon, the Alpha Male in the group, was probably a bit of a bully and had an obstreperous, surly attitude to everyone. However, his edginess and hostility made for good pictures.
Alex James, the bass player, was quite annoying; like many very handsome people, he hadn’t had to develop a personality or get other people to like him.
The ones I liked the most were Dave Rowntree, the drummer, and the lead guitarist, Graham Coxon.
This time, the magazine had a really bizarre conceit that they were trying to do. Their intention, given that Blur was at the time representative of a sort of modern multicultural Britain, was to photograph them all individually, then retouch them as a different ethnic heritage, so one of them would be black, another would be Asian and so on. It’s something that would never be done now.
I wasn’t really happy with the idea and, thankfully, they didn’t put it into practise. That conceit is the reason the pictures are quite bland and straightforward, shot on a plain, neutral-coloured background, though I still like them.
They were all taken on my Hasselblad 500CM, using colour transparency film. After we finished the studio shots I thought, I’m going to do something for myself and switched to black & white negative film. I took them outside into Beaufort Street and we walked towards the Thames. On the way, we saw a Victorian tenement block with a weird shed in the area next to it, with ‘wet paint’ written on the floor in chalk.
I liked the location so got them in position for the shots. There was an annoying lamp-post in the way, but I decided to go with it and include it in the composition. It sort of divides the band up in an interesting way because you’ve got the two most talented members of the band, Damon and Graham on one side and on the other you’ve got the drummer and the bassist, the less glamorous members of the band.
It’s the kind of visually interesting situation I look for, something you couldn’t envisage or get a set builder to create. As I often find on shoots, you can have preconceived ideas or notions, all these things you’re going to try on the day, but if you’re aware and keep your eyes open, sometimes something much better will just fall in your lap.
As told to David Clark.
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