THERE ARE A FEW PHOTOGRAPHERS WORKING IN MUSIC TO WHOM THE TERM ‘LEGENDARY’ COULD BE APPLIED, OR WHOSE NAME MIGHT BE CONSIDERED AS FAMOUS – MORE SO, PERHAPS – THAN MANY OF THE BANDS AND ARTISTS HE OR SHE HAS PICTURED. MANCHESTER’S KEVIN CUMMINS IS CHIEF AMONGST THAT SELECT GROUP.

An NME stalwart for many years, Cummins has captured something special in The Clash, Sex Pistols, REM, U2, Patti Smith, Marc Bolan, David Bowie, Oasis, Foo Fighters, Michael Hutchence, The Stone Roses and Buzzcocks – amongst countless others.
A forthcoming book (ASSASSINATED BEAUTY, to be published by Faber & Faber on December 4th) chronicles his work with Welsh punk-influenced situationist agitators Manic Street Preachers – and includes some mesmerising shots of Richey Edwards shortly before his disappearance in 1995.
In this fascinating new interview Cummins talks to The Mouth Magazine about Richey, about the Manic Street Preachers and about ASSASSINATED BEAUTY. He also talks about photographing The Smiths and Morrissey, and discusses his iconic 1979 image of Joy Division on a bridge in the snow…

IN THE INTRODUCTION I LISTED SEVERAL OF THE BANDS YOU’VE PHOTOGRAPHED IN YOUR FORTY OR SO YEARS OF WORKING IN MUSIC…
Less than forty, please, ha ha…

… I WONDERED IF, FOR YOU, THERE’S A SINGLE IMAGE WHICH YOU FEEL ‘SAYS IT ALL’? IS THERE A PARTICULAR IMAGE YOU MIGHT BE PROUD OF ABOVE ALL OTHERS?
Well, I’ve published several books so I’m proud of the body of work I’ve done. I wouldn’t be able to pick one picture above anything else, I don’t think. People have sometimes asked me “Have you got loads of pictures on your wall?” and I have – but they’re by other photographers. I’ve only got a couple of pictures of my own up…

… WHICH ONES?
Actually I’ve got three. One’s the picture of Richey (Edwards) covered in the Marilyn Monroe stamp. One’s a picture of Morrissey, although that’s propped up in the fireplace. And I’ve got a picture of Bowie that I took. He’s in silhouette with a cigarette in his mouth. They’re the ones I’ve got up. The picture, I guess, that people associate me with more than anything else is the 1979 picture of Joy Division on the bridge in Hulme, in the snow. I don’t even have a print of that. You’ll be surprised to find out that I haven’t got lots of Ian Curtis pictures up, perhaps. But I haven’t.

I WANTED TO ASK YOU, SPECIFICALLY, ABOUT THAT SHOT. IT’S INCREDIBLE – OSTENSIBLY IT COULD JUST BE ‘FOUR BLOKES ON A BRIDGE’… BUT ONCE YOU’RE AWARE THAT IT’S JOY DIVISION IT TOTALLY CHANGES. THE FEELING BECOMES “OF COURSE IT IS! HOW COULD IT BE ANYBODY ELSE?”… IT PROMOTES THE MOOD OF THE MUSIC SO BEAUTIFULLY…
I think when people saw that picture initially, there was a sense of intrigue. I couldn’t have photographed anyone else like that on that bridge. I couldn’t have photographed the Sex Pistols like that, or I couldn’t have photographed Buzzcocks like that. It wouldn’t have made any sense at all. Obviously it’s easy to say this with hindsight… but you look at that picture of Joy Division and you do know what that band are going to sound like.

SO I GUESS YOUR JOB IS, IN SOME WAY, TO TRANSLATE THE MUSIC INTO VISUALS… TO SAY SOMETHING ABOUT THE PERSONALITY OF IT – AND ABOUT THE PERSONALITIES WHO’VE MADE IT…
Yeah. I felt, when I was shooting for the NME back then, that we had almost a responsibility to our readers. That’s not so much now – because you can click on Spotify and listen to a band and decide if you want them, all within about thirty seconds. Back then, you could see a picture of a band you might not have heard, or might not have heard of, and it needed to tell you something about the music, or a little bit more about them…

… AND THAT JOY DIVISION SHOT IS ONE OF THE FINEST EXAMPLES OF THAT…
It’s an important shot in the history of rock music, indie music, any kind of music… but more than that I think it’s an important shot in the growth of that band. It’s probably the picture most closely associated with Joy Division; it’s the picture people ‘take with them’, and it captures the mood of the music, as you said.

I IMAGINE THAT FOR SOME OF YOUR SHOTS OF THE SMITHS MORRISSEY WAS WELL PREPARED, HAD HIS OWN IDEAS, HIS OWN AGENDA – A STRONG SENSE OF THE VISUAL AESTHETIC OF THE BAND. BUT I’M NOT SURE THE SAME COULD BE SAID OF THE VAST MAJORITY OF OTHER ARTISTS. SO, ARE THERE PARTICULAR METHODS YOU MIGHT USE TO GET A BAND IN THE RIGHT FRAME OF MIND TO ‘REPRESENT’ THEIR MUSIC, VISUALLY?
When I do a shoot I go armed with a couple of ideas, but sometimes circumstances dictate that you can’t do what you’d thought. Or something else happens and ideas or planning fall by the wayside. There’s always one or two stock ideas you can go back to if everything goes wrong. The problem is, photographing bands is more difficult these days because you don’t really get the time you’d want. When I started, there were very few PRs – lots of bands didn’t even have them – and you could do more or less what you wanted. I think when you look at the music press during the Seventies and the early Eighties, it was incredibly strong. Very powerful actually. Then PRs got involved and more and more stuff became PR driven – and I felt like it reached a point where a PR’s job was to stop us doing our job, rather than facilitate it.

THE ISSUE OF CONTROL… AND TRUST?
Yeah. For instance, I went to Japan with Morrissey. We didn’t have a feature lined up or anything like that, we just wanted to put him in the paper. I said to him “You don’t have to do an interview – you don’t have to do anything. I’ll just come over and spend seven days with you and then you can see the pictures we’re using and you can write the captions”. It was great. Rather than just send us a list of typed captions, Morrissey actually hand wrote them in crayon or whatever, and sent me a box of A4 sheets with them on. You can’t do that sort of thing anymore, that wouldn’t happen now.

THINGS HAVE CHANGED BECAUSE…
… because bands can take their own pictures with their iPhones. There’s no intrigue or mystique any more, particularly. You used to really feel that you’d been accepted by the inner circle of a band if you were invited backstage. I always felt backstage was quite sacrosanct. And now bands can Tweet pictures of themselves backstage, pictures of themselves about to go onstage. Sometimes they can even send photos or messages to their mates from the stage during the bloody gig! It’s unnecessary. I think everything’s reached saturation point. Rock ‘n’ roll needs to have a bit of magic to it, and that was our job really… to create some of that…

…OR CAPTURE IT AS IT HAPPENS…
Well, yeah. But I think you can create it, not just capture it. I mean, you capture it when the band are playing live but when you’re doing a session, a shoot, with a band you’re creating something. A lot of musicians don’t really have a lot of visual ideas. They might have a bit of an idea for a picture that’ll maybe work – or maybe won’t – but it’s the photographer’s job to create a sort of mood – the magic – around the band. Then the next time you do a session with them you can take it to a different level.

YOU DEVELOP A RELATIONSHIP AND IT BECOMES EASIER TO WORK WITH THEM AFTER THE INITIAL SESSION BECAUSE YOU ALL KNOW YOU’RE ON THE SAME PAGE, AS THEY SAY…
Yeah. Or, sometimes, you find that you don’t ever want to work with them again. Ha ha…

… HA HA. I WON’T ASK…
Ha ha.

MANIC STREET PREACHERS ARE A BAND WHO SEEM TO ALWAYS HAVE BEEN REALLY CONSCIOUS OF THE WAY THEY WERE PRESENTING THEMSELVES. IN THE SHOTS FROM THE VERY EARLY DAYS THERE’S A CLEAR FOCUS ON NICKY WIRE AND RICHEY AS THE CENTRE, THE HEART OF IT… JAMES AND SEAN ARE NOT SIDELINED AS SUCH, BUT THEY’RE MORE IN THE BACKGROUND. WAS THAT THE SENSE THAT YOU GOT OF THE BAND WHEN YOU FIRST WORKED WITH THEM, THAT NICKY AND RICHEY WERE ALREADY FULLY FORMED MANIC STREET PREACHERS, AND THAT SEAN AND JAMES WERE… LEARNING THE TRADE?
Yeah, a little bit. I always felt that the band worked well as a unit onstage – but offstage I don’t think they were all terribly confident. I’m saying this tongue-in-cheek, but it was almost as if Nicky and Richey were the band and they had to bring Sean along ‘cos they couldn’t get a babysitter. Normally you’d expect the rhythm section of a band to be the quiet ones, but Nicky and Richey were pretty outrageous for the time. You have to remember that when they were dressing like that, people were only just starting to move into that post-Ecstasy period – the Happy Mondays were still hanging around, the Haçienda was, well, on its last legs really. You had lots of second division baggy bands, and then you had all the shoe-gazing bands… Music was pretty much in the doldrums for a bit, and then along came these little gobshites from Wales and it was exciting. They shook everything up again – in the way that The Smiths had done, in the way that the Jesus & Mary Chain had done, about ten years earlier…

YOU SAY YOU FELT THEY WEREN’T TERRIBLY CONFIDENT…
I only mean in terms of the way they looked, the band’s visual identity. Over the years they all grew into it. A couple of years after those shots they all had a very strong identity and there was a coherence. They looked absolutely brilliant together by then. And individually. I’ve always liked with the Manics, how they developed a kind of ‘anti-fashion’ look, and they would change it a bit for each tour or for each album.

THOSE EARLY LOOKS ARE MUCH MORE… DELIBERATELY ICONIC, THOUGH.
The thing with the Manics is, they grew up in Wales obsessed with punk, and obsessed with music generally. Clearly they wanted to be The Clash – but we’d already had The Clash. So they more or less sat there, when they were growing up, analysing things to death and working out how it should work. So when they first came along they knew how it would work – they found their own route to where they wanted to be.

IT’S INTERESTING TO SEE THE BAND’S DEVELOPMENT PUT TOGETHER BETWEEN COVERS, ACTUALLY…
I’m really pleased with the Manics book. I really am. It took ages to edit because there’s got to be a narrative flow to it. It can be a shame sometimes because certain great pictures that you’d like to put in just don’t fit the flow… Ultimately the reader doesn’t know that – no-one buys a book and thinks “Ugh… what’s missing?”… This one tells the band’s story, it’s a nice set of pictures.

JUMPING ON A FEW YEARS THROUGH THE IMAGES IN THE BOOK, RICHEY IS QUITE CLEARLY IN A BIT OF DIFFICULTY IN THE PERIOD NOT TOO LONG BEFORE HIS DISAPPEARANCE. THERE’S A SHOOT, IN WALES I THINK, AND HE’S PALE AND DRAWN AND HE’S WRAPPED AROUND A STATUE. MORE ACCURATELY, HE’S CLINGING ON… IT’S TROUBLING…
It is, yeah. I felt he was fragile.

I ASK ABOUT THESE SHOTS BECAUSE IN DOCUMENTARY WORK THERE’S THAT UNWRITTEN RULE THAT YOU DON’T GET INVOLVED, YOU DON’T INTERFERE. YOU’RE THERE TO RECORD – NOT RESCUE…
Yeah. I’m not a documentary film-maker but if I was I’d just let the camera roll, and let them do what they wanted to do, let things unfold. But being a photographer, you actually have a story to tell and you do that by creating a still image…

… A SORT OF SHORTHAND FOR WHAT NEEDS TO BE SAID?
A sort of shorthand for what needs to be said, yeah. With those shots, I’d felt that Richey was really quite fragile and I wanted to show that what he actually needed was to cling on to a female figure. The two black-and-white shots, either of them would have made a great NME cover, because you can look at them and they really tell you the story. It’s very important when you’re taking a portrait like that and it’s for a magazine cover, to actually tell a story with it. But, just because we could publish the paper in colour, in typical fashion they decided to use a fairly anodyne colour one from that session rather than one of those. Those particular shots were ‘up a level’, I think.

DO YOU REMEMBER THE ACTUAL SESSION?
I do. It was in a courtyard in Wales at some recording studio they were using. I told Richey what I wanted him to do and told him to “drift off and go wherever you want to go, and forget I’m here”. And he did, and the pictures were great. And then Nicky and Sean walked across the background and Nicky shouted “Fucking hell Edwards! You’d do anything to get on the cover of the NME!”… and that was, kind of, the spell broken. But you can see Richey really has taken himself off somewhere else in those shots.

YOU’VE WORKED WITH THE REMAINING MEMBERS OF MANIC STREET PREACHERS SINCE RICHEY’S DISAPPEARANCE (WHICH IS, INCREDIBLY, COMING UP TO TWENTY YEARS AGO). OBVIOUSLY THINGS HAD CHANGED PROFOUNDLY FOR THEM BOTH AS A BAND AND AS INDIVIDUALS. WAS THAT SOMETHING YOU EVER TALKED ABOUT WITH THEM?
I don’t think we ever discussed it, really – but it was odd shooting them as a three-piece. I went out to America with them, and there was part of them that seemed to not want to be too reverential, or glam it up. They kind of dressed down in that initial period after Richey disappeared. They just wore street clothes, really. I don’t think their hearts were in that American trip, to be honest. They were quite disillusioned.

WITH BEING AWAY IN AMERICA, OR WITH EVERYTHING?
America is very hard to break. You don’t just go over and play San Francisco, LA, Chicago, Boston and New York and say you’ve cracked America. You’ve got to get on a bus and do about a hundred dates in small places…

… WHAT THEY CALL THE SECONDARY MARKETS?
Yeah. You’ve got to work hard at that. Lots of British bands might criticise me for saying this but lots of them just won’t do that. They can’t be bothered. I’ve been to the States with bands like The Big Pink, for instance, who were doing that. They slogged coast-to-coast and slogged back, because they knew how important it is to do it like that – whereas with New Order, for instance, they’d just go and play eight dates and then think “Right, well, we haven’t cracked it this time so we’re not likely to”… Some bands don’t mind success just on the college radio level, whereas some want to be as big out there as Bon Jovi, or whoever, and will put the work in. For the Manics? They’d been very successful in the UK and across Europe, but America is a different thing. It’s a very big nut to crack, as they say. They just weren’t into it; they were very disheartened on that first trip after Richie disappeared.

THERE’S THAT NOTION THAT THE SMITHS NEVER MADE ANY HEADWAY IN AMERICA – ALTHOUGH OVER THE YEARS SINCE THEY’VE SEEPED INTO THE CONSCIOUSNESS OUT THERE…
Yeah, they have now. But on the back of Morrissey’s solo work…

… WHICH IS REALLY INTERESTING, ISN’T IT?
It is, yeah. I went out to the West Coast to see him, earlier this year. I went to a gig in Orange County, and it was probably ninety percent Latino fans. Obviously everyone knows this now, but he’s got a very very big following in the States amongst Mexicans and other Latin Americans.

WHAT IS IT IN HIS MUSIC, DO YOU THINK, THAT MEANS THAT IS EVEN POSSIBLE?
I think they like the sense of loss in it, and the soulfulness of it. A lot of Mexican music is about that or like that. Lyrically, they feel he’s speaking to them about loss in their lives, in their families and all that kind of stuff. And I think they like the melody, really, because he’s like an old style singer – not a crooner, as such, but he’s telling stories in that great tradition, with that great voice.

DO YOU THINK HE’S A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PERSON TO WHO HE WAS DURING THE LIFETIME OF THE SMITHS?
I think the whole Morrissey question is quite complex, to be honest.

THE SENSE OF LOSS IN HIS MUSIC, THAT YOU MENTIONED, IS ROMANTIC. I DON’T THINK THERE’S ANY ROMANCE ABOUT THE SENSE OF LOSS IN THE MANICS’ MUSIC. IT’S ANGRIER AND MORE – MAYBE THIS ISN’T THE RIGHT WORD – CONFRONTATIONAL…
Yeah, they were confrontational. And about politics too. They were saying “These are our politics, but what are yours?” – it was great to have a political band again after, like I said, Ecstasy and baggy and all of those things. They really do wear their hearts on their sleeves, and they’ve never changed. Morrissey will not compromise and I think the Manics are a bit like that. They write about what they want, they write about what they know, and they have a massive thirst for knowledge that they then try and educate their audience with.

IT’S GREAT THAT THERE ARE STILL BANDS DOING THAT.
It is, because I think a lot of kids learn an awful lot of their thinking, or their way to be, through rock music. If you’re at school in the Fourth Year and you’re terribly distracted by everything around you, and you’re terribly distracted hormonally and distracted by the changes in yourself… if there’s a band that you like, you’re going to listen to what they have to say, aren’t you?

WELL THAT’S WHY WE’VE ENDED UP HERE TALKING TODAY, ISN’T IT? WHO WAS IT FOR YOU, AT THAT AGE?
Bowie. David Bowie did it for me.

DID YOU VISIT THE EXHIBITION AT THE V&A IN LONDON – DAVID BOWIE IS?
I did. I thought it was absolutely staggering. I went about three times. There was so much happening. That huge room with all the live video going on, it was like being at a gig. People were just sitting there for a couple of hours, being totally overwhelmed. I don’t normally wear those headset things during exhibitions, but I did for that one. You’d walk from zone to zone and the music would change and… I don’t know. It was just brilliantly curated.

WHAT GOT ME WAS SEEING THE KEYS TO HIS APARTMENT IN BERLIN… YOU KNOW – BERLIN REALLY HAPPENED…
Ha ha, yeah… The whole thing was great. I had a couple of pictures chosen to be in it, you know? So I was thrilled. It was a great thing to be involved with like that.

THERE’S AN EXHIBITION OF YOUR WORK WITH THE MANICS RUNNING AT PROUD, IN CAMDEN, UNTIL MID-JANUARY. I’D URGE PEOPLE TO GO SEE IT. I WAS LUCKY ENOUGH TO SEE SOME OF YOUR WORK DISPLAYED IN SALTAIRE A FEW YEARS AGO – STUFF FROM MANCHESTER: LOOKING FOR THE LIGHT THROUGH THE POURING RAIN – AND THERE IS SOMETHING VERY DIFFERENT ABOUT EXPERIENCING IT LIKE THAT… AS IN, NOT IN A MAGAZINE OR A BOOK YOU CAN JUST SHUT.
It was beautiful the way they exhibited it, there at Salts Mill. I was delighted with that. That room, they hadn’t really done much with it, they’d kept it closed for such a long time, but the pictures worked really well in that kind of industrial warehouse setting. It was lovely – and I’d like to do something with them again, actually.

I WONDER WHAT MIGHT BE NEXT FOR YOU? I’M INTERESTED TO KNOW WHETHER YOU OWN THE WORK YOU DID FOR THE NME – BECAUSE I GUESS THAT KIND OF THING WOULD HAVE A BEARING ON WHAT COULD COME NEXT…
I do own it, yeah. I’ve got a New Order book that’s coming out in March and that’s at the printers now as far as I’m aware. That’s a companion to the Joy Division one I did about three years ago. The band have all cooperated with the new one, they’ve lent me bits and pieces and some ephemera, so that helps. It’s lovely, the New Order book, actually. It’s going to look great.

WILL THERE BE AN EXHIBITION?
I think so although I think it’s probably going to be in Los Angeles. I’m doing a Joy Division to New Order show out there and then maybe bringing it back to the UK at some point. The thing I really like is, the Manics cooperated with their book because we got on well and they really liked the stuff, and so I did a fairly lengthy interview with James Dean Bradfield for it. And for the New Order one, similarly I’ve done fairly lengthy interviews with each member of the band – even Hooky.

THAT MUST HAVE BEEN INTERESTING BECAUSE… HOOKY AND BERNARD ARE… ERM…  NOT SPEAKING, ARE THEY?
No, they’re not. But it’s good that they’ll both speak to me!