Читать книгу Mr Paparazzi - Darryn Lyons - Страница 6

THE NEWS OF THE WORLD and the cut and thrust of London’s media were in every aspect a long way removed from my upbringing in provincial Victoria. But that upbringing made me the way I am and sharpened my natural instincts to make bold moves and to achieve.

I had an idyllic childhood in Geelong, a middle-class, country town an hour out of Melbourne. Everyone knows everyone else’s business and if they don’t, they make it up. It’s still a funny mix of being a very friendly, safe place to bring up a family and the Wild West. The P-plate burnouts still happen down Moorabool Street on a Saturday night. The radio station is still playing the same music it did twenty years ago – ‘April Sun in Cuba’ by Dragon. But that’s what Geelong people like and that’s what I love about Geelong. As they say, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Everyone in town seems to go off to work at Ford, Alcoa or Shell or becomes a plumber or electrician. I broke the mould. Not only did I break the mould at school but also at home. My family were quite strict Baptists – it’s odd because there’s nothing strict about me.

School was the start of my entrepreneurial activities. At around the age of nine, I wrote to the great Australian cricketer Dennis Lillee and asked him for five autographs, telling him to write in one of them: ‘Good luck in your cricket, Darryn’. I intended to sell the others for 20 cents a time. Lillee was my idol. I was successful in my request, and was delighted when he even spelt my name right. I copied his signature and to this day mine is very similar to his.

Competition and ambition were a big part of my character. In my bedroom was a picture of a Lamborghini Countach. I dreamed of that car, just because it was different – the doors opened upwards. My friends remember me telling them that I would have that car one day, and in fact the Lamborghini that I ended up buying from Rod Stewart was the same colour as the one on my bedroom wall. My main mates from school were Mario Gregorio (Mars), Shayne Van Dreumel (Vanny or Drumes), and David Lewis (Lewy). During our high school years we stuck together like glue.

Undoubtedly the biggest influence on me outside the family unit was Mal Donnelly, my art and photography teacher at East Tech Secondary. I come from a family of architects, builders and painters, but when I discovered photography I was gripped by a massive passion for it. The school had been given the most incredible facilities by the state government – when I got my first job at the Geelong Advertiser the paper didn’t have the facilities that the school did!

I owe Mal my career because he encouraged my love of photography. He was a huge influence – compassionate, caring and with an intuitive understanding of how a kid’s brain operates. He saw I had the right attitude, and the fortitude to be a good photographer, and he saw the amount of work I was willing to do. Mal also taught adults in the evening on a paying course, which ensured that he had good equipment for the kids to use. He was also able to duplicate his adult lesson plans for the brightest kids in the day class.

I wouldn’t call my discovery of photography luck; I really think it was fate. I was never going to do anything else – didn’t even have to think about doing anything else. I loved the creative side and always felt that photography was art. My interest started with a pinhole camera. We built them at school, took them home and took one picture, and then came back to school and developed it. It was fascinating. I found I had a knack for composition, and I went to extraordinary lengths to do something different. I would go to my grandma’s place and put hessian or Vaseline over the lens to get different effects while taking hundreds of shots of her dog, Midge. When I discovered Cokin lens filters, I was in my element. My poor sister Vikki spent several hours posing for me in the style of the Mona Lisa.

Mal says that I picked up the basics very quickly. He says that kids like me are a real challenge and that we raise the bar. I was inquisitive, inquiring and challenging – basically a pain in the arse! While he was teaching, he would look for that flicker of disinterest in my eyes and know he would have to expand his projects and ideas.

We covered a lot of theory, but the practice was very important too. There was a darkroom attached to the classroom, so we covered developing and printing. I was very interested in the chemistry aspect of photography, and that certainly helped with the course. Mal reflects that if you can get a kid interested in the darkroom process, it’s amazing what they can achieve. East Tech had an old Pentax K1000 that pupils could borrow at weekends, though you had to go through a major process to get it. It was the first proper camera I ever used. I was thirteen.

Mal also operated field trips for the students, generally just around town during daylight hours. We worked on cityscapes, portraiture, the full range. We were limited in terms of film stock and studio time, but this probably helped me become a better photographer. I knew how to make a shot work, and I also knew that I couldn’t waste frames.

By Year 10 I was integrating photography with other subjects. For one science project I went up to Kodak’s facility in Melbourne and learned about the history of photography, how film was made with silver oxide, the whole thing. I put everything into that project. (Until he retired in 2005, Mal used my work on that project as a teaching aid.)

The school built a new music and art wing and I volunteered to be the photographer for the opening ceremony. Mal was also responsible for the school magazine and was always looking for content, so was happy to give the job to me. My involvement in the magazine also meant that he could allocate more studio time for me.

The Geelong News, one of our local papers, came down to shoot some images of the opening ceremony, too, and the following week in class we went through the spread that had run in the paper. Mal talked through the photographer’s approach and where it might have been better, and remembers me immediately challenging him and defending the photographer.

Initially my parents thought that my photography was just a hobby. They got nervous when it became obvious that it was my chosen vocation. I took a job at Coles New World supermarket, working alongside my best friend Mario, and soon bought my first car and more importantly my first camera – which in turn made me my first million.

My first bit of kit was a Ricoh XR2S from Fletchers in Melbourne. It had all the amazing features I wanted. I remember walking in there with Dad, who said, ‘There are a lot of cameras here. Are you sure this is the one you want?’ He couldn’t believe I knew what I wanted. I used to walk around the house and the garden taking pictures of everything – especially Sasha, the family dog.

During years 10 and 11 at East Tech I got my first taste of life on a newspaper when I was sent on a work experience secondment to the Geelong Advertiser. My first printed picture, of three boys at a local fete, was used big and I was as pleased as punch. The Addy placement was over all too quickly, but I was soon back there working for free during my school holidays.

When I wasn’t partying I was practising my photography, but it was all in my spare time – I wasn’t even studying it at the Gordon Institute of Technology (where I went to do my final year of school). At sixteen, I started doing voluntary work experience. My mother almost had a fit when I came home from my first unpaid photographic job with pics of a decapitation on a railway line. A purple Jaguar had got stuck on the tracks and been decimated by the 3.15. This was real news. I thought my photos were unbelievable and threw the prints down on the table for her to look at while she was cooking dinner. She was speechless for a moment. Eventually she said, ‘Wouldn’t you like to be an architect, son?’ I’ll never forget the look on her face. You don’t really register the bad stuff when you’re in a high-octane news situation. You get tunnel vision and just focus on doing the job.

As my photographic career took off, my formal education started to fall away. I had decided that I couldn’t do both well, but it was an easy choice. During one of the infrequent lessons I actually attended, I looked at the algebra on the board and thought, ‘I am never going to use this in my life.’ And that was that. Predictably, I flunked at the Gordon.

Despite the fact that I had completed work placements at The Addy, I knew there was no space there and no chance of a job, so I targeted the other major paper in town, the Geelong News. I had been wagging school a lot and covering shifts for Brian ‘Harry’ Hamilton at The News, as well as doing whatever scraps they threw me.

I stuck with it, kept grafting and, over time, did more and more for The News, mostly unofficially. The News was biweekly and The Addy was daily. That in itself taught me to be more creative and take a different approach. If I was somewhere at the same time as an Addy photographer, I couldn’t shoot identical pictures as his would usually be published before mine and I didn’t want to be seen to be regurgitating the same material as my rivals. We loved getting exclusives at The News, turning The Addy over. A biweekly should never really be able to do it, but we managed to all the time. We’d all socialise in the Press Bar in the Criterion Hotel after work, but I always wanted to win.

I ended up getting banned from The News because, as an unpaid member of staff, I wasn’t covered by the workers’ compensation insurance scheme. I was very upset about that. The editor, Dale Jennings, was a real by-the-book man and we weren’t close, so the situation seemed impossible. I was much more friendly with his deputy, Gary O’Regan, and the sports editor, Ondrej Foltin. When Jennings moved to The Addy and O’Regan became editor my career began to flourish.

Harry Hamilton was on his way out, and I focused on making sure I was there, front and square, to step into his boots. O’Regan soon found out that I had been moonlighting and, according to Ondrej, far from holding it against me, when Harry left to set up a new company, I got my first break. O’Regan took me on rather than hiring an experienced hand.

I was ecstatic: at eighteen I was an official First Year Cadet with a weekly pay packet of $23. I signed up for as much as I could, regularly covering twenty or more jobs a day. If there was nothing in the job diary I would go out and set up my own stuff. It was never about the money – it was all about the idea. I was a real experimenter. My goal was to get the front and back pages every day. I achieved it many times over.

When Glen ‘Quarters’ Quartermain joined The News he became my right-hand journalistic buddy. He’s a great writer and one of the funniest characters I’ve ever met – a classic. Glen says that I am the most competitive little bastard he’s ever met and that I annoy him at times. This has been a constant in our friendship; we often fall out for a couple of weeks before carrying on as before, but I count him among my closest friends.

We were quite a team and some of the stories we covered together were unbelievable. One of our first jobs was to cover a horse race and instead of remaining behind the barriers, I clambered onto the track about five metres behind the finishing line. The officials were screaming at Glen to get me out of the way, but he knew that I wouldn’t listen to him any more than I was listening to them. They thought I was going to be killed, and I nearly was. As the horses finished they actually bowled me over, but I got a great shot of the winner on a 24 mm lens.

I was also there to help Glen cover his first fatal car accident, which is always a gruelling experience for any reporter. Glen kept his distance, but I was shooting through the car window, even though the macabre shots were obviously never going to be used in a family newspaper. I turned to see Quarters throwing up over a farm fence, entertaining the local cow population.

At the time we made good use of radio scanners, which were illegal but very useful. One day we picked up details of an armed siege on the emergency services frequencies. The police were there, marksmen, the lot. I came up with the great idea of circling behind the property to get into the garden. Once installed, Glen would try and get an interview with the guy holed up in the house and I’d get a shot of the guy. Glen’s response was simple, ‘Darryn, he’s got a fucking gun!’ But then he realised I was serious, wished me luck and started interviewing whoever he could. I headed round the back, climbed over the fence and knocked on the door. The guy barricaded inside actually opened the door and it became obvious that he was holding a water pistol. We chatted together for about ten minutes, he even posed for some set shots with the pistol. Then I nipped out the front and told the cops that I’d just been having a chat with the guy and he’d be out in a couple of minutes. Which he did. Of course, when the story ran it was as a Glen Quartermain World Exclusive! I told Glen that his was the greatest act of cowardice I’d ever witnessed. He retorted that mine was the greatest act of idiocy he’d ever seen.

‘The atmosphere was electric and the team was probably the best I’ve worked with’

There were only six or seven of us at The News, all news-hounds. The atmosphere was electric and the team was probably the best I’ve worked with in terms of competitiveness and hunger for success. We worked till midnight and wanted to be the best. I learned about the equipment, the pressure, the darkroom and how a newspaper worked – which in those days involved a lot of time in the pub. That was where you got your stories.

Though I continued at The News for several more productive months, my career began to get a little bumpy. Ted Brown took over as editor and he hated me. We just didn’t gel. He would scream at me and I would just tell him to fuck off. He fired me a couple of times, but couldn’t really get rid of me. Tony Aitken, the senior photographer and my immediate boss, hated me too. Everyone else around the office loved me because I was such a character.

In 1987 I won third prize in the cadet division of the Australian Press Awards with an image captioned ‘Polly Wants a Snapper’ – a shot of a cockatoo and a fish. Success of this kind was unheard of for a photographer at a biweekly regional paper. Clearly it was time to move on, and finally a vacancy came up at the Geelong Advertiser. I was twenty years old. The editor at the time, Graham Vincent, had had his eye on my work, and remembers bringing me on board. I was a little rough around the edges when I arrived, but Graham saw my total commitment.

I trod on a few toes, certainly, but I think Graham admired my flair. He knows that I took some criticism in the early days about my attitude and that it hurt me, but that I dealt with it. He loved my outrageous behaviour. He also realised that underneath all that bravado and bullshit was a fairly complex character. He always knew that I thought about things a lot more than some people gave me credit for. He loved that he could sit at a news conference at five o’clock in the afternoon, see that he had nothing for the next day’s front page and call me. I would ask what he wanted, he would reply that he didn’t know and, invariably, I would come back with a front-page image. I always produced the goods and wasn’t worried about what I had to do to get the splash.

My first major scoop was a shot of the Queen, a brilliant image that Graham Vincent ran across the whole front page of The Addy – something that had never been done before. Leaving the scrum of the official photocall behind, I managed to hide myself in the middle of a flock of sheep at a shearing demonstration during the Bicentennial celebrations and popped up and nailed a fantastic picture of Queen Elizabeth. She was throwing her head back and laughing at a dog wearing a watch. Pretty fucking surreal all round! The boy from the one-horse town had scooped the whole royal rat pack. Although I was covered in sheep shit I was delighted, and so was the paper. The shot is known as ‘My Queen of Hearts’. It relied on my patience and tenacity, and my desire to be the only person in the right place. Graham thought it was a sensational photograph and says that like all good photographers, I see things differently. I wasn’t afraid of anything – be it royal protocol or a perilous environment.

Though I had many close friends on the paper, my attitude would have annoyed some of the staff. Ondrej says that my arrogance really started to show at The Addy. He remembers me often striding into the office, flinging down some prints and announcing, ‘That’s it – I’ve got the front page!’ Those on the team who knew and understood me liked me; the ones who didn’t thought I was a real smartarse, which was no biggy; I knew I was a smartarse!

The Addy was fantastic and slowly I moved up the grades. I was known as ‘Scoop’. I was also big into the nightclub scene in Geelong at that time. One day I went to the Golf View Hotel (the first hotel in the area to have a revolving dance floor!) to do an advertorial and happened to meet the owner, George Ramia. We hit it off instantly, both being Leos. Then I started DJing for him with George Toppa. I also helped George with the night club renovation and began living at the hotel. This was at the risk of offending my parents who were anti drink and anti nightclub. Whenever my father was given booze for Christmas, he poured it down the sink. He had such disdain for alcohol. My mother’s parents had battled alcoholism, so she couldn’t bear the stuff either.

It was girls, beach, tinny, DJ, picture, and giddy up! In many ways I was at the top of the social ladder in Geelong. My connections with the newspapers, radio and nightclub gave me some serious cachet, and I was having fun. I could have had a wonderful life and a very good career there, but I had bigger ambitions. I talked to two buddies, George Ramia and Don ‘Mad Dog’ Dwyer from the local radio station. They said, ‘What more have you got to do here? Everyone knows you.’ Though he was a very well-known figure in Geelong, Mad Dog had cut his teeth in radio with the BBC in London and when my situation started to change he was a real driving force in encouraging me to break out of my comfort zone and follow my dream. Graham Vincent encouraged me, too.

I had several reasons for wanting to leave. The main one was that I had always been desperate to make it on Fleet Street. That was where the world’s biggest-selling newspapers were and it’s where I wanted to work. I’d also lost my driver’s licence for drink driving after one night at The Addy’s Christmas party. Working in Geelong was going to be hard without a car. Fleet Street had always been a magical kingdom in my mind; the ultimate dream and test was to make it there. It wasn’t just the big league – it was the World Cup final.

While I wasn’t flush, it didn’t take me long to get the money together. None of my jobs paid big money, but I had plenty of them. The night I left The Addy, I took a big cheque with me – my final payout was around $1400. One hour later I was on the end of a serious beating at a card game and was left with about $500 – my total budget for a new life. However, I was armed with a determination to take on and beat the world’s best: ‘If you can dream it, you can do it.’

I left in September. The good weather was coming to Geelong and I was moving to England for the winter. I was going to have to get used to a rather different climate! It was 1988 and I was twenty-two.

I couldn’t help looking back as the plane thundered on and I don’t mind admitting that I cried as I flew out over the northern coast of Australia. There’s an emotional bond that holds you to your country, and I was testing it.

The plane seemed to crawl its way to Los Angeles. Immediately upon arrival, I collected my gear and went from LAX to a horrible hotel in Orange County. I was on a package deal and had no choice; we were bussed in like prisoners. I was only in LA for three days and had to make sure I used my time wisely. I was on a mission.

I had come to LA to go to the legendary Samy’s Camera, the cheapest camera shop in the world, where I knew I could pick up some really good second-hand equipment. I was there browsing for a whole day, like a kid in a candy store, wishing I was rich but knowing I would have to choose well as my budget wasn’t going to stretch far. Despite my financial restrictions, I was able to get some great stuff – a photographer’s jacket, lenses and a beaten-up Nikon FM2 body, and a Quantum Turbo battery-flash. All this would get me through my first month in the UK. Once I had bought as much camera equipment as I could, I decided to visit Disneyland. I hated it – thought it was crap. London was calling and I was more than ready to leave La-la Land behind.

My plane flew into Gatwick and I cleared customs at around 6 a.m. and caught the next train to Victoria Station. My first destination was the business centre on the concourse, where I bought a phone card, borrowed the telephone directory and tried to get an appointment at every national newspaper picture desk for later that day. It was a tough process. I was an unknown foreign national begging for time from some of the busiest people in London. But my enthusiasm had its reward – I was able to secure an appointment with the News of the World, one of the major players in the tabloid field. I wanted to work there, or at one of the other big papers – the Daily Mail, The Mirror, The Sun or The Express. These were the Fleet Street leaders. At one time The Express had ninety staff photographers working for it around the world!

I was very low on cash by this point and, though I shudder to recall it, opted to walk from Victoria to Wapping carrying all my luggage on an unseasonably hot day. It’s a bloody long way, and took me around four hours.

‘My jaw dropped as I realised that I was now sharing the lift with Rupert Murdoch’

Seeing the Tower was surreal, and in fact the whole city looked like a film set to me. London seemed so olde-worlde, so quaint. Everywhere I looked I saw clichéd images like the famous red double-decker buses. I wasn’t impressed with Big Ben – it had looked much bigger on television. Initially, London struck me as a doom and gloom, ‘Get out of my way’ kind of place. No one seemed too keen to help a lonely Australian with directions. Lack of assistance notwithstanding, I made my way to the News International HQ and went to find Mr Frank Hart, who was the picture editor at the News of the World.

Inside the lift I jabbed the button and the doors closed, then suddenly reopened to admit a group of men. My jaw dropped as I realised that I was now sharing the lift with Rupert Murdoch and some of his immaculately turned-out henchmen.

I hadn’t come this far to miss an opportunity, so I introduced myself. ‘G’day, Mr Murdoch!’ I said cheerfully, and told him I used to work at his Geelong paper, The Advertiser. Not only that, but I had in fact been part of the Addy dragon-boat team that bore his name – Rupert’s Raiders. In between floors, I even managed to produce a team T-shirt featuring his caricature.

Whether or not he thought I was insane I don’t know, but he seemed interested – or perhaps just amused. He asked me what I was doing in London. Without hesitation, I told him who I was going to see and that I was planning to make it on Fleet Street. He smiled and was gracious enough to wish me luck. Probably to the relief of his associates, the doors then opened at my floor and I got out and headed for Frank Hart’s office.

After my meeting with the Boss I was feeling pretty confident, but it immediately became obvious that Frank didn’t have a lot of time and was only going to give my portfolio a cursory look – not least because it was a Friday and they were fairly manic, being the world’s largest-selling newspaper.

Just as Frank was telling me that I would probably be better off trying to cut my teeth in the UK at a suburban daily, and that he had a mate at the Croydon Advertiser, there was a frantic knocking on the window. I didn’t know what was going on at this point – the only Croydon I knew was in Melbourne and I had just flown from there. Frank went out to take a call and I figured I had reached the end of my appointment. I could see him chatting animatedly when suddenly he sat bolt upright and started nodding furiously.

I still don’t know who was on the other end of the line (so give me a call, Rupert, I’d love to know), but Frank came straight back in and said that my portfolio was great. ‘You start tomorrow, son,’ he told me, and that was that. I was to pull my first shift as a freelance the following day.

My mouth fell open, but I managed to recover enough to make sure I didn’t fumble this opportunity. Now it was my turn to start nodding furiously.

Five minutes later I was back on the street, Frank’s words ringing in my ears. I was off to Bournemouth with the paper’s chief reporter to find out if Windsor Davies was gay. My final question had been simple. ‘Great,’ I had said. ‘Who the fuck’s Windsor Davies?’

After the chance meeting with Murdoch and the incredible offer of some immediate work, I was on a real high. That night I took a bus to Muswell Hill to beg a favour from an old colleague at The News, Tracey Linguey, and her husband, Tony, who were living in London. I desperately needed somewhere to crash as my money was gone. Tracey had landed a plum gig at the Daily Mail but Tony, I was secretly amused to learn as we had never got on, was delivering TVs for Rumbelows. Tracey and I had agreed to rendezvous in her local pub, the Maid of Muswell. I was early and it wasn’t long before the travel, the excitement of the day and a couple of pints of British beer caught up with me. When Tracey arrived, she found me sound asleep under a table.

The following day, I was still tired and jetlagged. The chief reporter picked me up from Muswell Hill and we set off for Poole in Dorset. He told me that this was going to be an easy gig and that I was going to sample the best seafood I’d ever had in my life. It wasn’t the best of course. (I’m Australian, for fuck’s sake! I know good seafood.) However, the trip did teach me about the expenses fiddle. It was regarded as a kind of unofficial overtime for a newspaperman in the UK, and I had to learn quickly, otherwise everyone else was going to get caught out. I hated having to fill in all those forms. It was a pain in the arse, but you had to do it. Everyone had a regular expenses fiction and my own favourite creation was ‘Use of galibea, £20’. I was never once asked what the hell a galibea was, but I’ve since discovered it’s the name for the flowing robe worn by Muslim men!

After that first job, I got work almost every day. Freelancers were always advised not to rely on one source of jobs, so I also covered the odd job for The Sun and The Standard. I was truly a free agent, covering sports, trailing outside restaurants or celebrities’ houses for a possible shot – otherwise known as doorstepping – anything for any paper I could get work from. At one point I did go for an interview at the Croydon Advertiser because the regularity of the pay attracted me. I went down to The News in Portsmouth, too. Thank God something made me turn them down.

Tracey remembers all too well my stay with her in what she describes as her ‘broom cupboard’ in Muswell Hill. I was out on the road every day with my portfolio, tapping up new contacts, certainly not afraid of rejection. I only stayed with them for three weeks, sleeping on the floor, pretty much living on Wimpey burgers and bad Indian food. After I moved out they still saw me – I was always keen on a backyard barbecue. Not that the weather was any good, but when a barbie is on offer I am there by hook or by crook.

My expertise was growing with every new day and my horizons were certainly expanding. My first experience with the royals was right after I arrived in London: I covered Prince William’s first day at school. There were about 150 photographers there in the morning and everyone shot the proceedings, but I hung around at the back door for the rest of the day and got a shot of the young prince leaving for home. I was the only photographer to get something that was informal and natural and it was my first exclusive. I sold the picture to The Express, who paid me £75 for it – at that point I had no idea how to negotiate. They used it big and then I took it to an agency, Rex Features, who syndicated it for me. Mike Selby, the head of Rex at the time, looked at me slightly askance. It was as if he was thinking that I was the kind of guy who might one day come back to haunt him. BIG is now bigger than Rex.

People don’t know the work that goes into this career. When I started out it was far from glamorous. After moving out of Tracey and Tony’s place, I shared a bedsit over the road from them in Muswell Road, Muswell Hill, with an English couple. We had a room each and not much else for £50 a week. It worked out fine for quite a while. I was hardly ever there; it was very much shift, shift, job, job. The room was big enough for a bed, a desk and a sofa. I had all manner of ridiculous things covering the walls – pictures of me dressed as Rambo, silly, tacky things that made me laugh.

When I first arrived in London I was incredibly naive about life in general. One day I was sent to get some shots at a trial and I just walked into the High Court and started taking photographs of the guy in the witness box. Of course, I was jumped instantly by the security guys. I had no idea I wasn’t allowed to take photos in there. I’d been used to just waltzing around Geelong doing whatever I liked.

I was always a big networker, a pusher. The desire to go out and achieve burns bright in me. London is a special place – all people do there is work, and I love it. To make my space in the business I had to make it happen by building relationships. I worked hard at getting to know people, even though I am not by nature a schmoozer. Usually this meant going out drinking with people. One thing that threw me was the early pub closing time. It reminded me of the ‘six o’clock swill’ in Australia in the 1960s – the bell would ring and everyone would rack up fourteen beers to down. (Not that I was a big drinker in the 1960s, of course, being four years old and not even at primary school!) In Australia I was used to getting a drink whenever I wanted, and the system in the UK seemed archaic.

My working day would see me up at six and out by seven, and taking on a night shift meant that I finished at 3 a.m. twice a week. Most of my jobs were for the Daily Mail. I wasn’t on a shift rate and could pull in £65 a job, which was a lot of money then, especially when you do the maths in Aussie dollars (in those days you multiplied by three) – the most I did was twenty-nine jobs in one day! There was no hanging around; if I hadn’t been briefed the night before, I always rang in early to see if there were any loose jobs available. I knew that most photographers were quite lazy, so if I could get the first call in as the picture editor arrived, I would be away. Something usually always came up, though if I didn’t get a job for some reason, I would be out on the road looking for pictures. I craved that elusive exclusive.

Often when everyone else was in the pub, I’d be out looking for pictures. My average workday was eighteen hours. I enjoy getting up early, but it’s not so easy in England in the winter. I really missed the sun. Pushing the limits meant that I would always come home knackered. I didn’t have a large circle of friends in the early days and much of my socialising was work related. Despite that, I was never really lonely. People have always been drawn to me, and my home was always open to strangers.

Having arrived in the country with nothing, very quickly I had a lot. I was one of the first people to have a mobile phone – one of the enormous versions with a gigantic battery pack; I still remember the number. That was one of my brightest moves because it meant I was always ahead of the pack when the jobs got handed out. My first pay cheque was around £6000 and most of that was reinvested into gear. Whenever I got a new piece of kit, I was like a kid at Christmas.

Working like a dog during the week wore me out, so I would try and catch up on sleep at weekends. Fine in theory, but I was often offered extra shifts. Sometimes they were news shoots but frequently it was football. I’d never seen soccer before and was amazed by how fast it was. Though I was happy to take the money, the English winter was not for me and as soon as I could afford to give up the freezing Saturday arvos at the pitches, I did. On at least a couple of occasions I fell asleep on the bus on the way home and woke up in the depot feeling like Reg Varney of TV’s On the Buses: ‘Where are the clippies?’

Though I have always been a keen cook, I hardly went near the kitchen at Muswell Hill. My life was work and my work was life. I was very fit, but I was living off Kentucky Fried Chicken and burgers from the cafe round the corner – bloody great burgers, though. I didn’t want to let a minute go past without trying to make money. To this day, I won’t go near washing and ironing. It’s such a bad use of time. Thanks, Mum – but I would rather buy new than waste time.

My hectic schedule meant that I was getting plenty of exercise and my youth kept me going – adrenaline is an amazing thing. The excitement of chasing jobs and the thrill of competition meant that I felt strong.

Tracey and Tony – he grudgingly and only by extension – were really good to me and took me under their wing. A few weeks after my arrival, Tracey inveigled me an appointment with Andy Kyle, the picture editor of the Daily Mail. At stake was a ‘regular’ freelance position, still not a coveted staff position but one up the ladder from my truly hand-to-mouth role at News of the World. There was a real class system on Fleet Street. It ran on a sliding scale from staff photographer down to regular freelance to freelance to scum.

Tracey had got me the introduction; now I needed to seal the deal. I had to prove myself. Thankfully, my tenacity, enthusiasm and – let’s not forget – an excellent portfolio carried me through. I had done it. I was numb. This was a huge, momentous event in my life. I’d got my first job on Fleet Street! I called Mum from around the corner from The Mail’s Tudor Street offices, crying tears of happiness. At The Mail I would be working with photographers of incomparable quality.

When I first started at The Mail I was on around £60 per job. I was doing multiple jobs, treble shifts. I didn’t sleep – fuck that. My sales reports very quickly totalled at least £8000 a month. I was cleaning up. It wasn’t long until the accountants got wise and forced me onto a day rate – but not before a memo had been circulated asking why I was earning more than the editor. The memo appeared after I had received a monthly statement from accounts that came to more than £10 000. This was a lot of money, but I did have a huge backlog of expenses that had finally come through in one chunk – and those galibeas weren’t cheap!

I was certainly making the figures, but I needed wheels. The first car I purchased in London came through one of the drivers at the Daily Mail, Dave Bully. He was a real character, very charismatic. It was a Renault 5, a total rust bucket that cost me £150. My first experience driving in England was terrible. A very troubled guy threw a rock through my window as I proceeded up the Archway Road. I knew he was off his nut because he threw an ice-cream first.

‘This gig was like being put into a tumble-dryer on full speed’

Scary as that was, I knew I was going to have to be tough to make it in this city. The requirements of the job were that I had to be physically and mentally very strong. This gig was like being put into a tumble-dryer on full speed. I could handle it, but I came out a different man. Working regular freelance was all about speed and efficiency. You had to be the best to compete with the best.

Getting jobs through the paper’s diary wasn’t enough for me. I also used to go out and look for pictures on my own and submit them. I had a couple of great page-three shows in the early days – I was only doing what I’d been doing at The Addy, but it impressed the picture editors. Most of my peers were very lazy and just sat in the photographers’ room waiting for the phone to ring and for them to be spoon-fed something. When it did ring, they’d be too scared to pick it up as they hated working, but I’d be diving for it. Sometimes the other staff photographers told me to say I was the only available person, so I would get the job. Good.

To get a great picture, you needed thought and a bit of luck. Ray Collins of The Sun and I rode our luck when we were chasing shots of a youngster who had committed a very serious crime and got sent down at Slough Magistrates’ Court. The police smuggled the kid out of the court and into a van; we jumped into Ray’s car and gave chase. We hit the M40 and charged along after the van like the proverbial bats out of hell. I opened the sunroof and stood up through it, camera at the ready. Ray pulled the car in behind the police van and then, at my signal, yanked the wheel around and moved up next to the window. The guy turned around in surprise and I melted him. Unbeknown to us, though, we weren’t allowed to take shots of juvenile convicts, and I got hauled over the coals when I got back for endangering public life and bringing the profession into disrepute. Of course, I told the desk that the whole thing had been Ray’s idea.

My bull-in-a-china-shop approach may not have been subtle, but it got results. Chief reporter Dave Williams and I were sent abroad to cover a story involving a British admiral who been taken to the cleaners by his mistress. After the whole drama blew up he had been hospitalised in Spain. While Dave was back at the hotel trying to go through official channels, I waited till siesta time and just walked into the hospital, took the admiral’s picture and asked him a few questions. When I got back, Dave told me I was out of order and there were protocols to be observed. He was happy to take a copy of my notes, though. As we were operating abroad, we got away with it.

Despite the staff’s differing work ethics, we all loved a good drink-up together at the old Fleet Street bars – the Punch, Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, Scribes or the Mucky Duck, which was over the road from The Mail. The odd opening times used to confuse me at first, but I soon picked them up.

Though the general life was dog-eat-dog, there was a degree of camaraderie. To survive I had to be part of the gang. The most important clubs were the Golden Scissors Club and the GANS (Give Us A Neg Society). GANS involved sharing out negatives if any of the hard-core membership had missed the moment and would not otherwise have been able to file an image. We were a close-knit community and were judged on what we produced. If only one of us had the picture, then sometimes that person was forced, by convention, to share. Naturally, that kind of action was never in my mentality, but it was part of the game and I had to play it. The old guys whose car-chasing days were over loved it, of course. My competitive edge could be salved, however, just by the knowledge that I had got the shot, and I loved getting a pat on the back from some of the old stagers who had been there and done that.

A great example of this was in 1994, when I nailed a shot of convicted serial murderess Rose West through a police-car window at 5 a.m. the day after her accomplice husband, Fred, had hanged himself. The other guys were all sleeping off their hangovers. Though I knew that my success would be shared by GANS members, I didn’t expect to be the only photographer who wasn’t given a byline by his paper. What a cruel irony. I had taken the shot that was on the front of every national paper, credited to Tom, Dick or Harry – all fortunate GANS members!

‘Send the Aussie in – he’ll kick their arses’

There were some real characters in the group I ran with. The notorious snapper ‘Beastie’ Burton was someone I spent a lot of time with. He looked like a rogue, but was a lovely guy. He was one of the younger breed but had an older mentality – he loved the style of the classic Fleet Street snappers, which basically meant that he loved a drink! In many ways he was born in the wrong era. I could imagine him wearing a fedora with a press card sticking out of the band, toting a classic Speed Graphic camera. He truly had the look of a movie press photographer, straight out of central casting. He was a great guy to be around, great company, and never slow to get a round in.

There is no doubt that my time at the Daily Mail was the making of me and shaped my future business. My company, BIG Pictures, is very much modelled on the way The Mail ran – lots of screaming, lots of conferences and an attitude of ‘Let’s beat everyone’. The editor of The Mail, Sir David English, was a gentleman of the old school and a born newspaper man. I idolised him. He was the boy from nowhere who had made it, and I wanted to be him. He oozed aura and presence and I loved the way he spoke. He even used to swear ‘in posh’. He had really lived the life, and had been in papers long enough to have broken the story about the death of JFK. English became a real influence on my career. He used to take the piss, but he loved my attitude. ‘Send the Aussie in – he’ll kick their arses,’ he would command. In my early days at The Mail I was known for putting myself in harm’s way to get the shot. I ended up on quite a few car bonnets and several of my colleagues weren’t sure if I was employed as a snapper or a stuntman.

As a Daily Mail photographer, you were part of the ‘royal family’ as far as other photographers were concerned. The Mail was the place to be at the time, but they worked us fucking hard. English had been there since it was turned into The Mail from The Sketch under Lord Rothermere, and he wanted results. That suited me, as that was my agenda too. Rothermere, who’s now passed on, was a true gentleman and a ladies’ man. He had a Japanese mistress in Paris, where he spent a lot of time. Bubbles Rothermere was his wife; she had been a Tiller Girl and liked to party. She was a constant source of amusement and there were all sorts of rumours about her.

The Daily Mail picture editor, Andy Kyle, and I had a good relationship. He was very diligent and a good politician – it’s a bloody hard job keeping all those egos satisfied, believe me. By the time Andy came in, the role of the picture editor on Fleet Street had changed from being all-powerful to being more of a picture collector. They just had to get as many pictures in as possible and chuck them over to the back bench. The powerhouse of any newspaper became the subeditors who laid out the paper. It was up to them who got the front page.

I was making friends with all the right people. Obviously the top brass were important, but Johnny, the head of the darkroom team, was the boy. The darkroom guys were real East End types, but they knew how to make your pictures look good. There was an entrepreneurial atmosphere to that place, with a lot of backhanders going around for extra prints. I’d hate to be able to compare how much film came in against how much went out the back door.

In my first weeks at The Mail I spent much of my time loitering outside the Portland maternity hospital with Pete ‘Rosie’ Rosenbaum and Chris Grieve, who were freelancers at The Mirror, waiting for the Duchess of York’s first child to be born. Pete, and Kleggy from The Sun, were laughing at me because I didn’t know how to pull off a ‘car shot’. This shot required technique, luck and whole lot of guts. Pete gave me the low-down and left me to practise. The premise was as follows: set your aperture at F8 to F11, full manual power on the Quantum flash unit, 250th of a second on the shutter speed, run at a car, and crash-bang-wallop with a wide-angle lens. Rosie and I used to run up to people driving home past the Portland and practise on them. Must have scared the living crap out of them. (Funnily enough, just recently I took a call from the police, who were making a complaint about a couple of my BIG guys. They were outside TV personality Ulrika Jonsson’s house and had been practising their car shots on a family and almost caused a major accident. While this was in truth no laughing matter, it did remind me of the old days.)

Fergie was a long, cold doorstep at the Portland. Mike Forster was the Daily Mail’s royal guy, and there were five of us making sure that everything was there for him. I pulled twenty-four-hour shifts for two weeks and made a killing – £280 a day. In those days I was a staunch royalist, and I was so excited when the Duchess was about to come out with the new Princess that I turned up in black tie. A sea of photographers from all over the world, two or three hundred, surrounded me. I’d been guarding the spot for three weeks, but when the moment came the favoured royal photography rat pack turned up, took the best positions and got their shots.

That was the way it was most of the time. Out on the street there was no time for pleasantries. It was a free-for-all. There’d be fighting, pulling people’s Turbo leads out of their packs if they weren’t looking, it was dog-eat-dog and anything went. But the adrenaline …!

We had some real breaks at the back door of the Portland. Rod Stewart emerged once with his new baby when none of us had known he was there, and one afternoon I melted the actor David Jason walking past. I felt a little sorry for him as he didn’t enjoy the experience, but the pictures got used.

There was time to learn new tricks, but in general there was no fucking about. I had to watch and learn fast. I was flying with the best: Chris Barham, Bill Cross, Mike Forster, Mike Hollist – the big boys. There were some great characters there. One of my favourites was Eric Faulkner, the night picture editor of the Daily Mail. His version of the truth always had a certain economy; apparently he’d ‘made’ the Rolling Stones when they came in unkempt to have pictures done and he clipped them round the ears and sent them away to get haircuts and some decent threads. According to Eric they came back as pop stars and the rest is history.

Another interesting Mail guy was Monty Fresco. He had once been David English’s favourite photographer and was finishing his career as I was starting out. His eyes weren’t what they’d been and he used to get me to cover jobs for him, because he rated me. Well, I thought he did. Maybe I was just gullible. Another Harry Hamilton! I didn’t mind because I wanted the experience and I liked Monty. Rumour had it that he had an entire room at home devoted to his collection of hotel toiletries. Maybe light-fingeredness ran in the family – I’m fairly certain his son Michael once nicked a lens from me on a job at Croydon Crown Court.

As well as perfecting the car shot, I also discovered a very low-tech piece of kit – the ladder. It was as important as the camera on some jobs – if there were forty guys there, you had to get above them. I was always out with my ladder; I was like a window cleaner. I had ladders with two, three, four and five steps. They were all a pain in the arse. Much of the art of being a photographer is being prepared. It is as much about getting ready and getting in position as it is getting the shot. It’s not always easy, and most of the pressure came from myself.

‘It was a scene of devastation and mutilation, but I had to get on with the job’

My first major success for the paper was when the Kirov Ballet came to town. I was given the theatre gig, which the others figured was a dead-end job, but I knew was important because David English himself was attending the theatre that night. I stayed on after the photocall even when every other photographer had left. This gave me unrestricted access to shoot the full dress rehearsal and the results were excellent. Andy Kyle looked at the long roll of negatives and was immediately impressed. He hurriedly made marks with a Chinagraph pencil on a couple of shots to be cropped slightly, and with a finger and thumb nicked each of the neg proofs that he wanted to see prints of immediately. The prints the process guys turned out were the old style, 16 by 20 inches – huge. The picture editors in those days used to influence the back bench or the editor by turning up with prints the size of posters. Luckily for me, David English loved the shots, too. ‘This is marvellous stuff. Maaarvellous stuff!’ he boomed. Through going the extra mile and waiting for the shot that was worth hitting, I ended up on the front cover with a double page inside. That pissed some people off, I can tell you!

Horror was part of the job too, and news photographers had to deal with it. I covered the Clapham train crash on 12 December 1988, which left thirty-five people dead and scores injured. It was a scene of devastation and mutilation, but I had to get on with the job. In situations like that I switch everything else off except my focus on the job. I become unemotional. Maybe only journalists understand that. I’m not saying that distancing yourself from your feelings is a good thing, but you can’t get too emotional in the field and still capture what is happening in front of you.

As well as expanding my experience and portfolio, The Mail also helped to fill my extremely limited down time. Chief reporter Dave ‘Willow’ Williams was captain of the paper’s cricket team, and always roped in any Australians who joined The Mail. The team would play in and around London and the home counties every Saturday, and once a year there was ‘the tour’ – a real highlight. We travelled all over the country, from Yorkshire to Somerset to Norfolk – although we were scared to go to Yorkshire because we always got slaughtered. It was the most dangerous county for us. I called it ‘Lillian Thomson county’, after Australian fast bowlers Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson.

Some of the greatest cricket arenas are in the UK, and I’m not talking about Lord’s. One pitch had a 40-foot oak tree at second slip – I edged many a six there. Another had a road running literally 20 feet behind the stumps. The wicketkeeper had to watch his back to avoid passing cars shaving the hairs off his arse with their mirrors! I loved these grounds.

Daily Mail cricket tours were usually four-day affairs. We would depart on a Friday morning, hit a local pub for lunch and that evening turn out to play a twenty-overs-per-side game at 5 p.m. It was real ‘hit and giggle’ stuff, and we were usually slaughtered. We would then play a full match on both the Saturday and Sunday, and come crawling back on the Monday. A very, very long weekend, with a lot of drinking and a lot of cricket.

All the top-echelon Daily Mail reporters were on the team. After a game in August 1989 we were in a curry house somewhere in South London having a great night together when we all got called back to central London. I was briefed on the cell phone as I drove, but details were hard to come by. All we knew was that a party boat, the Marchioness, had gone down on the Thames with half of London’s ‘beautiful people’ on board. It was a models’ party on the boat, with the next generation of supermodels on board. The scale of the event kept being revised and it wasn’t until we reached the riverside that the true horror became apparent.

It was a foul night and somehow evoked an atmosphere of Jack the Ripper’s London. It was windy and there was a real chop on the water. The darkness was almost palpable, cut only by searchlights and the desperate screams of the dying. I swung my camera around, trying to follow the searchlights and blindly banging off frames. I could hear but not see people in the water all around me, screaming and then disappearing into the inky water to their deaths. Everyone who was present wanted to do something to help, but diving into the Thames to try and pull some unseen victim to safety would have been a suicide mission.

I had a long (300 mm) telephoto lens, but was unable to find anything. The atmosphere was terrifying – it had the same sense of panic and fear that I imagine the Blitz must have engendered. I couldn’t hit anything in the water; the only images I got were of the heroic rescuers doing their best and of the upended vessel. No one got a shot of anyone in the water – not even Bill Cross, who actually lived right next to the river.

I didn’t question our right to be there doing the job while these devastating scenes unfolded around us. I am not a qualified lifesaver, and I and my colleagues were there to record history. After the event, of course, I had an emotional response. Over the following weeks I had a recurring nightmare featuring a drowning girl slowly losing her grasp on the stays of one of the bridges and being dragged under the water. While that may have happened, it was certainly not something I witnessed.

The Marchioness disaster was a chilling event, and sobering in every sense of the word. Fifty-one people drowned. We were all commended for our efforts by The Mail’s deputy picture editor, Nick Skinner, but it was a terrible experience – an extreme event. The following day was almost even more harrowing. I was sent out as part of a team to round up ‘collect pictures’. This involved knocking on the doors of people who were freshly bereaved and asking if they had a photo of their loved one that we could copy. It was true gutter press stuff – probably the worst job a photographer had to do, but if you could pull it off the more you were rated by the tabloids. It was hard, but I was amazed at the grace of the families I spoke to.