Continued…

So, if you don’t actively ask people to smile then obviously your style with them brings that out. You make them feel comfortable and they like you and respect your work.

I mean it really means a lot to me. The best tip I ever received – I think it was from this book by John Hedgecoe about photography. I have to be a photographer. Basically, I had this book when I was still a kid and I read it. It was kind of a plastic cover so you could take it with you – a kind of waterproof cover. And it was really a how-to-be-a-photographer handbook.  I know that his advice was never take more gear than you can run with except someone told me when you’re doing a portrait have someone look down and then look up at the camera. So, people will stare at a camera when you’re taking a picture especially if you have a motor drive on it and they’ll just have a very fixated look in the face – it gets kind of tense so just having them look down and look up makes for a very relaxed face.

Right.  I can’t smile right when forced and I feel self-conscious.  I’ll have to remember that tip when taking pictures.  And I’m sure you get asked this question a lot but how did you get your start doing rock photography?

I was interested in photography probably since I was about 16 or 17. Maybe 15. I remember high school. We had a darkroom I think. Then at university we had a darkroom and I took some pictures for the student paper.  It was actually called National Student Paper but I was really into music. So, music was my main thing and I was doing a postgrad at Warwick University in the Midlands in England.

But then I’m from London and I was doing my third year and I spent most of my time listening to music and talking about music with friends. People would come to my office and we would just sit and play music, play records and go to see bands.

And I was really into the Clash and The Jam and Sex Pistols and The Ramones and the punk bands in the late seventies.  I was taking pictures and what actually happened to kickstart everything was that Robert Plant (I was not a big Led Zep fan except that I’d go to see them at Naples because everyone went there  – like a quarter million people went there). But he played at my university. He played in the student union at Warwick and it was a benefit for the International Year of the Disabled. The band was called the Honeydrippers and they hadn’t played live for some time so I got pictures and they were actually really crappy pictures because the lighting was really shit. Our student union was not the art centre, it was not really a music venue. So the lighting was crap. I didn’t get great pictures.

I figured someone might be interested in them like the music papers I used to read – I read the New Musical Express every week. Melody Maker was the rival paper I wouldn’t be seen dead reading. NME had the great writers and great photographers and a lot of legends actually.  Neil Spencer was the editor at NME.  I’m trying to think of a couple of other really great writers.  Penny Smith was a photographer and Anton Corbijn – that’s what I aspired to.

Well I actually took the bus to London from Coventry and got out at Victoria Station with these pictures of Robert Plant and his band and I went to a phone box at Victoria Station and I thought “Who should I call and who would be interested in this?” And I thought NME is not gonna be interested in Robert Plant or Melody Maker but Sounds, the third paper, would definitely be interested because they were really metal and punk and you know my least favorite of all three of the weekly broadsheet music newspapers. So I called them and I spoke to the photo editor Eric Fuller and he said “Yeah come over to Covent Garden.” So, I had this little portfolio with me and I had these pictures and he was really nice and he looked through my pictures and he said “Yes, we can use a picture and generate 50 words and we’ll put it on our news page” and they used it! They used it with 50 words and he said to me “If anything is going on in Coventry or in the Midlands maybe we’ll give you a call and maybe you can cover it for us.”

And then a couple of months later I got a call because the Specials and The Selecter were playing with some other bands at the Stadium, which is this little stadium in Coventry and would I cover it. So I said yes. They sent a journalist up – I think it was Karen Swain who is still a friend of mine and I took pictures for them.  I didn’t know what a photographer did – like how many pictures to give a picture editor after a gig. And I took in this huge box of prints that I’d made and there must be 70 prints or more but they used one photo across three or four columns. So it’s a nice big one with a credit. And what was said to me was, “If you were back in London we could give you quite a lot of work”.  I was at the end of my third year and I was nowhere near finishing. I was really into rock and roll and taking pictures. So I moved back to London and I was taking pictures at gigs every night.  

So it’s like you were right there at the height of that scene.

To take photos undocumented and I kind of wish I’d done it two years earlier.  Maybe I could have done a lot more Clash gigs and Jam gigs.  I never got to see the Sex Pistols because they kept getting their shows cancelled. So when they were playing Coventry – I had a ticket I think and it got cancelled.  I never got to see them and I saw that their final show was in San Francisco at the Winterland.

I have a good friend who was there for the final Sex Pistols show in San Francisco. So yeah that’s something.

So yes. So that’s how I got going.

(Steve shows me a photo of Robert Plant on his phone)

So this is a very, very damaged image of Robert Plant from that gig. So those negatives did not survive. Well a lot of my negatives are bad. Some of the Specials ones are unusable as well. But this was the most unusual one I’ve ever found. But I did a scan of it and I cleaned up a bit and it just has this ethereal beauty to it.

Yeah. I actually really like it.

I do too. Yeah but that’s negative damage. Interesting. So that photo was from that show.

How did you store the negatives all those years? How do you keep those?

I moved in 1992 and put my filing cabinets in my friend’s garage and they were there for 25 years and that’s in England.

So you know not climate controlled obviously.

Right. And I didn’t get them until 2017. December 2017. So I’ve had a few negatives like that – an Annie Lennox one and a Springsteen one. A Bowie photo was one of my best pictures but nearly all of it was in storage. And then the color has not survived. Well there’s a lot of damage on the color transparencies – a kind of fungal bacterial damage.

I imagine there’s a lot of software to clean things up as best you can.

You know I haven’t really been able to do it with software but I’ve been able to do it on the iPad.  I have a Pro and a stylus and I’ve also found a place in India that does retouching. So they’ll clean up my photos for four dollars each. Some of them are just not really doable because it’s just black dots over the whole image. So I don’t even know how you how you can fix those but if it has scratches and stuff I can do that or I can have them do it. And most of my pictures are in pretty decent shape now and I still have a massive library that I haven’t scanned but right now, I just don’t have time.

You’ve been posting on Instagram and they’re awesome. But about meeting Dave and Annie – how did that come about?  Did somebody introduce you?

This is what I love about the digital age – do you know what this is?

(Steve shows me a picture of Eurythmics onstage in a small club, Annie wearing the long, black wig)

Is that the gig where she ripped her wig off to reveal the orange haircut?

She may have revealed this. This was the first ever Eurythmics gig. The Barracuda Club. Annie comes on and she’s wearing the wig and the Diana Rigg – you know, the Emma Peel outfit.  I was a huge Avengers fan. It was “The Avengers” the TV show. And Dave actually did the soundboard and the lights as well.  It’s all right behind him on stage and there might have been a slide show as well, but Dave did all that while playing. So I was there. That was the thing.

That was the hook to get the music papers interested. So I think Sounds probably sent me to do that gig and I don’t know if I met them then or if that would have just appeared in the paper but I got hired to take pictures on Love Is A Stranger. That’s one of the earliest videos that I worked on.

We got on pretty well. There’s a lot of hanging around on a video. So I got to talk to them quite a bit and ended up working on you know the first six or seven of their videos which are probably amongst the 10 best videos of all time, probably three or four of those would be in the top 5 of all time.

Yes, I feel that as well, as you can tell from my website.  I feel they’ve made the best videos I’ve seen in terms of…

What meets your criteria for a good video?

A cinematic eye, intelligent references and commentary, humor, subversiveness.  I mean when you watched MTV back in the day and a Eurythmics video came on, it was so different than other videos – there was a level of maturity there, an intelligence that you didn’t see in the other ones. I don’t want to be unfair but the majority of music videos were not of that caliber.  These were like little vignettes, little art films, and you just couldn’t wait for the next one because you were like “What are they going to do now?” And you know, they never disappointed as far as I’m concerned.

I don’t know why they stopped using me on the videos. I know that this happened with a lot of bands.  Annie remarried and her husband ended up getting involved on the management side. And you know I didn’t really know him and I think he wanted to use fashion photographers and famous French photographers.  I kind of got edged out which I suppose at the time I was kind of bitter about because we had such a good working relationship. 

But they were so much fun to work with. I got to know the crews and especially loved working videos where Chris Ashbrook was the lighting cameraman because he taught me a lot. And he’d even sometimes say “You know, seeing this angle it looks even better” and he’d actually listen to me. 

I used to wear all black.  So I just kind of blend into the background and no one would notice me whereas most photographers didn’t know the crews and they didn’t know how to act on a set. So I got a lot of leeway and I got a lot of great pictures and videos that no one else could get because I knew the cameraman and then you know the electricians and the directors after that first gig at the Barracuda Club and there you were.

How did you get asked back to start photographing on their video sets?

They were on RCA, right?

Yes.

I did a lot of work for RCA.  They had me do a lot of work with their younger bands and newer bands. So at that point they didn’t hire me to do Bowie or any of the other big acts that they had but RCA was one of the record companies that gave me the most work, especially in the early days.

So I think possibly ABC’s “Poison Arrow” was the first video I worked on and it was a Julian Temple production.  That was a spectacular production and I was absolutely mesmerized by the art direction. And Lisa Vanderpump was the female love interest. Martin Frye’s love interest. Martin was really cool. The band were really cool. I got some pictures of Julia with Martin and he went on to do the Great Rock and Roll Swindle not long after that I think.

I’ve recently seen the video again for “Poison Arrow” and thought that it held up really well and it looks great.

It was beautifully lit. Yeah and the costumes and the marching and the gold lamé suit.

Very cinematic and colorful.

So what you were saying about what you like about videos which is really interesting is that you hit on the art film. I think for me it was a chance to work on movies in a small way because I love movies and I had this dream of being a movie photographer or even a cinematographer. And this was as close as I ever got. And Eurythmics videos were these little movies. And Love Is A Stranger was like a 50s black and white noir movie with the old car, the Rolls Royce and looking through the window and she’s in the shadows and she’s a prostitute or maybe she’s not…maybe it doesn’t make sense trying to figure that video out!  Is she a prostitute?  Is she not?  Is it all in her head? Maybe it’s just a bunch of images. I mean there’s nothing there – it isn’t really a story, you know it’s just it’s a bunch of imagery but it’s got so much in it. I mean you know like it’s referential – like Sweet Dreams.  I think for the most part it was Dave’s cinematic vision for these videos. And Annie was like this beautiful actress and maybe she had a lot more input than I give her credit for.  It’s quite possible because I’m absolutely sure she never did anything she didn’t want to do.

A typical video shoot – how long would that last? A day, two days?

Well Sweet Dreams there’s at least two days because there was the field and there was the studio and the need to change locations and it’s not that common. It was not that uncommon either. And you’re talking about MTV and in the early days all the American videos were nearly all just lip sync and playing along. Maybe Cyndi Lauper broke the mold a little bit with her video – what was that one?

Girls Just Want To Have Fun?

Yeah that was it. That was a good story.  And look Beastie Boys – that almost looked like it came from England.  Well, Cyndi Lauper’s “Change Of Heart” video was filmed in London. I worked on that one.

Is that the one where she’s performing outside? I think she might be in Trafalgar Square or something like that?

Yeah that’s the one I remember. And all over London. And that was a pleasure. That was really fun to work on but it wasn’t really cinematic whereas Girls Just Want To Have Fun has the story. So that was a little bit different. But the American videos were very bright and whereas the English ones tend to be more “The Third Man”, you know “The Thirty-Nine Steps”, much more kind of dark and that’s us you know – we’re darker and gloomier and Americans are like “we’re going to have a fun party!” We didn’t party in England when I was growing up – you know “to party” was…we didn’t have a verb in England “to party” – that was an American thing. So where were we?

So what were the roots of the typical video? They might say get there at 9:00 a.m. and then I learned pretty quickly to get there at 11:00 a.m. and then probably nothing will happen to 12:00 or 1:00 but there was good food – every video had really good catering.

So yeah I usually would get there a bit later because I didn’t do anything until the first shot and then often even if it was the first show it wasn’t necessary – the artist or the main artist would not usually go until 9-10-11-12 at night and then sometimes it would reconvene the next day, sometimes in the same location, sometimes a different location. I’m not sure I’ve ever did a day shoot.  I might have done one or two and then sometimes there were night shots.

On a few occasions there were overnight shoots – one with Killing Joke was in a field in England in the snow overnight and there was a massive accident on the motorway. This truck fell over. It was across the entire northern northbound of the M1 and was on fire.  And then when I got there it was snowing and there was another one in London really close to where I live. That was overnight. It was in fake rain. So they brought in you know sprays and whatever it is that they do to make it rain and some of them would actually be in the rain. A lot of them were outdoors and cold and wet and miserable. Quite, quite a variety really.

But that’s kind of a fairly typical day – you’d break for lunch at some point and then there’d be hot food for dinner which is nearly always really good. There were always snacks and it was kind of cool but it was sometimes really excruciatingly boring. There was no Internet or cell phones. You just sit around two hours, three hours waiting for a shot or the next flight to get set up. And with Eurythmics off, me and Dave would do stuff like just goof around with Dave taking pictures. People wanted pictures of Annie and Dave but they were not nearly as sellable as pictures of Annie. I’ve got masses of pictures of Dave and me that people haven’t seen before.

I’m sure some of the fans would be interested in seeing those. Speaking of the cold and rainy conditions, I wanted to talk about the Here Comes The Rain Again video shoot. I’m thinking about that photo you took of Annie and Dave jumping in the air and Annie has those big giant boots – the fans have always thought those boots were wild because you obviously don’t see them in the video.  It was cold and she obviously had to cover up. I see from the photo she’s got that nightgown on that she wears in the video but she’s covered up and she’s got the boots on. So just how cold was it and was there any rain?

It was fucking cold. I mean it rang me.  It was only in December. You know I should know this. I can’t remember if it rained.  I suspect it probably did because the only rain that’s in the video was sort of like rain that looked like they created it for the video. 

That’s the only time you see rain in the whole video – very briefly.

I think there’s rain in the video because it was raining.

It’s interesting that they kept the rain to a minimum in the video considering the theme.

If you look she’s not just wearing the nightgown but you can just about tell that she’s got thermals on underneath.  She had a really hard time on that video and that was two days, maybe three I think with travel. It was a spectacular video to work on but it was really cold. It was December in Orkney. So that’s not even December in London. That’s not even December in Scotland. That’s not even December in Aberdeen. It’s like Aberdeen plus going out to sea on a little island. So we were working in a croft which is like a 16th century stone cottage. And the only heat or light was from the candles we saw in the video. 

(Steve shows me a photo on his phone of the crew from the video shoot)

This I haven’t scanned. I had this crew photo from that video. That’s really cool because you get to see everyone who worked on that. I don’t seem to have it in my collection so maybe I didn’t scan it,  so let’s go back to that photo you asked about.

They asked me to do a picture for the fans for the Christmas card. So this shoot was December the 6th 1983 so they had a 1983 Christmas card somewhere – there must be some fans who still have that card – I never saw it.

I have the card.  I’ll show it to you.

Well Annie was very specific that this picture was not to be used for anything else. So interesting – I mean it is now 37 years later.

The fans are very familiar with that picture.

I think the fans are the ones who are going to buy this book as well as the moon boots! She was walking around in the moon boots and you can see she’s wearing nice thermals plus she’s got ski pants and she actually had to wade in the water. So that was monstrously cold. She had a thermal suit on under her nightdress but she had to go in the nightgown into the water to do that.

Barefoot!

Yeah. And I think it was probably pretty rough underfoot as well. So yes, she’s walking on these rocks and there’s water and yeah it’s freezing. She suffered for her art on that video and actually now that you mention it – when she’s walking with the lamp with chickens in the foreground – that’s wet and they sprayed that down for the night reflections for those night shots.

She’s got the nightgown on from the videotape and that coat on all the way through I think. I love the hat. I love throwing the hat in the air as well. There’s some lovely pictures of Dave in that coat with a video camera from that shoot.

Do you still talk to Dave today?

We’ve chatted a little bit on Instagram. But not Annie.  I haven’t managed to connect with Annie in all these years. And I did chat with the guy who runs their office out in L.A. and he runs the official Instagram account. I can’t remember his name off the top of my head.

He reached out to me I think about something and it sounded really exciting. Then it never happened – like they were doing something with MTV for their 30th anniversary and they wanted to use some of my pictures and then they were going to do an exhibition but so many of those ideas never came to fruition.

It would be great to raise their profile a bit in America. We want them in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

How can they not be really.

That will be rectified soon I’m sure but I feel it’s important right now to sort of raise their awareness, their profile. You know they’ve done some performances together recently.  And your book helps too – I think that’s great.  I hope Dave & Annie think so too.

It’s only 250 copies in the first pressing.  When we did the Damned book, which was my first one, we sold out before it was printed and then sold a bunch of the second run.  So I want to get to that point.

I wanted to ask you about “Sweet Dreams: The Definitive Biography” which you worked on with Johnny Waller.

Yeah. You know Johnny passed away about 25 years ago.

No, I did not know that.

Not long after I moved – it was 1995 – he was on his bike and got hit by a truck and he was wearing a helmet as well. So Johnny was my best mate. We played football together and we played squash together. It was through him that I met my ex-wife Rebecca.  She was just out of college and she was working as his intern or assistant compiling stuff and I think she maybe even worked on the Eurythmics book.

But Johnny was a writer or photographer.  I think the way we met was because we both freelanced for Sounds. So we started doing jobs together and then we got quite a lot of assignments together. And so I said “Well let me come over. I haven’t met Rebecca yet.” So I went over to play squash to his place in Brixton. Rebecca was there and we were kind of having fun with each other and she ended up that same night moving in with me and we’re still friends. But Johnny passed away. But Johnny and I got this book and did you know that Laurence Stevens did the design for it?

Yes, it’s really classic Laurence designs, isn’t it?

Yeah right. We were friends with Laurence, he was a really nice guy. I haven’t been in touch with him for a long time – I think I tried to get hold of him. Maybe we had some exchanges. I can’t think. I’ve looked for him on Instagram and on social media before.

He is a nice guy and has always been very kind to me.  He gave me Eurythmics logos to use on my website and also an interview a number of years ago.

It’s kind of a tragic story about that book because it was Virgin Books. It was John Brown I think started Virgin Books and I think we were one of their first or if not the first publication for Virgin Books and they were very enthusiastic about it and it was the official biography. It was Sweet Dreams The Official Biography.  Johnny worked on the manuscript and I assembled all the pictures and I kind of acted as a photo editor for all the stuff that wasn’t mine as well.

So all the early stuff – The Tourists, but also their family pictures – you know we talked to their families and we went up to Aberdeen and we met Annie’s mum and dad. We went to a gig in Aberdeen – from which that picture with Annie wearing the Scottish guards Guzman’s hat, the kilts and all of that was taken. Her dad was backstage, too.  We went to Dave’s high school and they gave us pictures. Dave’s mum was really nice and gave us pictures of him as a kid and his brother.

I go off on tangents – so we’re working on this book and it is a Virgin book and me and Johnny are supposed to fly to New York to see Dave and Annie and this was when they were playing two nights at Forest Hills. My recollection is that Howard Jones was on that bill and we were supposed to meet with them and take them the manuscript. So we get to the airport which I think was Gatwick back then and we’re flying on Virgin Atlantic and it was overbooked. Like really, really, really overbooked.  It was a disaster and we were stuck there for hours and no one’s telling us anything. There’s hundreds of people stuck there and we’re supposed to be at this gig and I think we ended up managing to get a flight and, in the meantime, we’re calling Virgin Records and saying this is your fucking book and it’s your airline and call Richard Branson and get him to do something here!

And I think we ended up flying on a different airline but we missed the gig so we got there the next day in a torrential downpour and went straight from the airport to the gig to go backstage to see Dave. The first thing Dave says to me is “Steve, you should’ve been there last night. Bruce Springsteen came backstage and I would have introduced you two.” He knew that Springsteen was my hero.

You know I’ve seen photos of that backstage meeting with Springsteen.

Yeah. And I would have taken that picture.

Yeah sorry, that’s painful and I probably should not have brought it up.

Yeah. So we’re there in this torrential downpour and we give them the manuscript and then we went up to Toronto with them I think as well. And maybe on that same trip we went down to Texas. So we went to Houston and Austin I think and did two or three gigs with them which were absolutely amazing. Off the charts – probably because Austin is a college town. So I just remember all these kids being up on stage and I ended up dancing with them onstage and taking pictures.  Dave and Annie let them onstage instead of having their bouncers throw people out. They were so into it – everyone was so into it that I ended up jumping on the stage myself and dancing with them, and that’s one of those two cases where they got the chain mail and you know the picture of them wearing the chain mail.

Oh yes, the picture of Dave and Annie in chain mail!

Some fan made that for them and brought it to them backstage and they put it on and I got the picture.

That’s interesting – I never knew that that a fan made that.

Most people don’t know. We went to a club and I got a picture of Annie sitting in the lap of  Ed “Too Tall” Jones – I think he was a linebacker for the Dallas Cowboys. That was probably in Dallas.

You always heard that Annie was the quiet one at parties. Maybe not all the time.

I got pictures of her with JoBoxers in New York that I found going trawling through my stuff. That was a club. So I don’t think she was that shy. No I guess she was kind of shy but I think she knew that she had to be present at these things.

Anyway Dave and Annie got the manuscript of this book and they read through and they decided that they didn’t like it or they didn’t like it enough for it to be the official biography anymore. This was a devastating blow.

Meantime I gave Dave a pack of all the photos and Dave was going to go through them and see what they liked and approve which ones they wanted – the collaboration – it wasn’t just us doing a book. It was very much a collaboration with them and Kenny Smith and the management and everything. So I get a call in the middle of the night from Dave at literally like 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning saying “Steve I’m at the Sunset Marquee in Hollywood. There’s been a terrible accident.” I said “Dave, what happened?” He said “Well I was walking alongside the pool at Sunset Marquee with your photos in an envelope and I tripped and I fell in the pool with all your photos.”

So I said “Well, we’ll just have to see what we can do – hopefully not too badly damaged.” So when I got them back from Dave I gave them to my friend Rick at Rex Features. They had a color lab and he was going to process all my film. And he just cleaned them all off and actually they were fine in the end but this thing about them not liking the manuscript was devastating because they decided that it would no longer be the official biography and that cost us our American deal. And without the American deal Virgin kind of backed off on everything so it was gonna have a much bigger print run and ended up only having a small print run. We really never made any money on it. It was still a great project. It looked great. It looked like a Eurythmics artifact because of Laurence and the irony was after we lost all of that, Virgin really didn’t want to promote it because you know they felt without the American deal, without Dave and Annie, it was just called the Definitive Biography.  They let us call it that. But the irony was that after it came out Dave and Annie loved it which really surprised me and Johnny. They started talking it up in interviews and said “This is great book out about us”.  It was a cut above most of the kind of pop books definitely, maybe not all the rock books, but definitely the pop books at the time. So I have a copy. I’m so proud of it, but it’s just a shame.

So I know it was supposed to have like a distribution deal in the US but that didn’t happen.  This is like nearly 40 years ago but my recollection is there was going to be like 5,000 copies in England and like 25,000 copies in America. And that would have been a pretty big deal.  Without the American one they ended up doing a couple of thousand and I didn’t think it sold much.

I think most fans in the U.S. bought our copies here as imports. You know I remember buying it in a record store and clearly it was an imported copy.

I don’t think they ever did print it in the States. Interesting and one other thing that really upset me at the time was that whether it was Virgin or Dave and Annie, they ended up using a Peter Ashworth picture of Annie on the cover of what I felt was my book which I was really upset about. I like that picture of Dave on the back – that was in Austin I think.

You said that Dave and Annie looked at all photos and approved everything?

One of the things great about our relationship was Annie knew that if she wrote “no” on a picture it would not get used and that wasn’t true for everyone. Most of the time Dave was like “you know, use, maybe reuse”. Annie was very particular – I ran all my stuff by her so she would write “No no no no”. They did end up using a photo of mine for the “Touch Dance” cover and I have the cover and she signed it but she wrote “No no no no no no” all over it. “No no no”.  I have this big poster of “Touch Dance”. And maybe that’s what she wrote. “No no no”. I know it’s signed by Dave and Annie.  I’ve had it for 35-37 years.

So that was the book that was the Sweet Dreams story. It was a near miss. Could have been a big deal. Sadly it wasn’t.

Interesting.  From the fans perspective we didn’t know anything about that. We just thought of it like “This book came out and we like it”. So it’s different what is perceived by the public as opposed what goes on behind the scenes. You all were disappointed but the fans were just thrilled that we had a book about David and Annie.  And that book is held in very high regard to this day by fans. I mean it’s always talked about and people love it.

So maybe we should try and re-publish it.

Yes. When Eurythmics finally get inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame might be a good time to put it out.  Dave is in the process of working with somebody to remaster all the videos. I don’t know if you’ve noticed on YouTube but some of them have been remastered already and are in HD and 4K and some others still haven’t been upgraded. So they’re working on them. And I think they’re all trying to get this in line for what we think is coming within the next few years. And of course for their legacy. Then there’s the old home videos that Eurythmics put out – live concert videos and other things that have never been remastered or put on Blu ray or anything like that. And of course the fans want that. So I’m hoping this will slowly come to fruition within the next couple of years.  Maybe an addendum could be made to the biography if it’s re-published.

Yeah. That wouldn’t be me – it has to be Johnny’s estate you know.

So let’s talk about your new gallery in Pacifica, California.

Yeah. So I think I got the place at the beginning of August and I got flooded the day after I opened. So in fact there was even some repair work this morning. Almost 100 percent fixed now but I lost a lot of days but the pictures weren’t damaged. So it’s really like just the last couple of weeks I’ve actually been open for business and actually sold a couple of pictures over the weekend and it’s selling online. And then I said I always wanted a gallery and this place was available and I got a quite good deal on it.

Well I have to come out there and take a look in person and meet you since I’m so close.

That would be fun. That would be so much fun. I can show you a bunch more stuff as well. I got everything on the iPad.

Back to the Eurythmics videos again.  Did you work on the video for “It’s Alright (Baby’s Coming Back)”?

Weird. I don’t remember.

That’s an unusual video, it’s kind of animated mixed with live action. And so I wanted to ask if you had any recollections about how they did that. Did they film live and then and then do animations?

I can’t remember anything about that video and when I looked in my database that’s the wrong spreadsheet. It seems that it was done back to back with “There Must Be An Angel”. I have them down on the same dates. June 21st 1985.  I just have a few pictures, maybe one contact sheet and it’s just some headshots of Annie so I’m not sure.

Interesting. That’s probably one of the more interesting videos because of the animation. You know that was early use of animation. Back at the time A-ha had done “Take On Me” – that was the real breakthrough in animation but “Baby’s Coming Back” was very unique too because it had a kind of animation/live look to it as well.

But it was live. It was live. But it was a live motion thing. Yeah I think it was colored. It was probably cartoon animated afterwards to the live video. 

So there’s this one other story that you might have read in an interview with Dave. For “Here Comes The Rain Again”, we’re in this craft 16th century cottage that’s just lit with candles and there’s a dressing table and it’s just got candles on it and I’m standing with my back to the dressing table. I’m talking to Dave and Dave’s just like “yes, Steve” and then “blah blah blah blah blah blah blah – your jacket is on fire” – like he doesn’t raise his voice, doesn’t say shit. I take the jacket off and it’s on fire and it was one of those kind of warm padded jackets but it’s really just made out of nylon. So the flames actually burned a hole in the jacket about this big. And somewhere there’s a picture of me that I think Dave took of me when we landed at Heathrow. Dave took a picture of me holding my jacket and looking through the hole in the jacket. So that’s got to be somewhere on the contact sheets from Here Comes The Rain Again. I haven’t scanned.

So that was one of the candles seen in the video that caught you on fire?

Well that’s it. Yeah well.

And one other thing that people don’t know is in Sweet Dreams Dave has this little black gadget. He’s playing with a little black gadget. That’s my light meter. That is my digital meter.

We thought it was some futuristic, cool thing Dave was using.

It was. Wow, that is a little bit of me in that video.

Did you work on “Would I Lie To You?”

No, not that one.

They shot that one in L.A. I think.

I have a lot of photos from the American tour that I haven’t scanned from Toronto and from Texas and probably from Forest Hills as well.

Sounds like you have a lot of material for another book Steve.

Yeah I mean I could just do another photo shoot with Hanging Around Books as well. Not the videos just a bunch of other stuff. Yeah.

Yeah, I have nothing but good memories of working with Dave and Annie  – it was a really, really fun time.

Thanks so much for the conversation Steve, I really appreciate it.

OK. All right. Thank you. Okay. And now have some lunch.

Steve also just opened his own gallery in Pacifica, California, (Mostly) Rock ‘N’ Roll Gallery.  Check out his amazing photographs, visit the store in Pacifica, or order prints online.  All photographs in this article are © Steve Rapport Photography and are reproduced by kind permission.