Month: December 2014

Hi Steve. Many thanks for sharing the GTP photo session. Along with Victoria`s blog on your photography work, its been a really exciting time lately, putting bits of missing information together, and having your photos illustrate the times so well. My question is, in his book, Mick Karn alluded to a group photo session for the album. Would i be right in assuming that the front cover shot of David is in fact a cropped version of a more epansive picture/photo featuring all of the band ? Thanks

I’ve not read Mick’s biography so I’m not sure which session he would have been speaking of. The front cover shot is as intended but there were also band shots which were potentially going to be used elsewhere, however they didn’t work, both compositionally as well as stylistically. What some make-up artists failed to realise was that there was a fine line between appearing androgynous and looking like drag queens. We’d learnt to make the look work for ourselves, but when make-up artists were brought in it was invariably over stated. This was, if memory serves me correctly, the main reason for rejecting the band images. It worked for some, but not all.

The ‘Gentlemen Take Polaroids’ album cover photo shoot was in fact a group session. Creative make-up artist ‘Regis’ was given free rein to explore his craft with almost ‘Kabuki’ style results.