Cast your mind back – or if you’re a Gen-Zer, use you imagination – to a time before smartphones, when gigs were enjoyed without the encumbrance of a thousand phones held up in front of you, where queues at the bar were deep and journeys home very long. At this time – let’s call it around 1994 – the only way you could hear the bands you liked was to, yknow, actually buy their records or go to a gig. And if you didn’t catch them live, the only way of seeing what a band looked like was either on the back of an album or in one of the music weeklies.
Which is why music photography was so important in the early 90s. Just as in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, the images by the top photographers in the business didn’t simply capture the look of the artists, they defined their identity. Immortalised them, in some cases.
