‘OF COURSE WE remember Harry,’ commented Andrew Loog Oldham in 2008. ‘He always stood out a way from the other snappers who loathed us, who wished us no good and could not wait to get back to snapping Vera Lynn.’ Coming from the man who discovered the Rolling Stones, and who reinvented the music business in Britain, it’s a handsome tribute. Because there was little in Harry Hammond’s background to suggest that he would be so enthusiastically welcomed by the inner circles of Swinging London.
By the time he came to shoot the Stones, Hammond was already in his mid-40s and brought with him the heritage of a much older photographic tradition. Pre-dating rock ‘n’ roll (he recalls working with a then-unknown Errol Flynn on a Brylcreem advert), he could easily have been regarded as an anachronism in this brave new world; instead he was rightly celebrated as one of the key figures in capturing the birth of British rock. And, although he worked exclusively in London, his shots of visiting Americans, the likes of Gene Vincent and Buddy Holly, remain iconic images of the Fifties generation of stars.
‘He always stood out a way from the other snappers who loathed us, who wished us no good’. Andrew Loog Oldham, 2008
Born in 1920 in the East End of London, Hammond left school at the age of fourteen and took his first step towards a career in photography. ‘Using glass plates, not film,’ he recalls, ‘I survived a four-year apprenticeship in advertising, fashion and press photography at the London Art Service in Fleet Street. Together with other novice cameramen I coped with optics, camera mechanics, chemistry and the art of pointing a camera.’
In 1938, his apprenticeship complete, he moved to Bassano Ltd in Dover Street, Mayfair, a studio dating back as far as 1850. Here he worked on ‘high quality photographic portraits of the rich and famous, mostly the aristocracy and sometimes royalty. Eminent notables would be invited to the studio to be photographed and no fee was charged. The fashionable photogravure society magazines of the time then paid Bassano’s reproduction fees to publish the portraits’. Regular work also came from debs, escorted by their chaperones, who wanted to be captured in their coming-out season, though the fashions of the time were not always appropriate for the refined standards of society photography: ‘Sometimes I had to cover their more generous endowments with a fine white chiffon to give a diaphanous appearance in keeping with those respectable days.’
This brief encounter with high society didn’t last. With the outbreak of war in 1939, Hammond joined the RAF as a photographer, swapping Mayfair for the Western Desert as the backdrop to his work, as he flew over enemy lines. ‘During the early days of the war,’ he remembers, ‘we used hand cameras, hanging them out over the side of the airplane for reconnaissance.’
On his return to London after the cessation of hostilities, he went freelance, still working in Fleet Street – for Reuters and other press agencies – and still specialising in celebrity shots, though he was aware that the public taste in subjects was starting to change: ‘The demand was moving away from the aristocracy in favour of showbiz and music people.’ What hadn’t changed was the equipment he was using in those days of austerity Britain, when wartime rationing had yet to be lifted. ‘Materials were in short supply. We worked with vintage cameras, limited emulsion speeds on glass negative plates with screw-in flashbulbs.’
'It was not unusual to cover a two-hour concert with half a dozen dark-slide glass plates in one pocket and a few flash bulbs in the other, and if the performer was too far away on stage, you just had to get closer.’
Not being attached to a studio, however, meant than Hammond was now primarily engaged in location shots, and his pursuit of subjects led him to Denmark Street, London’s own Tin Pan Alley and the home of British popular music. Mixing with bandleaders, publishers, pluggers and songwriters, he carved out a sustainable career for himself in the music press of the time. ‘Between 1946 and 1951,’ he remembers, ‘I was selling photographs for use on sheet music, and to Jazz Journal, Melody Maker and the Musical Express, which was then just a single sheet of newsprint, folded in half.’
It was the latter publication that was to prove the most significant, both to Hammond and to British rock and roll. Bought in March 1952 by Maurice Kinn, just as it was on the brink of collapse, the paper was rebranded and, as the New Musical Express, made the key decision to introduce a Record Hit Parade in November that year: ‘an authentic weekly survey of the best-selling “pop” records,’ as it was billed. Previous charts in Britain had been based entirely on sheet music, and the NME venture – compiled by advertisement manager Percy Dickins under the eye of editor Ray Sonin – was an inspired guess at the future of the industry. Hammond remembers Kinn’s ‘belief that gramophone records would outsell sheet music, a theory not accepted at the time’.
Kinn was right. Between 1952 and 1955 the number of record players in Britain tripled, reflecting a shift in emphasis from writer to performer. The existence of the NME charts enabled the paper to find a new audience, no longer dependent on chasing the musicians who formed the core Melody Maker readership, but instead aimed at the consumers of the industry. The tracking of record sales provided the paper with a set of antennae that were uniquely sensitive to developments in public taste, particularly amongst the growing teenage market. ‘We went for stars in the hit parade,’ Kinn commented later. ‘If somebody was in the charts, that was our signal to give the people what they wanted. The success of the paper started when I made that policy.’
And key to that success was the work of Harry Hammond, who became increasingly identified with the NME. It was here that most of his work first appeared, setting a pattern for the career paths of many who followed, associated primarily with the pages of one or other of the rock weeklies.
‘As a teenager in the Thirties,’ he says, ‘my choice of popular music was mostly limited to jazz, songs from the West End shows and a weekly visit to the Majestic Ballroom in Tottenham Court Road.’ But even then there were hints of what was to come: ‘Via the new electric radiogram, the music publisher David Toff played what he called “hot gramophone records imported direct from America”. We sat around and listened respectfully and nodded approvingly, knowing it was all the latest thing.’
'By the time the Beatles appeared, I’d seen it all: jazz, swing, pop, r&b, bossa nova, doo-wop and, finally, Britain’s acceptance of rock and roll.’
His tastes remained largely with jazz, and with the fast disappearing, romantic world of Tin Pan Alley: ‘I watched over my teacup as deals were agreed, or a song written on a paper bag by an impoverished tunesmith sold for £25, only to go on and net a fortune for the new owner. Decisions made over tea and buns could mean fabulous wealth for some, ruination for others.’ But he was sufficiently in touch with public opinion to know which way the wind was blowing (‘Man, there’s no money in jazz,’ as Billie Holiday once told him), and sufficiently in sympathy with the times to recognise new talents: ‘Judy Garland was my all-time favourite, and with her it was the only time I ever came close to ardour. But I was a fan too of Jerry Lee Lewis and Eddie Cochran.’
He was also aware of the emerging power of television. For many years he attended the dress rehearsals of Sunday Night at the London Palladium, photographing the elite of British and American musicians, while he also took the definitive shots of groundbreaking shows like Six-Five Special and Oh Boy! The photos of Oh Boy! in particular have acquired huge historical significance; this was the show that, in George Melly’s words, ‘virtually invented the pop style’ and, far more than the limited poor-quality video tapes that survive, it’s Hammond’s pictures that capture the highly theatrical stagings created by producer Jack Good.
The list of those he photographed in this period, on stage and in the TV studios, includes the cream of American rockers – Bill Haley, Little Richard, the Everly Brothers – as well as the initial British response to this revolution: from Lonnie Donegan and Tommy Steele to Billy Fury and Adam Faith. This was the start of what was to become a new aristocracy of entertainment, and he accorded it the courtesy and attention to detail that he had learned at Bassano’s.
Two guiding principles shaped the work for which Hammond is most celebrated. First, he respected the division between the public and the private incarnations of his subjects. ‘I always tried to catch the star looking their best or most glamorous,’ he says; ‘that’s how picture editors liked their photographs to be in those days.’ For those he photographed, it was largely this attitude that made him such a reassuring figure. ‘Today’s paparazzi seem intent to present their subjects in the worst possible light,’ commented Cliff Richard, fifty years on from the start of his career. ‘In the days of Harry Hammond, photographers only wanted to show the best of you. I guess that’s why it was always such a pleasure to have Harry around.’
And second, he never went back to studio shots: ‘I like to work on location with a person in their associated environment,’ he wrote, many years later, ‘in hotel rooms, at home, or backstage at theatres.’
He can thus be seen, to some extent, as bridging two worlds – the promotional imperative harking back to an earlier showbiz era, while at the same time the informality pushed rock photography into a new style.
Harry was also unusual amongst press photographers of the time in having his own dark room. There were still severe limitations on the technology then available: ‘Prevailing conditions were sometimes more than adverse. It was not unusual to cover a two-hour concert with half a dozen dark-slide glass plates in one pocket and a few flash bulbs in the other, and if the performer was too far away on stage, you just had to get closer.’ But the fact that he developed and printed his own pictures gave him more control over the imagery than his rivals could achieve. ‘I was proud of my prints,’ he says, noting also that his wife, Peggy, would sometimes be called upon to retouch the work. ‘It was almost like painting a picture.’ Few others, on either side of the Atlantic, were prepared to lavish such attention on performers who still rated fairly low by the showbiz standards of the time.
In any event there were, at least in Britain, few enough competitors to challenge his status as the pre-eminent rock photographer: ‘For some years, I seemed to be the only photographer to take an interest in this scene,’ he reflects. And certainly he was the only one who could combine enthusiasm for his subject with such a position of authority and experience.
He became a familiar figure in the dressing rooms as well as in front of the stage, accepted as a confidante partly because – as a veteran with twenty years in the profession, and with the experience of the North African campaign behind him – he wasn’t easily overawed. ‘I was never star-struck with celebrities,’ he says, ‘and looked on them mostly as “guineas on legs”, as I was usually paid five guineas a shot.’ By the start of the Sixties his reputation was preceding him. ‘It was great,’ remembered Alvin Stardust, who was shot in his earlier incarnation as Shane Fenton. ‘We knew who Harry was because he’d taken the pictures of the people we grew up listening to.’
But as the initial wave of rock and roll began to recede, the whole industry, and Hammond with it, began to wonder about its future direction: ‘I was not sure who to photograph next.’ The question was answered by the Beatles. ‘I shot the first pictures of them in 1962 when they were newly arrived in London: unknown, unloved and looking for publicity to promote their first record.’
But by now there was growing competition, and fewer rewards for the man who had worked so long in virtual isolation. ‘For some fifteen years,’ he says, ‘I spent seven days a week recording it all on film. By the time the Beatles appeared, I’d seen it all: jazz, swing, pop, r&b, bossa nova, doo-wop and, finally, Britain’s acceptance of rock and roll. With the arrival of the Beatles, and finding that there were now at least twenty photographers at every concert, I decided to slow down…’
He was still there for the 1964 NME Poll Winners Concert at Wembley – these annual gigs, put together by unsung hero Percy Dickins, had produced many of his best known images – and he shot the next generation of stars to emerge from the London r&b scene: not just the Rolling Stones, but also Arthur Brown and Long John Baldry. But by then his own career was taking a new direction as he moved into management; drawing on his extensive show business contacts, he steered groups such as the Settlers, the Overlanders and Hedgehoppers Anonymous into the charts.
In the ensuing years, as the tradition of rock photography has grown in stature and recognition, Hammond’s work has become acclaimed in a way that would have seemed implausible in the 1950s. A score of his pieces are in the National Portrait Gallery, while the Victoria & Albert Museum bought his entire back-catalogue.
A key moment in that ascent to respectability came in 1982 when an exhibition of the work of Hammond and Gered Mankowitz was staged in the Photographers Gallery in London. It was, says Mankowitz, ‘the first time that music photography had been shown anywhere in the world in a gallery environment,’ and the show set new attendance records before touring the country for two years. ‘Harry was one of the founding fathers of music photography,’ adds Mankowitz, ‘and it was a pleasure and an honour to have the opportunity to spend time with him, planning the exhibition. He was a master of his art.’ And, as Andrew Loog Oldham points out, his ‘pictures have stood the test of time.’ More than that, his pictures have shaped our image of the times they recorded.
All images courtesy the V&A, London
A widely published writer on British popular culture, Alwyn is the author of The Biba Experience, co-author of Cult Rock Posters 1972–1982, and editor of Portmeirion. He has contributed to The Rough Guide to Rock and the BBC website. His most recent book is Crisis? What Crisis?, an account of high politics and low culture in 1970s Britain.
