The first UT single is credited to 664...
Emma Poole at Virgin called the book in, I think it was us verse Jack Webb, and we got the job, so we had this really weird meeting listening to three songs in front of the people who were playing the three songs, which is always quite weird. I can't decide out of the two groups of three people who were the shyest, really. that single cover was very much by chance. It was a difficult day, Andy was terribly shy and very unhappy to have pictures taken - which I can understand, it's a pretty silly thing to do, have pictures taken - it started off very difficult, got a lot easier. Once it had become clear that someone was unhappy, you can deal with that unhappiness, but if they're not showing it you're not aware of it so you don't have to deal with it. Some of the stuff from that day was OK, but it wasn't my finest hour by any means, and we did another session later in the year after Andy had had all his hair cut off.
The cover of Stone was taken in a park in Abingdon, using a very old polaroid camera that decided for itself what it's going to do rather than you deciding for it. It was just beginning to rain when we were taking those pictures, the sky had gone quite dark, so it's just a long exposure and the guys were walking away. It think that picture partly came out of desperation as well, I think that was the point that Andy had decided that he really really didn't want to be there. It's nice because it's not so specific, you have to look at it and go "what's that then?"
Higher Than Reason, where's that image from?
That was taken in the back room of a friend of mine called Speedy. Three of my friends lived in this house together and I took pictures of them whenever I was at the house. At the time I was making pictures that scream "like me, like me!", but that was one of the best images to come out of that time. It's rare that you do things and look back on it, from that long ago, and still like it, but I still like that image. It was just a case of the band coming to me and saying "what have you got", which is strange, because you have to think what goes with the music, and a lot of the pictures from that time, when I was at college, and I went to live in Berlin for a little while, were, if not manic depressive, then very melancholy, and lot of the images the band used at that point were from that time. I chose a pile of prints and sent them to Dave the manager, and the band decided from that pile what the next image would be.
>Solved
That's Jonathan's hand, Jonathan from 664. He moved to London 2 or 3 years before I did, and he was on his own in his flat opening a bottle of wine, and the neck sheared off and went through his hand, all the way through, and that picture is of the resulting scar, I think they had to open up his hand and sew the tendons back together and then close him up again, so the scar is actually bigger than the cut. I believe it was dissed rather badly by 60ft Dolls, I was told by a friend of mine, which was a bit weird, a bit like being called names in a playground.
>Almost Here
That picture was taken on the underground in Berlin, near where I was staying, it was just a case of this couple, sitting opposite the three or four of us travelling, in an embrace. I didn't look through the viewfinder, I just held the camera up a little bit and took the picture. I think it benefits from being out of focus as well. That time for me was very odd anyway, all the pictures there were quite dark, there about 12 or 15 in that series all with the same feel, and I carried that on, really less successfully, when I went to Ireland. A lot of the pictures inside the album are from Ireland - the picture of the T.V. was a youth hostel in Dublin, the crossing with the traffic lights that was also used for Settle Down/Dune Sea was in Bannor, Co. Down. It worked together for the album because they're very solitary pictures, very melancholic in their sense.
What all those pictures were about were a sense of isolation, and I think a lot of the songs on the album deal with those kinds of feelings, and loss and confusion, so what they're there to do is to complement the music and for the whole package to appear in a certain way, so I was very happy for them to be used, they worked well on that level. By this time we'd become friends, with a lot of bands they have a very strong idea of what they want, and it doesn't always work, this was a collaboration, which was nice that that happened at that time.
>Between this and the new album and singles, how do you feel the relationship has changed?
I spent a month with Andy in Russia, so that was a bit of a change. I really got to know Andy properly, he's not someone who necessarily that easy to get to know, and obviously being together for that amount of time, travelling together in a small compartment in a train, we were really in each other's pockets for that whole time, it could have been a disaster, but it was quite the opposite, it was really a defining time for me in lots of ways. It was a pleasure to spend that amount of time with him and talk about life the universe and everything. I think the pictures reflect the ease of that relationship and the time we spent there. A lot of those images I wouldn't have been able to get if it hadn't been for Andy and the people that showed us around. All the new pictures were taken during that period, August 1999. We went to Moscow, then we spent 2 1/2 - 3 days travelling down through Siberia to Kraznayarsk. The original intention was to go right the way to Vladivostok, and then to Japan and then home from there, but we didn't have time to do that, and it's good that we didn't because it allowed us time to dawdle instead of doing this mad ambitious trip .You could work things through in the images. It was nice having Andy there too to say "what do you think of this", it was nice to have a bit of feedback really.
All the things like empty rooms and the sense of absence, that all came out of conversation, and what we found as well. We were taken to places we never would have found in a million years if there hadn't been people telling us what was around. We bummed around Moscow State University, which is where the picture of the globe is from, where all the floors had blistered where the central heating had burst, all these amazing places, theatres, the strange room in the hippodrome, where they have horse racing, mad places that you'd never get into if you didn't know the people there.
>Photographically how have things progressed from the first album?
I thought it was quite important to do things in colour, as a very obvious way of saying "this is a progression", and also they're taken with an enormous camera, it wasn't as if you just raised it to your eye and took a picture, you really had to think about what you were doing, it was a much more complicated operation to do it than the last album. It was more ponderous, they're very carefully made. The way that the colour works n the pictures was thought about a lot, and it was just really a case of making something specifically for the band, rather than saying what have we got and what can we do and how can we make this look coherent. I really wanted to take a very organised approach and say "this is for you, this is your thing". I'd had monitor mixes of the album or 3 or 4 months before we went, so I'd been listening to all that, and a couple of things really stood out, I Can't Wait is probably my favourite song on the album and that really informed a lot of the pictures, there is a real sense of sadness and desperation as much in what Andy sings about as in the music, the music is very tense, and I wanted there to be an underlying tension in all the photographs. It was made from that point of view. Also a lot of the conversations Andy and I had while we were away the images changed and progressed from having those talks about our pasts and childhood s and things that happened. There was a lot of thinking back going on. I didn't want it to appear like a road movie either, that was something I really didn't want, any notion of Kerouac, I wanted it to be very European in it's sensibility, very considered. Also when we designed the album, I gave the images to Stephen Male, he's a friend of mine and he does very pared down spare designs, and I thought that was quite important; I though it was important that it looked very beautiful, something that people would like to have.
>Another departure is the use of portraits...
I think that those portraits are nothing but evidence. No-one's asked to stand in a certain way, this goes for all my photographs, they're not asked to anything except stand there. I've always seen music as evidence of something, of feeling a certain way, or trying to communicate certain ideas about yourself. - it's very important when you're growing up and listening to music, you automatically identify with people who listen to the same sorts of music - what I wanted to do was present these portraits, but Stephen and I thought it's nice to have that human presence there, but photographed in that certain way. The portraits are just evidence of someone existing, really. Also something I've always felt about doing something creative is it's evidence you existed, you created something that says "I was here", and it's not in any narcissistic sense, it's just a case of saying "I was here at this point and I met this person and we communicated and then I left again". That I think is an important element. But what was really nice about the whole thing was that I was packed off with my camera and a member of the band and told "Go and do whatever you want", which you never get, no-one ever says that. So being able to do that was an enormous pleasure. It's a brilliant job to go off to a country you find fascinating and take whatever pictures you want, and also to be trusted to go off and do it, for someone to say, "we believe in you, now go off and do it".
>You've done another set of pictures of the band themselves, was that easier?
Not a problem at all. I think you can see that from the pictures as well. I think it's fairly evident that I'm happier and I've got a better idea of the way I want it to look, and the band seem a lot happier. The first time was the first session they'd done, and now they've done a hundred sessions with a hundred different people all working different ways. I think if you look at the pictures it's completely obvious that we're comfortable in each other's company, and it was a pleasure to do it.