Queen was giving another concert the next day at the same venue and so Keith Sharp asked me to work through the night to develop the film and make prints that he would give to the band the next day. Working off the adrenalin that comes from photographing a great band like Queen I worked through through the night until about 3 A.M. when my body started to ache with pain. It was then that I remembered the attack that I suffered during the concert. My legs may have been kicked and black and blue, but Keith Sharp did give my pictures to Queen the next day.
Late in the morning, Keith Sharp picked up the photographs and told me we had an interview with the opening act, Thin Lizzy. I was tired from being up the whole night and would have prefered to have stayed in bed. Nonetheless I went to the interview, camera in hand, to take the usual Keith-interviewing-the-group picture. However, when I took out my camera, I was told by the lead singer that they were not presentable enough for pictures and they didn't want any taken. At first I thought this was a joke, as no one had ever said no to pictures before. It soon became clear that they were quite serious, much to my irritation. You would have thought that I was about to take photographs of blonds models as opposed to hard rockers. I thought it was ludicrous at the time. It was akin to Keith Richards saying he needed some time to apply makeup before pictures could be taken. He could put on all the makeup he wanted but that would never change the look of that face.
A few months later, Keith Sharp decided to move the magazine to Toronto. For myself, I made the decision to spend two years in Georgia where I would trade the tranquility of photographing rock concerts for being shot at in the American South. Some 30 years later in May 2010, I would receive a phone call from a familiar voice, Keith Sharp, asking if I still had concert photographs and any magazines. He was writing a book about starting Music Express and hoped to use them. That led me to create this website to showcase the talent that I photographed at the time.
