Extract: Bob Marley and The Sex Pistols – The Music Photography of Dennis Morris

From his early documentary projects exploring race and identity in Britain to his iconic portraits of music legends such as Bob Marley, the Sex Pistols and Radiohead, Dennis Morris is considered one of the all-time great photographers of both music and black culture.

After his arrival in the UK from Jamaica as a young boy in the 1960s, Morris started to photograph his home borough of Hackney, capturing the everyday life of the British working class with an honesty and depth rarely seen in the mainstream media of the time. At just 11 years old, Morris’s zeal for documenting music was already realized, photographing bands outside concert venues. By his teenage years, he was touring with Bob Marley.

His early work established a unique perspective that would come to define his career – one rooted in authenticity, access and an instinct for capturing both the under-represented communities around him, and the rising music stars in the limelight. Later, his work with the Sex Pistols distilled the raw, unfiltered energy of British punk.

In this extract from the new book Dennis Morris: Life + Music , Sean O’Hagan explores Dennis Morris’s career photographing the music industry, and how his work captivated the world.

In the late 1970s, Dennis Morris was, in his own words, ‘at the forefront of a new black British generation who had a double identity, a double culture’. By then, he had already documented two pivotal pop-cultural moments that neatly illustrate that cultural duality. The first was the ascendancy of the global reggae icon, Bob Marley, which Morris witnessed at close hand, documenting both the singer’s first British tour with the original Wailers in 1973 and his now legendary performance at the Lyceum in London two years later. The second was his on-the-road reportage from the Sex Pistols’ 1977 UK tour, when the band was at the apex of its notoriety during the seismic musical and cultural upheaval that was punk.

Morris was a young teenager when he was invited by Bob Marley to chronicle the Wailers’ tour, having bunked off school with his camera to wait for the group outside the stage door of London’s Speakeasy Club. In the following weeks, he shot the group on stage, as well as creating several candid portraits of Marley in the downtime between shows – smoking in a nondescript dressing room, relaxing on the tour bus, scrutinising a football in a sports shop. The images amount to an intimate insider’s portrait of a young performer on the cusp of crossover success which, through the passing of time, has inevitably attained a bittersweet resonance.

Looking at these portraits afresh, what strikes me most forcefully is how young and untroubled Marley looks. In time to come, the singer’s face would, in the words of the music writer Philip Norman, assume ‘the solemn, stoical look of some Haitian martyr saint’. Here, though, he is as yet unburdened by the weight of his own fame, utterly at ease with himself, but already a charismatic presence.

Morris’s reportage from the Sex Pistols’ turbulent 1977 tour is of an altogether different order, with even the relatively calmer moments exuding an edginess that was emblematic of the group’s complex and compelling aura. Morris captures the chaos and camaraderie of a group in the eye of a hurricane of public outrage and opprobrium. The context was a nationwide moral panic fuelled by the release of the group’s declamatory anti-royalist single, ‘God Save the Queen’, a few months earlier – a provocation timed to coincide with nationwide celebrations of the monarch’s silver jubilee. Gigs were pulled at the last minute by spooked local councils, and the group were forced to play under a different name – the S.P.O.T.S (Sex Pistols On Tour Secretly).

With hindsight, Morris’s visual testimony of that volatile moment is punctuated by telling moments that speak of the band’s complex core dynamic: the compelling otherness of the terminally bored singer, Johnny Rotten, and the dogged, self-destructive nihilism of his doomed sidekick, bassist Sid Vicious. (How cartoonishly reductive those punk monikers seem in retrospect.) In one memorable backstage portrait, Rotten – eyes closed, mouth agape, hands clasped over his leather-trousered crotch – looks like he is dissociating in the aftermath of a particularly intense live performance. Elsewhere, though, in Morris’s more formally posed portraits, he is a performer who is utterly engaged with the camera, as if instinctively aware of its power to enhance his notoriety and affirm his status as punk’s most charismatic malcontent.

[…]

Revealingly, Dennis Morris has often cited the likes of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa as formative influences, rather than the esteemed music photographers that preceded him. His extended collaborations with Bob Marley and later John Lydon (né Rotten), though, are indicative of a more fluid approach that merges reportage, portraiture and documentary, but they also depend on Morris establishing a close relationship with his subjects in order to engage with them meaningfully over a prolonged period of time.

His friendship and working relationship with Lydon is a case in point. The ‘double culture’ that Morris later identified, and for a time deftly negotiated, as one of the country’s few black music photographers, pertained in a different way to Lydon, the son of Irish immigrants. It was his love for, and deep knowledge of, reggae music that initially drew him to Morris, whose photographs he had first encountered in the music press. Lydon, who hailed from Finsbury Park in North London, had initially gravitated to roots’ reggae music in the mid-1970s, finding it an antidote to the vacuity of most contemporary mainstream pop and the baroque pomposity of progressive rock. For Morris, who had arrived in Britain from Jamaica as a small child, and grown up in Hackney, East London, reggae was part of the air he had breathed as a teenager, whether at local dawn-til-dusk blues dances or in the deep pulse of the sound systems that shook the foundations of legendary clubs like the Four Aces in nearby Dalston.

This extract is from Dennis Morris: Music + Life, which is available now.