Think 70s music and, naturally, your head goes to David Bowie, Lou Reed, Syd Barrett; those boundary-pushing bright things who shaped the era. Who you may not consider is Mick Rock, the man behind some of the most iconic images of the era, a photographic legend on an old school music scale. Rock’s images have come to be entrenched in the folklore surrounding such stars, like Bowie, whose infamous on-stage provocation with Mick Ronson caused uproar at the time and remains brilliantly burned in our vision of glam history today.

Now, Mick’s collection of such images becomes the subject of a new book. Titled, The Rise of David Bowie, the tome traces the early journey of Ziggy, arguably Bowie’s most iconic alter-ego, from 1972-1973. From the The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars to the Japan tour of 1973 it’s all here, a vivid, electrifying, and often in-the-dressing-room portrait of an artist who’s boundary-pushing self-expression shook 70s notions of gender, sexuality, fashion and music, and whose cultural impact will keep on rattling ’til long after we’re dead.

Ahead of his book signing at Taschen in London tonight, Mick tells us about the story behind the images, and the little tab on which it all began.

Tempe Nakiska: The first thing that hit me was the holographic cover. Was that your idea?
Mick Rock: No no, no no. It was actually Benedikt Taschen’s idea, credit where credit is due. They came to me about that and I thought fucking sounds cool to me, let’s do it.

TN: I was watching an interview about how you got in to photography and you were kind of mucking around with Syd Barrett when you guys were mates and that was kind of the beginning of your music photography, how did that all kind of come about?
MR: Something to do with going to Cambridge, you know, people get a bit dotty up there. But it was the late 60s and there was LSD and that was really the cornerstone because I was a Modern Languages scholar, so my education was not at all visual, it was entirely literary, and uh [pause] then I took a tab of acid and grabbed a mate’s camera on a trip and that started the whole thing, I certainly wasn’t looking to be a photographer, I didn’t have any photographer heroes, and I don’t think it was a very promising thing to do because there weren’t that many photographers around and there weren’t that many outlets, but if it hadn’t been for rock ‘n’ roll I definitely would not have been a photographer, no way.

TN: Yeah, yeah
MR: People went on to ask me, “Do you wanna be a fashion photographer?” and I’d say, “No, I don’t wanna be a fucking fashion photographer I don’t give a shit about that, I just do not wanna have to get up before noon every day!”

“I took a tab of acid and grabbed a mate’s camera on a trip and that started the whole thing.”

TN: There you go you found your calling [laughs].
MR: It found me I think. I think it found me. And it’s something to do with this silly Mick Rock name too, people would go, “Ooh it sounds like it’s what you’re supposed to do Mick,” you know? Some dodgy shit going up in the heavens that’s for sure.

TN: It’s call of fate [pause] so you were mates with Syd Barrett and then um and then in the early 70s you got into David Bowie?
MR: Yeah ’cause someone gave me a copy, a pressed copy of Hunky Dory [pause] that got me very buzzed and I had written a couple of little… I mean, I did the very last interview that Syd Barrett ever did in ’71. It was actually a half page in Rolling Stone magazine, but that was his very last interview and I think he was the beginning of my photography. But he was also the beginning of a period when I would also do interviews for a few magazines – it was a good idea for them because they got to pay one person for the pictures and for the copy, and they got it cheaper that way. Me, I made a bit more money than just doing one thing or the other. So that was that, and I had done a couple of album covers before I’d met David. I mean I had been around for a couple of years so I had [pause] I mean you didn’t need to make a lot of money back in those days you could live in the middle of London quite cheaply, and in New York I found.

TN: Yeah, yeah.
MR: But, so I was he wasn’t that well known, David. I mean he was known, but I didn’t really know who he was, a certain somebody who had that hit Space Oddity in ’69 which I barely registered with to be honest with you. I think if I’d known it I would of thought it was just a gimmick record, you know, 2001 A Space Odyssey! Because it was meant to be a play on that. I mean it was David being opportunistic but producing something that in the long-run turned out to be a fabulous song. But I didn’t register it!

TN: It’s very clever. 
MR: Yeah, you know he was a very bright man by any standards. But all standards.

TN: So at the time you started shooting him he wasn’t huge, not that many people were coming to his gigs, right?
MR: Not a lot, not at the very beginning. Not at the first show, but still he mustered 400 people, for an artist that wasn’t very well known. I did two or three things, relatively modest things with him and I would write and supply pictures, and I was travelling around with him. SoI got to know him and I liked him and I was very impressed with him, although what was my opinion worth, you know?

TN: In terms of the Ziggy Stardust character, it was so far ahead of its time. 
MR: He was lightyears ahead of his time, and he he was not only interested in those space things, he used to mime, everything he’d learnt from Lindsay Kemp and Japanese theatre. He was very important he might have been the single most important factor in David’s self-education. It was tthe basis of the mime, the make-up, the Japanese connection the idea of costuming, the brightness of it, and of course as Ziggy went on it developed from the start to more radical. If you look through the book you see it’s not in linear order like that, I’ve done that before with Moonage Daydream.

TN: What impressed you about him at first?
MR: Well one, that album. That album for starters. Two, when I saw him perform and there was something, well there was something very different about him. And then three, when we chatted for that first interview the level of intelligence… of course, he was very self-educated David. Me, I’ve been to Cambridge and I knew all these boffins, but David was self-educated and he had a much broader range of reference in his interests. And plus he loved Syd Barrett so he was intrigued because Syd was my friend. And then he had been in New York to sign the deal for the Hunky Dory album deal and then he met Lou, Iggy, and then Andy Warhol. Not that Lou and Iggy were that well known then and not that they had sold many records, in fact as Lou said they could barely give them away.

“[Bowie will] go down as a great artist. Not just a rock and roller, not just a musician, but in the broadest sense…”

TN: The colours in the book are so striking, they really jump out at you. 
MR: The thing about this one is that all the pictures were remastered. Every one was colour-corrected and colour-refined and the details were brought out. This book has the finest renditions of all of the pictures that are in there.

TN: It’s incredibly vibrant.
MR: It’s really cool. Yeah I really pumped those colours, Taschen did a great job, I was so happy with what they did and so was David.

TN: What kind of legacy David Bowie has left for future generations of performers and musicians?
MR: Massive. Massive. Spans generations, I mean, obviously people of my age love him because of what he did to the culture but the young people love him too more than any other act. God bless the Rolling Stones, they can go out and fill stadiums, but their look is basically been the same for 50 years. Whereas David was something else. David changed his music so many times, he kept shifting and rolling.

TN: I remember reading an interview about that chameleon factor, from around the time most of these photos were taken… 
MR: Yeah, I got a lot of quotes from him. I have a book out there called Glam. It used to be called Blood & Glitter, and David wrote the foreword for that. And there’s quotes form Lou Reed, Brian Ferry, Iggy, Freddy, Richard O’Brian, Lindsay Kemp. But there are quotes in the book that I got from interviews I did with [David] in the 70s. He was also very curious, very curious. His curiosity was insane. I mean, he wanted to know about everything. He was also a very charming man personally, so he could charm all kinds of stuff out of people.

“David changed his music so many times, he kept shifting and rolling.”

TN: I also wanted to ask about your archives of your photos are mental, I read somewhere you’ve got over 5000 photos of Bowie. And you directed Space Oddity and Life on Mars, The Jean Genie, and John I’m Only Dancing
MR: Yeah and then I’ve got all this movie footage. Those are the four that were officially released, and David gave me the copyright back to them around 2000. I mean they weren’t worth much when they were made and they didn’t cost much, they didn’t have a lot of usage.

TN: Your book also covers when Bowie had a major impact on Lou Reed, in the early 70s. 
MR: Well there was Iggy and Lou Reed and that whole genre of 72, they’d been dropped by Island Records, and he’d had one album out as a solo, that didn’t sell, none of the Velvet’s albums sold. And David was like a last ditch attempt to rescue it and out came Transformer. Aided and abetted I might add by Mick Ronson, who should not be underestimated. And then Iggy, out of the chaos of this, Iggy and The Stooges. I mean Punk Rock was like nothing compared to Iggy and The Stooges in high gear. And he’s the only one still out there and he’s still a punk at 69.

TN: Isn’t he!
MR: Iggy is still going and he’s amazing.

TN: There are all these celebrations on this year in London to celebrate punk’s 40th anniversary, but that’s not even the half of it. 
MR: Yeah punk heavily pre-dates… I mean I saw the Ramones and Debbie Harry in ’74 and there were twenty people there. And I was only there because it was an opportunity to meet William Borroughs!

TN: Did you meet him?
MR: I did meet him yeah! I liked his voice, this kinda crackly voice he had, but what did I know? We were all so young, in our early and mid-twenties, so it’s hard to look back in that sense because the culture that alternative culture was still relatively new. Even comparing to when Elvis broke out, I think he released his first record in ’56, so that was only 16 years previously. And Elvis, seemed like very old to us. Even The Beatles and The Stones seemed like pretty old hat to us then too! But we were looking at the light, you know?

Mick Rock is speaking at the John Varvatos London flagship this Thursday, from 7pm at 12-13 Conduit Street. 

Rock will also be signing books at TASCHEN Store in London this Friday, from 6:30 pm–8:30 pm at 12 Duke of York Square.

The book will be available to purchase at both stores. Online orders are currently sold out.