Great British rock in pictures. See it in Glasgow

Rock was there from the beginning of punk. Indeed, she helped visualise it. In a way punk’s origin story is also hers.

And so you join us as she is telling me about the first time she met The Clash in 1976 at the ICA in London. 

“I had never heard of The Clash, but I’d met Lenny Kaye [the guitarist with Patti Smith] in New York and he said the band were playing at the Roundhouse and they were thinking of seeing a new young band called The Clash and we could all meet up there. 

“Well, they never came down, but I went, saw The Clash, and happened to be standing next to Joe Strummer. I said, ‘I’d love to take pictures of you.’ At which point he said, ‘Sure.’”

The band’s manager Bernie Rhodes agreed. “We might want to use one,” he told her.

So, soon after, Rock went to the band’s rehearsal room in Camden where she found Mick Jones, Strummer and Paul Simonon wearing paint-splattered shirts. Strummer was wearing a suit.

Rock put the three of them in a corner of the room, in front of an old B-movie film poster. On the wall to the side of them were newspaper adverts and cuttings (“Parents Warned Over Glue Sniffing” and “Miss World’s Wild Man.”) 

The resulting picture caught something. The band’s punk realness certainly, but also their pin-up potential. Rhodes paid her £50 for it. 

It was an important moment for Rock. “I was completely bowled over,” she recalls. “That was so much money back in the seventies. I was so chuffed. I had never been paid for a photograph.

“When you do anything for the first time it’s such a huge deal. Even the smallest amount of money somehow validates the effort you put into it.”

It is fair to say that over the years Rock has put in the effort. As Rebels & Renegades, her new show at Street Level Photoworks in Glasgow (a joint exhibition with her fellow music photographer Jill Furmanovsky) reminds us, Rock has been one of the great chroniclers of musicians and music culture over the last 50 years. 

(Image: The Clash)

After punk she captured the New Romantics in all their peacock finery at the start of the 1980s. Subsequently, she has shot everyone from Sade, Sinead O’Connor and Siouxsie Sioux to Sting (and many more whose names don’t begin with an S). 

Her archive also takes in architects, the British seaside, Tibetan monks and horses too, but in our short time talking together it’s the music that dominates.

It’s a Wednesday afternoon and Rock is in Germany, two hours from Dusseldorf, at a retreat with her husband when I catch up with her. Soon, she’s off to Vienna and then Berlin, before coming to Glasgow in the middle of November for the opening of the exhibition.

It should be said that Rock’s story is also a music story because that’s the story she wants to tell.

For Rock, life began in 1970 when she arrived in London. Before that, well, she says, “I really don’t want to talk about my early life because, does that really matter? Britain to me was the beginning of an awakening.”

She will say she came from a middle-class family. “I was raised in a Japanese-American household and Americans are profoundly conservative. I came to London and within a very short space of time I met Mick who became my husband.”

That was Mick Rock, her first husband, the photographer who would become a key image-maker during the Glam Rock years and beyond. Sheila helped him place a feature in Rolling Stone about David Bowie, who in turn then invited the couple to accompany him on the Ziggy Stardust tour. 

“And for me that was the beginning of my introduction to rock and roll, to a whole different kind of consciousness. What could be better than David Bowie?”

What age were you then, Sheila? “I don’t want to talk about that.”

Young though? Young and innocent?

“I was so innocent. We were all quite innocent and making it up as we were going along, I think. I was introduced to mime artists and theatre people because David’s interests were so expansive.”

She also met the likes of Iggy Pop and in a daisy chain of connections the leading members of the emerging New York punk scene - Lenny Kaye, Patti Smith, Debbie Harry, Richard Hell - which, in turn, led to her meeting the pioneers of punk in London, some of whom, most notably Steve Strange, would go on to be the pioneers of the New Romantic scene.

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None of which would mean anything more than gossip if Rock didn’t have an eye for taking a telling image. Because along the way she had picked up a camera. And soon she was providing photographs for the weekly music press.

Rock’s own experience of the punk scene was enormously welcoming and anything but sexist, she says.

“I was introduced to punk through Don Letts and Jeanette Lee. They were both shopkeepers on the Kings Road. But it was an extraordinarily special shop where all the young people would go down and buy their clothes. Bands would come. Don told me that even Bob Dylan went down there to get a jacket or something. David Bowie bought suits. 

“I met the Bromley Contingent and Billy Idol there. And then Jeanette started to hang out with the Pistols.”

Which led to Rock hanging out with the Pistols too.

“When you’re young you talk to everybody and everyone is interesting and everyone is kind.

“Chrissie Hynde I met during that time. And there are pictures of her in The Moors Murderers [the band Hynde was in before The Pretenders]. And she wasn’t even the singer. Steve Strange was the singer. That set of pictures I think is quite important from a music history point of view because of Steve, because of Chrissie.”

And Rock was there to bear witness.

“In the seventies people in Scotland and in England were desperately trying to find themselves, find their own individuality. So many Brits find music as an avenue for that, which is why there are so many great bands in the UK, why the music is so brilliant here.

“And then in the nineties it suddenly became supremely corporate. It was about making money.”

Before that disappointment Rock forged a career making images of bands and for bands. She worked with the Cocteau Twins, The Associates, the Jesus and Mary Chain and Simple Minds. 

It is her night-time images that can be found on the cover of the latter’s double album Sons and Fascination/Sister Feelings Call.

“To this day I’m very proud of that work and it conjures up the feeling, I think, of the music. And it was the beginning of me becoming aware of how the marriage of the music and the visuals were so important. And that was my job.”

As for the Minds themselves, “they were a band that did not like to be on the front of their LP sleeve,” Rock recalls. “They felt uncomfortable. They were more about the music and not about the image. They were not Duran Duran. They clearly did not want to be photographed like hunky models.”

This suited Rock. “I took enjoyment and relish in experimenting every single time I did a shoot. I wouldn’t do that with Duran Duran, but I would do it with Jesus and Mary Chain, for instance, or another band that somehow would suggest more evocative, mysterious things.”

She always liked to hear a band before she took any photographs. When she was asked to take photos of a new Irish group whom she had never heard of she went to see them playing in a pub in West Hampstead. They were called U2.

“There might have been 20 people at this pub. No one was looking at Bono and the band. They were just socialising at the bar.

(Image: Sheila Rock (right), Jill Furmanovsky and The Face's graphic designer Neville Brody)

“Two days later we flew off to Dublin to do a photoshoot and one of the images was used on their early single.” 

As the 1980s began she became a photographer for Nick Logan’s new magazine The Face. But by the end of the decade Rock was looking to stretch her wings. 

“I stopped taking pop and rock music photos from the early nineties. I began working more for editorial publications, including fashion, and had many commissions in the theatre, ballet and opera world.  

“The next decade saw a shift again when I began concentrating on my own private passions. I explored projects that took me to a monastery in India where I photographed Tibetan monks. I travelled along the coast photographing portraits of the English at seaside destinations. It evolved into my love letter to the English in a book titled Tough & Tender.” 

But in recent years Rock has been looking at her archive more and more, realising what treasures can be found in it.

“I think youth culture in the UK is very much about the music. Unknowingly, I was creating an archive of images for the British people that have a social and historical importance.”

Which is where we came in. This is her story, but it is our story too.   

Rebels & Renegades: Sheila Rock opens at Street Level Photoworks on November 16 and continues until February 23, 2025

(Image: John Lydon)

John Lydon, 1980

"I was doing the job for a Japanese magazine, I think. He has always been, dare I say, perfectly behaved and a gentleman to me. I’ve seen him be absolutely awful.  John is a very interesting character, but difficult. Sometimes difficult people are worth the effort.

"Inherently I think he’s a much nicer person than his persona. But he’s learned to become that persona because it serves him well. And I think it’s almost like an actor playing a role.

"He’s very smart, very clever. There was another time when I photographed him in a studio and that was for The Face magazine and he was immaculately dressed in a tartan suit. You couldn’t have a top-paid London stylist do a better job. I wouldn’t say his look now as he’s gotten older is particularly interesting, but when he was a young man, my God ...

"Every time I used to see him he was an absolutely quirky, interesting individual and he always knew how to play in front of the camera. He understood who he needed to be. 

"Many years ago I did the book for The Young Ones and they were all very strong characters. But when you met them in person they were incredibly well-spoken. Rik Mayall was a bit more working class, but so polite. And so when you met them they were actors being a character.

"I think John has become his character, whereas The Young Ones were able to leave it on the stage."

(Image: The Cocteau Twins)

The Cocteau Twins, 1987

"I did a number of different sessions with them. They are very shy, but I loved the music. It had that very ethereal, dreamy quality, so that particular image I shot on 5x4 Polaroid. It can give you that slightly painterly, very beautiful quality. Like the music.

"If the people are introverted and shy then there is some other aspect as a photographer that I have to find. It’s a little bit of a treasure hunt."

(Image: Sinead)

Sinead O’Connor, 1990

"That shoot was for Rolling Stone magazine. I don’t think it was a big feature. She was quite shy. I didn’t see this slightly aggressive or strong woman particularly.

"She came with her Irish manager who might have been her boyfriend. And she was quite vulnerable with him. And then he left and it was just Sinead and me. 

"I was working on just the clothes she wore, her androgynous but exquisite beauty. Sinead was a beauty."

(Image: The Associates)

The Associates, 1981

"Alan Rankine was incredibly quiet, hardly spoke. He looked brilliant back in the day. But Billy had an intelligence, a charisma. He was clearly a star. But without that horrible ego. 

"I didn’t hang out with The Associates, but certainly from my impression and our interactions in the studio, he was clearly the leader. Sometimes some lead singers can behave very badly. But I never saw him be unkind or arrogant. It’s a tragedy that he died."