Mr Paparazzi. Darryn Lyons
there was a degree of camaraderie. To survive I had to be part of the gang. The most important clubs were the Golden Scissors Club and the GANS (Give Us A Neg Society). GANS involved sharing out negatives if any of the hard-core membership had missed the moment and would not otherwise have been able to file an image. We were a close-knit community and were judged on what we produced. If only one of us had the picture, then sometimes that person was forced, by convention, to share. Naturally, that kind of action was never in my mentality, but it was part of the game and I had to play it. The old guys whose car-chasing days were over loved it, of course. My competitive edge could be salved, however, just by the knowledge that I had got the shot, and I loved getting a pat on the back from some of the old stagers who had been there and done that.
A great example of this was in 1994, when I nailed a shot of convicted serial murderess Rose West through a police-car window at 5 a.m. the day after her accomplice husband, Fred, had hanged himself. The other guys were all sleeping off their hangovers. Though I knew that my success would be shared by GANS members, I didn’t expect to be the only photographer who wasn’t given a byline by his paper. What a cruel irony. I had taken the shot that was on the front of every national paper, credited to Tom, Dick or Harry – all fortunate GANS members!
‘Send the Aussie in – he’ll kick their arses’
There were some real characters in the group I ran with. The notorious snapper ‘Beastie’ Burton was someone I spent a lot of time with. He looked like a rogue, but was a lovely guy. He was one of the younger breed but had an older mentality – he loved the style of the classic Fleet Street snappers, which basically meant that he loved a drink! In many ways he was born in the wrong era. I could imagine him wearing a fedora with a press card sticking out of the band, toting a classic Speed Graphic camera. He truly had the look of a movie press photographer, straight out of central casting. He was a great guy to be around, great company, and never slow to get a round in.
There is no doubt that my time at the Daily Mail was the making of me and shaped my future business. My company, BIG Pictures, is very much modelled on the way The Mail ran – lots of screaming, lots of conferences and an attitude of ‘Let’s beat everyone’. The editor of The Mail, Sir David English, was a gentleman of the old school and a born newspaper man. I idolised him. He was the boy from nowhere who had made it, and I wanted to be him. He oozed aura and presence and I loved the way he spoke. He even used to swear ‘in posh’. He had really lived the life, and had been in papers long enough to have broken the story about the death of JFK. English became a real influence on my career. He used to take the piss, but he loved my attitude. ‘Send the Aussie in – he’ll kick their arses,’ he would command. In my early days at The Mail I was known for putting myself in harm’s way to get the shot. I ended up on quite a few car bonnets and several of my colleagues weren’t sure if I was employed as a snapper or a stuntman.
As a Daily Mail photographer, you were part of the ‘royal family’ as far as other photographers were concerned. The Mail was the place to be at the time, but they worked us fucking hard. English had been there since it was turned into The Mail from The Sketch under Lord Rothermere, and he wanted results. That suited me, as that was my agenda too. Rothermere, who’s now passed on, was a true gentleman and a ladies’ man. He had a Japanese mistress in Paris, where he spent a lot of time. Bubbles Rothermere was his wife; she had been a Tiller Girl and liked to party. She was a constant source of amusement and there were all sorts of rumours about her.
The Daily Mail picture editor, Andy Kyle, and I had a good relationship. He was very diligent and a good politician – it’s a bloody hard job keeping all those egos satisfied, believe me. By the time Andy came in, the role of the picture editor on Fleet Street had changed from being all-powerful to being more of a picture collector. They just had to get as many pictures in as possible and chuck them over to the back bench. The powerhouse of any newspaper became the subeditors who laid out the paper. It was up to them who got the front page.
I was making friends with all the right people. Obviously the top brass were important, but Johnny, the head of the darkroom team, was the boy. The darkroom guys were real East End types, but they knew how to make your pictures look good. There was an entrepreneurial atmosphere to that place, with a lot of backhanders going around for extra prints. I’d hate to be able to compare how much film came in against how much went out the back door.
In my first weeks at The Mail I spent much of my time loitering outside the Portland maternity hospital with Pete ‘Rosie’ Rosenbaum and Chris Grieve, who were freelancers at The Mirror, waiting for the Duchess of York’s first child to be born. Pete, and Kleggy from The Sun, were laughing at me because I didn’t know how to pull off a ‘car shot’. This shot required technique, luck and whole lot of guts. Pete gave me the low-down and left me to practise. The premise was as follows: set your aperture at F8 to F11, full manual power on the Quantum flash unit, 250th of a second on the shutter speed, run at a car, and crash-bang-wallop with a wide-angle lens. Rosie and I used to run up to people driving home past the Portland and practise on them. Must have scared the living crap out of them. (Funnily enough, just recently I took a call from the police, who were making a complaint about a couple of my BIG guys. They were outside TV personality Ulrika Jonsson’s house and had been practising their car shots on a family and almost caused a major accident. While this was in truth no laughing matter, it did remind me of the old days.)
Fergie was a long, cold doorstep at the Portland. Mike Forster was the Daily Mail’s royal guy, and there were five of us making sure that everything was there for him. I pulled twenty-four-hour shifts for two weeks and made a killing – £280 a day. In those days I was a staunch royalist, and I was so excited when the Duchess was about to come out with the new Princess that I turned up in black tie. A sea of photographers from all over the world, two or three hundred, surrounded me. I’d been guarding the spot for three weeks, but when the moment came the favoured royal photography rat pack turned up, took the best positions and got their shots.
That was the way it was most of the time. Out on the street there was no time for pleasantries. It was a free-for-all. There’d be fighting, pulling people’s Turbo leads out of their packs if they weren’t looking, it was dog-eat-dog and anything went. But the adrenaline …!
We had some real breaks at the back door of the Portland. Rod Stewart emerged once with his new baby when none of us had known he was there, and one afternoon I melted the actor David Jason walking past. I felt a little sorry for him as he didn’t enjoy the experience, but the pictures got used.
There was time to learn new tricks, but in general there was no fucking about. I had to watch and learn fast. I was flying with the best: Chris Barham, Bill Cross, Mike Forster, Mike Hollist – the big boys. There were some great characters there. One of my favourites was Eric Faulkner, the night picture editor of the Daily Mail. His version of the truth always had a certain economy; apparently he’d ‘made’ the Rolling Stones when they came in unkempt to have pictures done and he clipped them round the ears and sent them away to get haircuts and some decent threads. According to Eric they came back as pop stars and the rest is history.
Another interesting Mail guy was Monty Fresco. He had once been David English’s favourite photographer and was finishing his career as I was starting out. His eyes weren’t what they’d been and he used to get me to cover jobs for him, because he rated me. Well, I thought he did. Maybe I was just gullible. Another Harry Hamilton! I didn’t mind because I wanted the experience and I liked Monty. Rumour had it that he had an entire room at home devoted to his collection of hotel toiletries. Maybe light-fingeredness ran in the family – I’m fairly certain his son Michael once nicked a lens from me on a job at Croydon Crown Court.
As well as perfecting the car shot, I also discovered a very low-tech piece of kit – the ladder. It was as important as the camera on some jobs – if there were forty guys there, you had to get above them. I was always out with my ladder; I was like a window cleaner. I had ladders with two, three, four and five steps. They were all a pain in the arse. Much of the art of being a photographer is being prepared. It is as much about getting ready and getting in position as it is getting the shot. It’s not always easy, and most of the pressure