CHRIS SAUNDERS

I first saw Henry Rollins in 1993 at the Octagon in Sheffield on what I think was one of his first spoken word tours.  I can't think why I went, his band in the 80's, Black Flag, weren't really my thing, but I must have read an interview with him & liked what he had to say. It's the only thing I can think of. I do remember coming out of the show, which had consisted of him talking non stop for nearly 3 hours, thinking it was one of the best stand up shows I'd seen.  It wasn't really actually stand up comedy though, more a monologue of funny anecdotes about his life on the road, his upbringing, his crap jobs, meeting his heroes (one phrase stuck in my mind, on nervously meeting Iggy Pop, describing him as 'muscle dipped in skin'). A lot of material, then, that ordinarily would be common stand up fare, the difference being that it was delivered with a supreme storyteller's skill which most comedians fall way short of.  All really good but what sealed it was the closing 20 minute story of how he met his best friend, their lives & japes together, leading up to how his friend had recently died horrifically in Rollins' presence and how he was dealing with it. His closing statements about the aftermath were incredibly moving & uplifting considering they were coming from someone who was obviously in a very dark place. I left the gig thinking that the man was the real deal.

Annoyingly over the subsequent years I've missed most of his tours, for one reason or another, save for a couple of times.  I've followed his stuff online, got the cds, he had an excellent cable tv show a few years back which was particularly good, where he'd interview great film directors, actors, musicians etc and get good interesting conversations out of them. Seeing as I like to photograph people who I think are the aforementioned real deal I resolved to try and do so when the next opportunity arose.

The Sheffield City Hall gig was announced a few months ago, ticket bought, & entered in to the diary 10 days before the show "Email Rollins".

10 days before the show, email sent. Reply straight back. It's to the point..

"Chris, hello. Thanks for the interest. Sure. How long will it take? Has to be brief. Thanks, Henry".

"No problem. 5 minutes"

So come the day I arrive at the venue expecting the five minutes and no more. Thing is the City Hall, while a beautiful building, has a backstage area that is useless to take a portrait that shows the subject in their surroundings, so I know it's probably going to be a close up shot and pretty much nothing else.  A quick scout around the backstage confirms this is still the case & I head up to the dressing room on the first floor & knock on the door.

"Hey man, come on in".

Instantly he starts talking about photography & starts showing me loads of pictures on his laptop that he's taken on his travels.  Rollins' life, basically, involves going to places that no-one wants to go to, having great experiences, then coming home, writing it all up, and then going on tour and talking about it for the next year. He shows me great pictures of soldiers in North Korea, in what looked like a portakabin situated right on the border with South Korea where the leaders of the North & South meet to argue, who didn't want their photograph taking at all, fierce looking tribesmen somewhere in Africa who look *really* bizarre due to the fact that, along with their chalked skin & tribal facial scars, are wearing pink shorts. And so on, all punctuated by rat a tat tat anecdotes.  He's a very good photographer and has a book out, Occupants.

So we do the photos in between me barely getting a word in edgeways as he talks about filming Lost Highway (a subject I brought up, obviously), a spirited defence of Obama's signing of the National Defense Authorisation Act (that I didn't completely agree with I have to say, but I wasn't going to possibly balls the shoot up by saying so too much), being asked to curate a Stooges gig to commemorate them being given the keys to Detroit as well as joining them on stage, the merits of At The Drive-in reforming.. etc etc etc. It felt like I was basically was the audience for a mini Rollins gig. I was there longer than five minutes, the man can talk. The show later that night was phenomenal, a couple of the many highlights being a story of how he & his aforementioned friend scared Dennis Hopper to death, and his trip to North Korea during which he was constantly in the presence of a security officer, ostensibly completely devoted to The Great Leader, but who seemed desperate to show regular human emotion. Go and see him.

Anyway the photos. I'm reasonably pleased with them, I've caught the image that he likes to put across ok I think.  I just wish I'd caught him smiling, he's a warm bloke beneath the stern image usually seen in photographs, but it's not on to be holding a camera up at someone when they're in full flow I don't think.  I did, annoyingly, forget to tell him my Chuck D anecdote though, which would have definitely got him chuckling (one to be retold some other time on here maybe. Or maybe not, it's excruciating to recall...).

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