10.08.10
Reportage Special: Hit The North, Alannah Sparks speaks to Danny North
Danny North lives for music. It courses through him like a drug, energising him when he speaks, when he moves, when he works.
Lucky for him then, that his job involves shadowing his favourite bands, sharing the stage with them and hanging out on tour – all in the name of getting the perfect shot.
When I eventually caught up with him he was just back from the Snowbombing festival in Austria, where he shared a stage with Fatboy Slim in the middle of a snow-covered forest in the Alps. He was there to shoot the festival for America’s Spin magazine, and the starlit scene was so charged and surreal that he had to catch himself at one point and come back down to earth. After all, it was only a relatively short time ago that he was struggling to make it in the music industry – not as a photographer but as a bass guitarist.
Danny was raised on a diet of punk and metal rock. He grew up in the burgeoning music scene of Leeds, where local goth bands were fighting for a moment in the spotlight. His parents were market traders and Danny spent his early years on the markets throughout Yorkshire, but although they were working-class people with a strict work ethic, when it came to Danny’s education they were very liberal. Spotting that his son bore all the creative flair that he himself had had stifled as a youngster, Danny’s father allowed him to pursue his passion from a young age. The first gig he attended – at the tender age of 12 – was Iron Maiden. From that moment he thought of little else than the strings of his guitar.
“The music has always been everything – it takes up all of your time. You’re practising, gigging, hanging out and you never want to do anything else but work on your music.”
He played bass in a series of bands – heavy metal his genre of choice – but at the age of 16 he was forced to choose another subject for A-level, and for want of anything better he decided to try his hand at photography. “It didn’t last long,” he confesses, “my teacher encouraged me to drop out because he could see that it wasn’t my thing. All I ever wanted to do was sneak off and practise my guitar.”
Having flunked the course he moved out to Hollywood to study at the Musicians Institute of Technology. Alone, aged 18 and living by the beach in LA was hardly a formula for hard work. But it was the perfect set-up for hard partying, at which he excelled. Leading the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle resulted in another failed course, but equipped him with a suitably blurry lens through which to capture the heady passion of the music. Back in England his band Dominion was signed up, enjoyed brief success and then broke up as the members fell out. North resumed working in his dad’s warehouse, his confidence shattered. With his music career at a standstill he needed a new creative outlet, and a gift from his girlfriend of a digital camera opened an unexpected new avenue.
“I started shooting for the local zine called Sandman. I used to go out three to four nights a week photographing local bands and getting heavily involved with the Leeds music scene. “Around that time, it was quite exciting because you felt like you were around something that was really happening.” What really happened was that about a year and a half later, the New Musical Express started looking for a photographer to capture the hot new bands in the northern cities. The editor at Sandman recommended North and after months of relentless pursuit he got his first paid commission shooting a Manchester band called the Whip.
“It was only about two inches wide, the smallest live shot in the whole magazine, but to me it was amazing. I couldn’t believe someone was going to pay me for a job I enjoyed doing. I was like a kid in a sweet shop – it felt like I’d arrived.”
But it wasn’t all plain sailing – North had to grapple with the idea of leaving his own music behind and concentrating on the other side of the lens. “It took me about a year of shooting for the NME to stop being pissed off about the fact that it wasn’t me on the other side of the camera, because I’d been playing in bands since I was 12, and all of a sudden I was on the other side – it’s a strange feeling. It kind of sucked at the same time as being totally incredible.”
Coming into the industry at such a late stage – he was 30 when he started working for the NME – gave North a grittiness and a determination that afforded him a distinct edge over his younger counterparts. “I had a different mindset to most of my colleagues, who were eight years younger than me. Being in bands, promoting gigs and managing bands – because I’d slogged at the music business for years I had a really driven work ethic. I’d finally made it and there was no way I was going to let it go.”
Having skipped all the traditional rites of passage for a photographer – the internships, the college courses, the apprenticeships – he absorbed the craft and the tricks of the trade on the job by allying himself with other music photographers, sweating together with them in the middle of a heaving concert venue and mirroring every click of the lens. NME photographer Andrew Kendall was a huge inspiration and “pretty much provided me with all the reference points I needed to start to be really good.” By stalking Kendall’s movements at festivals and gigs, North learned to “be the master of the machine” as opposed to the Rage against it.
For the first time in his life the music started to play a supporting role. “I started to be really focused on getting the shot, on capturing that emotion and energy so that a person looking at my photographs could feel what it was like to be at that show. When I’m shooting a gig that’s what I’m concentrating on, and the music doesn’t really break into my mind in a way that it would break that concentration. Sometimes I don’t really hear the band at all, I just buzz off the situation I’m in.”
When you look at North’s pictures – a frenzied scene captured from deep within the crowd at a Metallica show, or a spotlit portrait of Liam Gallagher taken from the wings of the stage – it may be surprising to learn that since childhood he has been partially disabled. He suffers from acute arthritis in his legs as well as a bone disease that means he has to walk with a stick. And so every gig he attends, every crowd he mixes with or band he joins on stage – he’s doing it all with a stick. And looking at the exuberant physicality of his shots, you can see that’s no easy feat.
Even more marvellous are his exploits as a music video director, which are so charged with savage energy that watching makes your heart-rate jump a notch. Blood-soaked zombies scale wire fences in the video for metal-punk outfit Chickenhawk and skateboarders bludgeon each other with toilet cisterns – the horror scenes are masterfully executed to fit the thumping hardcore metal music to which they are shot. Making the transition to the moving image was a totally organic process, says North. “I’d wanted to do it purely for the challenge.” But he confesses: “I thought it’d be a piece of cake – it wasn’t.” But testing the limits is all in a day’s work for North, whose enthusiasm and almost childish delight for his work pours out in every lilting northern comment, in every ebullient anecdote.
“I’ve always counted myself as being a music fan first and a photographer second. Music has always driven me to do the things that I end up doing. Because it’s the biggest love of my life it’s not even a job, just a labour of love.”
www.dannynorth.co.uk
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