ROCK ’n’ ROLL ART
Photography by KEVIN CUMMINS
Rock n Roll Art – A night with Kevin Cummins, Paul Morley and special guests.
Tuesday 1 December 2009, Cochrane Theatre, London
It has been well over thirty years since tonight’s guest speakers, this evening’s special hosts – legendary photographer Kevin Cummins and leading rock critic and author Paul Morley – first shared a stage.
Long before they went on to make waves in their respective professions, they would be recognized as blinkered teenage muso-types hopelessly peddling their two-bit punk band The Negatives around the hot-tempered clubs of Manchester, before being crushed under the feet of the heavy weight groups that would stampede out the city in the late 1970s, and into the throes of 90s’ Britpop and beyond.
And so it’s very fortunate for this evening’s enthusiastic audience (that included Marco Pirroni, Mark Moore and Sex Pistol Glen Matlock amongst others) that Morley and Cummins didn’t strike a chord as punk pretenders, as instead we celebrated the iconic images Cummins snapped of Manchester’s pop elite – Buzzcocks, Joy Division, The Smiths, A Certain Ratio, Stone Roses, New Order, Happy Mondays – with a gritty short film of his work followed by an fascinating and often humorous three-way conversation and Q&A spun around Morley, Cummins and special guest DJ and Musician Mike Pickering.
Quite unlike a lot of the Q&A sessions I’ve attended in the past, Rock n Roll Art was rolled out very much as an event, an evening that truly drilled home and applauded its subject matter. And with such magnificent photography and the words and magical memories of three of the city’s leading men, it couldn’t really fail.
Words by Mark Youll
(Kevin Cummins’ book of photography Looking For The Light Through The Pouring Rain is available now through Faber & Faber.)
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