Aladdin Sane
Brian Duffy the photographer has died aged 76 of lung disease. His contemporaries in the sixties were Terence Donovan and David Bailey and the three were often referred to as the black trinity. He took quite a few iconic pictures of many celebrities including the Kray twins, Harold Wilson, Jean Shrimpton and Joanna Lumley. She once said that Duffy would ply his models with wine and then ask them to sing before he snapped them. But most notably for me it was Duffy who took the magnificent cover shot for David Bowie’s ‘Aladdin Sane’ album. He also took the picture from the cover of Bowie’s ‘The Lodger’ album from 1979
He also snapped quite a few other musicians including John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Black Sabbath and Blondie
He famously tried to destroy all his negatives back in 1979 when an office boy asked where the toilet paper was. He is alleged to have said “I was chairman, CEO and main stockholder… and now I was responsible for toilet paper too.” A short while after that incident he quit photography to become a Regency furniture restorer
Jean Shrimpton
Read the NME article on his passing here
I’ll close the post with the title track from Bowie’s ‘Aladdin Sane’. Enjoy!
