Tony Mott spent three decades as a rock photographer. With an exhibition of his work now in Wollongong, he tells GLEN HUMPHRIES the three worst people he ever worked with. Well, two of them at least.
In three decades as a rock and roll photographer Tony Mott’s met pretty much every musician in that time – except perhaps those he admires the most.
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Mott, who lives in Redfern but has a weekender in the northern suburbs of Wollongong, reckons there's a lot of truth to the phrase “never meet your heroes”.
“The problem with your heroes is you pedestal them automatically,” Mott says.
“It’s quite good to leave them on the pedestal, because one thing that is true is that all musicians are human beings - aside from Keith [Richards], who obviously isn’t human.
“They’ve got all their foibles and all their flaws.”
Mott has had the chance to meet a few of his heroes, including Ian Hunter from Mott the Hoople.
Born Tony Moulds, he changed his name to Mott because of the band. But when he was in the same backstage room as Hunter after a show, he opted not to introduce himself lest he say something “dicky” about how he loved the band so much he changed his name.
It was a similar story with Carole King – like many others Mott is a big fan of her legendary Tapestry album. During an Australian tour her promoter invited him to join her for dinner.
“We end up backstage and she was meeting people at the far end of the room and I thought, ‘I’m going get introduced and she’s going to be told I’m a huge fan’,” Mott says.
“I’m going to be one of those idiots that goes ‘oh my God! I think you’re amazing! You changed my life!’. So I went home, I left the room and I went home. I don’t need to meet her, she got me through uni days, so that’s fine.”
At the height of his career, Mott estimates he was going to 300 gigs and doing 240 photo sessions with bands a year.
Some of those photos are appearing in the Wollongong Art Gallery exhibition of his work called What A Life!, which opened on Friday night.
So many musicians carry a reputation for being difficult, for throwing tantrums or acting like ‘rock stars’, but Mott says he rarely came across that sort of thing.
Not even with Prince who, according to rumour, didn’t want people to look him in the eye or even talk to him.
“I remember when I was hired to shoot Prince,” he says.
“I’d heard all the stories in the press. Couldn’t have been a nicer guy. He was obliging – I didn’t get to know him or anything – but he was great.”
Mott reckons he never saw the tantrums and diva behaviour because he understood musicians and would try and involve them in the photo shoot.
He said it was important to remember that musicians weren’t like models, who were paid to do what a photographer told them to do.
“Musicians, you tell them to do something, they want to know why you want them to do that and they also might go ‘I’m not going to do that, it looks dicky’,” Mott says.
“They have an opinion and they will forcefully say it.
“Often they get a reputation for being difficult but I don’t find them difficult at all.”
Well, with a few exceptions. Mott says he has a list of acts he found were “arseholes” – and it’s a list with just three names on it.
“Two of them I was warned in advance that would happen,” he says.
“So I won’t talk about The Beastie Boys or Van Morrison.
“Beastie Boys were just a pain in the neck. They reminded me of spoiled middle-class brats and they behaved accordingly. I since met their tour manager who reckoned I got it all wrong. I said ‘five times? They’ve been pretty consistent’.
“Van Morrison, his manager warned me that at some time he’s going to be very abusive towards me and not to worry, he does it to everybody. And he wasn’t wrong.”
And the third band on the “arseholes” list? That’s a “quite peculiar” Australian band that he won’t name.
“They were a pain in the neck at the height of their fame and I always put it down to that; they behaved appallingly because they’re going through the fame thing,” he says.
“Then at least 20-odd years later I got hired again by them and they were exactly the same pains in the arse they were 20 years ago. It wasn’t because of fame, it was exactly who they were.”
Mott – who describes himself as a night owl – became a rock photographer by accident. A trained French chef, he was already going to gigs after he knocked off work. At some point he decided to take a camera along.
The first photo he sold was of The Divinyls’ Chrissie Amphlett; he got $20 for it and the manager put his name on the door for the next gig (Mott says he didn’t know what that meant; he figured there was a door somewhere on which they’d written his name as a mark of respect).
These days he’s a photographer on film sets, since the decline of record companies and the live music scene – and a lack of magazines that would buy his photos.
At the Big Day Out in 2001, he took a photo of Dave Grohl with Anthony Kiedis from the Red Hot Chili Peppers that he sold to 40 of the 172 music magazines on his books.
He then took a break for six years and, when he came back he took another photo of the Chilis and could only sell it to two magazines. And of those 172 mags, only 11 still existed.
He’s now 60 and a full-time dad with young twins, so the idea of heading out to gigs several nights a week or going on tour really isn’t feasible any more.
It’s a life he doesn’t miss – most of the time.
“I went to Tex Perkins’ biography night and had a couple of glasses of wine,” Mott says.
“I remember thinking, ‘this is what I used to do, go out to functions and bands’. So I do miss it a little bit but not much.
“I’m quite happy with my lot in how life’s worked out.”
The What a Life! exhibition is on at the Wollongong Art Gallery until January 28, 2018.