Rolling with the Rock

'And here's David Bowie, he wrote the foreword to my book, he's a mate of mine, the key to it all really.'

'And this is Iggy, Iggy Pop... Comes across as a primal animal on stage, but actually a very sensitive and intelligent man, heh heh oh? and this is Lou, Lou Reed - fabulous to photograph, does love to be difficult but was always very kind to me. Here's a picture of me taken by him, in fact. And here's Freddie!'

'He had a thing about his teeth, you know, had too many at the back which meant they protruded slightly at the front. He never wanted them to show, so I couldn't photograph him smiling or anything, and here's Johnny Rotten, and then Debbie Harry, and Siouxsie, and Patti Smith, all from the glammy end of punk, and here's an album cover I shot for a group called Leather Nun. As you can see, it shows a bound nun, heh heh heh. Very punky.'

His West London rock'n'roll drawl fills the lounge bar of the Columbia Hotel, laughter crashing like big, polluted waves over the businessmen's mid-afternoon murmurings and the tinkle of spoon upon coffee cup.

Mick Rock (real name), rock photographer (genuine article) to the shiniest and scariest of Seventies rock stars, is showing me proofs from his new retrospective book, Blood & Glitter (subtitle Glam: An Eyewitness Account).

Most of the hotel guests pretend they're not listening to the educated, lived-in, smokily sonorous and just-slightly camp voice that has bossed the likes of Iggy and Lou and Johnny, but really, they can't resist; not if their murmuring, tinkling adulthoods were preceded by an interest in Seventies rock music anyway.

Because if their favoured Seventies singer or band was important - if their style and music influenced the way that the young and inquisitive acted and thought about themselves - then the chances are that Mick Rock not only hung out with and photographed them, but also produced the pictures on which their public images were based.

Bowie's classic Ziggy-era pictures, like the one of him fellating the pick-ups of Mick Ronson's guitar; Freddie Mercury, hands folded across his chest, spookily uplit, teeth tidily tucked in (from a session that would inspire much of the 'Bohemian Rhapsody' video); topless, skinny Iggy holding a mike stand and looking as if it's just told him his girlfriend is sleeping with the drummer; Lou Reed on the covers of Transformer and Coney Island Baby.

Such shots have long sat upon proud pages in the rock'n'roll family photo album, but in 2001 you would also find photocopies of them on the mood boards of many young London fashion designers.

In the past two years the sort of glammy new-wave looks created and captured by Rock have been key inspirations for the newer-wave of young London fashion designers such as Anthony Symonds, Luella Bartley and Bottega Veneta's Giles Deacon, and fashion-slaves touting angular fringes and slim ties around W11 and SoSho.

It is also hard to believe that international designers who have been working with similar looks, like Dolce & Gabbana and Balenciaga, have not been studying old Rock sessions like the 1979 one that produced the sleeve for Blondie's 'Sunday Girl'.

On 'the north side of 50' now, Rock was born on Holland Road, West London (civil-servant dad, housewife mum) and studied modern languages at Cambridge. He wasn't all that interested in rock music or photography; what he liked were 'mad French poets', and he saw a lot of mad French poetry in the musicians he met when he started taking pictures at early David Bowie gigs in March 1972.