JAMIE FRY

What’s this cover all about then James?
I though it would be interesting to reinvent one of my favourite still life images: Irving Penn’s Salad ingredients, this time using the recipe for crack cocaine. It’s a fantastic picture. The layout and construction of the original is near perfect, a total balance in composition. Both pictures are to be included in my book ‘ A Licence to Rock and Pop’. Throughout the book I make comparisons between the classic and the contempory to illustrate all that is good and bad in the world of rock and pop music. These pictures are part of a chapter entitled: How to Take Recreational Drugs.

Who made the druggy salad image then?
My mate Sam Buchanan who’s an inspired Scottish stylist put the whole thing together. He generally designs interiors and sets in a very classic/historical style (and he’s no drug user) so he was on uncharted territory with this subject but he got it right straightaway. Glenn Dearing took it, a great interiors photographer, he shot it in seconds flat. I’ve worked with him on a number of shoots, he doesn’t hang around. Between them, they made the image come alive in the space of a few minutes. – Both of them chasing about the studio finding props and lights… It was like ‘Ready Steady Cook’ only with crack cocaine on the menu instead of a three course dinner. – That not a bad idea for a TV show is it …eh?

A book you say? You’re our first author to do a cover for le cool, what’s your book all about?
It’s a self help book on how to be in a band – inspired by some of the best and worst photographs and performances ever. It reads like Alan Carr’s – How To Give Up Smoking – The reader completes the book and fills out the questionnaire at the back which is submitted back to a panel who will or will not grant a licence to be in a band depending on the answers and content of the questionnaire – I came up with I idea when I was watching Coldplay on TV…so they did have a use after all… A friend of mine who read the book described it as ‘a cry for help’ which I think is properly true.

See the section below:

Once mastered, “The noble art of ‘showing off’ (and it is a noble art) can generate hysteria in its purest white hot form. The skilled performer understands this, and as a result, will work the audience down to their knees; he/she can generate an electrical charge that will connect with the spectator’s head, heart, spine, and genitalia. One never meets a successful spectacle who isn’t a natural at showing off – and a dreamer.

Men, women and cameras will love the star forever; Boys will want to be with it (and have sex with it); Girls will want to have sex with it (and own it). The camera aches to have it in its gaze and craves to record its image.

…Meanwhile, up on the higher ground the performer performs. A play to the back of the hall and to the front row, to the lights and the shadows, to the microphone and the wires…and it’s all so natural…without sparing a thought for the audience. After all… it does all of this for no one but itself…a gratuitous and selfish act. After all… do they really deserve to be in the presence of a super-mortal? After all… they are just workers with well-paid bad jobs…

“Imagine for one last time that your are a spectator. Understand and read this book and it will be impossible for you to imagine this again”

I’d like to read these pages, when’s it out?
To be honest I’ve entered a world that I know nothing about; publishing. That’s part of the adventure and another reason I wrote and compiled it. Its been generating a lot of interest in recent months so I think it should be picked up fairly soon. I’m continually persisted by people that want it transcribed into web pages and put it on-line, you know the modern way of doing things, which I guess would be the sensible thing to do, but I have this thing about it being a real tangible pick-up and read ‘book’ so the sensible thing to do is not an option… a bit like everything in the book itself.

Where can we find out more about this book?
You will find excerpts from it on my Twitter and after that in W H Smiths and all good book stores across the UK …