The snapper who mixed glam with the dark stuff sashayed off this mortal coil last November, but left us with hundreds of images that brought music and its makers to life. A new book collects some of MICK ROCK’s best and most surprising shots of Iggy, Lou, Syd, Bowie and more, and MOJO is proud to preview a stunning selection. Rock on!

YOUR PRETTY FACE IS GOING TO HELL

Iggy Pop live, 1977

Rock: “Iggy was a primal force, the like of which has never been equalled in rock’n’roll. He was a ‘monster’ in the Shakespearean sense, elemental, a force of nature.”

THERE ARE MUSIC PHOTOGRAPHERS WHO pride themselves on their anonymity – their ability to disappear into the background and observe, the proverbial fly on the wall. Mick Rock was the opposite: a massive personality who lent his own energy to the people and events he recorded. On the occasions he would appear in the MOJO office – his attire never complete without an extravagant scarf – he would call ever yone ‘darling’, regardless of their gender, like a star of the stage fresh from an excellent lunch at the Garrick.

Rock discovered photography and drugs simultaneously, in the rooms of a “well-heeled friend” at Cambridge University. In the course of a trip on blotter acid he picked up his host’s Pentax camera. “At the height of the lunacy, I started to point and click,” he recalls in Shot! By Rock, the upcoming compendium of his work from which these pictures are taken. “Especially in the direction of a particularly attractive young lady who was in attendance. Ever y time I clicked, I also took a deep breath: she changed physically from very young to very old, ver y big to very small. She changed colours, from blue to pink. It got me very excited as my brain slithered from the past to the future, from the gutter to a palace. From paranoia to bliss. From a spaceship to a dungeon.”