Many years ago, when a bunch of us would often travel up to London to see bands like The Scientists, Gun Club and the Fuzztones, I remember seeing a figure who regularly seemed to be at many of the same gigs. I didn’t get to meet him at the time and guessed that perhaps he was a journalist but, despite our obviously similar musical tastes, I never did find out who he was.
  Fast forward to 2012 and I’m at a Brian James & Rat Scabies gig in Ladbroke Grove and Tom Phobic introduces me to David Arnoff and his wife Penny, finally resolving the question of his identity. It seems that, if you remain an enthusiastic music fan long enough, you’ll eventually meet everyone else who shares the same interests !
  Anyway, although familiar with the name and already aware of his photography, it wasn’t until the recent publication of the book ‘Shot In The Dark’, a collection of his photos centring around 1976-1985, that the whole range and quality of his work became apparent. Many of the images will be instantly familiar to fans, particularly those of The Cramps, Exene & Lydia Lunch, Blondie and The Damned, but elsewhere, there are equally great pictures of bands ranging from Patti Smith, X, Ramones and The Clash, through to Devo and the Only Ones. As a fan, David had a knack of catching the bands at seminal moments, documenting the essence of what made them great. Whether portrait shots or live concert images, he clearly has a talent for capturing the character of the subjects rather than just producing glossy promotional material, and it is this that really sets his work above the mainstream. When you see his pictures, you really want to know the whole story behind it.
  Having met with David and Penny again at his recent ‘Book Lurch’ event in Islington, we made tentative plans to arrange an interview. As it turned out, David lives quite close to our mutual friend Gaye, so we decided to meet at her place and do the interview in a more social atmosphere. With beers and snacks on hand, this was going to be fun !
 
  Firstly, I wanted to ask about when you moved from Cleveland to Los Angeles. You mention this in the forward, but don’t say how old you were at the time…

  ‘I was ten years old… but it was against my will ! It was quite a shock to me, like moving to the desert.’

  So you wouldn’t have had a chance to see any live music in the Cleveland area before you moved…

  ‘No, only on TV… luckily, we used to listen to the radio a lot so I knew about things like the Coasters and Sam Cooke pretty early on. My Mum used to listen to the radio a lot in her car. So that was where the seeds were sown for everything else.’

  With the drastic differences between Cleveland and Los Angeles, did you feel pretty isolated when you moved there ?

  ‘I just felt awful. It was too hot… too hot to even play outside ! I used to faint or get sunstroke. We lived in an apartment in Beverly Hills very briefly, and then we moved out to the Valley, which is even hotter than the rest of LA.’

   As you were feeling out of place, do you think it was inevitable that you drifted towards something like music ?

  ‘Well, yeah, there was a lot of good music out there and I did get to see some really great stuff during the Sixties. But at the same time, there was this kind of artificial cheerfulness that I couldn’t relate to. It wasn’t really until later on that bands started to really reflect that situation. Bands like X… John Doe would be saying, well, yeah, I live in LA but I don’t go to the beach every day and it’s actually thirty miles away from where I live ! That was the first time bands were really singing about people who lived like that’

PATTI SMITH GROUP, THE ROXY, 1976.

 
Was there anything in particular that drew you towards the more underground music ?

  ‘It was pretty gradual. There was a period in the Sixties when it had been really good, bands like The Doors and all that. But then it went kind of crummy in the late Sixties and early Seventies, when all there was were The Who and Jethro Tull … they were the best live bands in the world at that point ! But after a couple more years, I started to discover bands like the Patti Smith Group, The Damned and The Ramones, which seemed to happen pretty quickly.’

  Did you ever consider playing music yourself ?

  ‘I had a go. I played bass, adequately, and I was in bands while I was in High School. We were almost like a Byrds covers band. That was our main thing but we also did some Blues stuff after that. We’d play songs by the Animals and things like ‘My Generation’ and ‘Gloria’, songs that everyone was playing in the late Sixties.’

  When did you first start to become interested in photography ?

  ‘I had my Dad’s old camera and I just used to take pictures of girlfriends or things that I thought looked good. The first time I took pictures at a gig was of Mott The Hoople. They were from pretty far away but they were okay. I also took some pictures of Laura Nyro at the Troubador that were okay… but I was still really young at that time and I wouldn’t have thought to try to talk to those people or meet them or anything. I didn’t really try to do anything seriously until the Patti Smith gig in 1976…’

  The pictures of Patti Smith are the earliest images in your book. What was it about that gig which made it different to your approach in taking photographs ?

  ‘Well, it was a smaller venue and it just seemed like I would be able to capture it on film. I just wanted to get what she was doing right then. It wasn’t light shows or anything, it was a lot more down to earth and something that I could do with my limited technical abilities.’

  Had you had any formal training at all ?

  ‘No… I had a photography class when I was graduating High School, which was okay. For my final project I put a little book together, in photo-copy form, just because I thought it looked good. But my teacher didn’t believe that I’d taken those photos and wanted to see my negatives to prove it. I said, I don’t care if you believe it because I’m graduating in a week, so fuck you, and I left the class at that… It wasn’t really much in the way of training. The only thing I really learned was how to print my own pictures.’

  The Patti Smith gig seems to have been a real turning point for you, giving you the motivation to be more serious about your photography…

  ‘Oh, yeah… I think it was when I saw my name in print for the first time. That seemed to make it more valid somehow. I mean, it was only in ‘Back Door Man’, which wasn’t much more than a fanzine, like, a garage version of Cream magazine or something. But they wanted to have people like David Johanson or Iggy on the front cover, really early on. They were really opinionated about stuff… I mean, I remember when they reviewed the first Heartbreakers album and they gave it a really bad review… something like, ‘Johnny Thunders left the Dolls to do this ?’ They really ran it down ! But that’s what I liked about it – they were really opinionated and earnest. Basically, it was just Phast Pheddie, Don Waller and Greg Turner. Funnily, they once used one of my pictures of Mink DeVille as a sorta fold-out centrefold ! But I can’t think of where they even sold the magazine. Probably Rhino Records and a couple of places like that , but it was a fanzine, really, a real labour of love, even though it wasn’t called that back then. They were pretty focused on what they covered, from Blue Oyster Cult through to Patti Smith.’

  Particularly in the States, Patti Smith was really the crossover point between what had been happening in the early Seventies and the Punk movement which was just about to happen…

  ‘Oh yeah. Her and Dr Feelgood and The Damned, really. And with them came a real accessibility to the bands which made it a lot easier for me. It was easy to go backstage and just talk to people. It was no big deal anymore. In fact, the only band I remember from that period who weren’t like that were The Police. I went to see them the first time they came over, when they’d only just released ‘Roxanne’ as a single and the first album was out. They were just three businessmen who happened to be good musicians… and who also hated each other !’

CRAIG LEE (THE BAGS) at the masque, 1977.

There are a couple of pictures in the book of The Masque club, and pictures of a few bands who played there, but it isn’t something you cover very much in the book, despite its now legendary status…

  ‘You know, I didn’t even go to gigs down there. I worked in a record store that was right above it, so I remember when Brendan Mullen first moved in down there and he was literally up to his knees in water, just trying to clean it out.  I took pictures above it and inside it when it was closed, but I don’t think I actually went to any gigs there because it was more of the kind of bands that would eventually be called ‘hardcore’, I suppose. Or bands like Black Randy that I thought were pretty tuneless… The only real exception for me was X. But bands like the Gun Club or The Cramps never played there. The LA Punk thing was also very cliquey… almost everyone lived in the same apartment building, called the Canterbury. So it was kind of tight and a bit unimaginative. There were some really good people involved, but they could also be a bit closed-minded. It was probably also a bit too close to where I worked. The record store was on Hollywood Boulevard so it stayed open really late and when I finished there in the evening, I really didn’t want to go downstairs to see a gig !’

  Although some of the people or bands that you took pictures of have since become well-known or successful, at the time you were taking those photos, most of them were still to make any impact. So I guess you were taking the pictures more because it was something you were into, rather than just trying to build a career…

  ‘It was something I wanted to do and I never thought I was going to make any money out of it. That wasn’t even an option, so it was just something I enjoyed doing when I wasn’t working. I mean, even if I did get paid for something, it was stupid money. I had one of my pictures of Elvis Costello on the cover of New York Rocker and I thought, this is big time, but I only got paid ten dollars ! I mean, it was nothing ! I think they paid five dollars if a picture was used inside the magazine and ten dollars if it was used on the cover, so there was no money to be had there.’

  But that also allowed you to concentrate on bands that you particularly liked rather than just doing assignments to get paid…

  ‘Oh yeah… except for The Misfits… I wasn’t a particular fan but I did enjoy taking pictures of them because of the way they looked. I think it was Chris D from the Flesheaters who suggested I should go to see them, as he was a huge fan. And it was an amazing gig, it was really, really good, but they just weren’t the kind of band I would listen to when I went home. I mean, if I hear their old stuff now, it reminds me of the first Damned album and they certainly had some good songs… Similarly, there are also pictures in the book of 45 Grave… they used to be fun but they weren’t really a band I’d listen to or hang on to their records. But I liked them as people and they were very photogenic, so that was good fun.’

  Did you have a particular preference for black and white photography ?

  ‘Yes, and I still do. I don’t know why, I guess things look like that to me ! It just kind of reins it in a bit more, instead of having something distracting just because of the colours … like if someone’s wearing stripey red socks, for example.’ (… he says, staring pointedly at Gaye’s  footwear…) ‘Plus, I can print black and white myself but I can’t print colour. And on a practical level, most of the music magazines only wanted black and white images so I would have had a lot more difficulty trying to get any colour pictures published. All of the English weekly music magazines were in black and white… there was no colour in England ! But I think black and white can sometimes capture more character. When I first saw the cover to the Ramones ‘Leave Home’, it seemed pretty weird to me after the first album cover. It was all bright blue and they’d used colour film… it seemed a bit hi-tech and modern to me ! It kinda kills the atmosphere…’

david arnoff

  Do you have a preference for taking live shots of bands, or offstage pictures ?

  ‘I’ve always preferred offstage pictures to live ones, just because you have a bit more control over it. Plus, when you’re taking pictures of a band playing live, you’re getting something that’s already there, so you’re not really doing all that much. I’ll end up at the end of a show with pretty-much the same picture forty times, you know, someone standing there singing… I’ll like a song, so I’ll take more pictures of basically the same image of somebody screaming into a microphone.’

  But you do seem to have a talent for capturing a very natural image, whether it’s on or offstage…

  ‘Well, I try to. I just want to make people look how they are, rather than having it staged. People should look comfortable and feel as if they’re just being themselves. I mean, someone recently took a picture of me for something and after a few shots he asked, ‘Don’t you like to pose ?’ So I told him, No, I can’t stand it ! He asked me to do something with my hands, put them up to my face or something, but I just didn’t know what he meant. Doing what exactly ? I mean, you can ask people to do something when they don’t look good, but only something like, could they turn your head a bit more to the left ? Nothing too much otherwise people can become uncomfortable. Most of the people in bands want to be photographed so they’ll be happy to take your suggestions as long as they aren’t too drastic. Actually, I usually find with bands, you’ll always have one person who’s doing something stupid ! It’ll be the drummer at the back pulling a face and I’ll have to say, come on, stop smiling like that and look at the camera. But that’s all I’ll say.’

  When some of the new British bands started coming over to the States, you were obviously interested in them, but generally, do you think there was any kind of rivalry between the American and British bands ?

  ‘No, everybody in the States has always liked British bands, ever since the Beatles really. If anything, there was some rivalry between LA and New York and I think that was probably more on the part of people in LA… I don’t think they were any less confident or anything, but for some reason they felt threatened by bands from New York and felt that they had to prove themselves a bit more. There was even rivalry between LA and San Francisco… people in LA, probably myself included I’m afraid, tended to look down their noses at San Francisco. It just seemed like a town masquerading as a city, compared to LA. And I wasn’t really too impressed with their bands… The Avengers, maybe, or Crime, but they didn’t really have too many bands that impressed me.’

DAVE VANIAN, THE DAMNED, at the starwood 1977.

  The first of the British punk bands to tour in the States were The Damned, who soon became one of your favourites. Do you think they had a particular impact on the LA Punk scene ?

  ‘Oh God, yeah ! They really impressed everybody that saw them at The Starwood. I mean, The Ramones had already played in LA, but they were the opening band for the Flamin’ Groovies, so seeing them was almost an accident and not everyone was there to see them. But The Damned was something that we all knew about in advance and were looking forward to. Of course, originally they were going to be supporting Television at The Whiskey but Tom Verlaine wouldn’t let them open up, just because he didn’t want a British punk band on the bill. It would have been a pretty ridiculous bill, really, so he was kind of right. It wouldn’t have made any sense because they were such different bands. Although I do remember some other really strange line-ups… I once saw Sparks open for Little Feat ! Things could be fairly random at times, but I think The Damned opening for Television just didn’t go together. But The Damned still came to the show to watch Television and I remember seeing them there… they were standing just behind me and staring-daggers at Tom Verlaine, like, Fuck You ! I don’t think they were trying to support him. And then, later on, they recorded that song ‘Idiot Box’ about Television, to get their own back…’

  When you consider LA bands like The Weirdos or The Dickies, their music and even style certainly had similarities with The Damned… do you think that was just something they were developing anyway, or were they influenced by The Damned ?

  ‘Oh, I’m sure they copped it from them, but at the same time, I think it went from Richard Hell to the Pistols and then back to LA, as far as how to dress... if you look at The Weirdos back then, their style was taken from New York and England, but then being silly with it, in the same way that Captain Sensible was doing it with things like wearing the most stupid-looking plastic sunglasses.’

  It’s strange that so many people seemed to miss the point to it, the almost absurdist approach, and instead tried to dismiss such bands as being comic-like. Even in retrospect, The Damned still get dismissed by many writers as not being serious enough…

  ‘But they were very serious about their music… Some people just had the same kind of attitude about them as Bob Harris had when he tried to dismiss the Dolls as ‘mock rock’…. What was it he didn’t like ? Their boots ? He certainly wasn’t listening to how they sounded. I hated the way he said that, as if he just wanted to get someone else out there. What a thing to say about a band  who are guests on your show. In the same way, The Damned were really serious about their music. Certainly as serious as The Clash, it’s just that they weren’t po-faced with it. They weren’t necessarily trying to look ‘cool’, except for Brian perhaps…’

  X are one of the other bands that you particularly enjoyed at the time and are represented accordingly in the book. Although they’re still a popular band in the States to this day, it’s quite bizarre that they never really caught on in the UK…

  ‘Well, I can actually understand it because they were such an ‘LA’ band. I remember even being surprised to hear they were going up to play in San Francisco or New York. They were a very American band, but the stuff they were talking about just seemed to be particularly centred on LA. Also, I think a lot of people over here looked at Exene and heard the way she sang and just thought, Well, we’ve already had Siouxsie so we don’t need this… But that was never the main thing of the band because it was really more John’s band. They were talking about a lot more personal stuff but people weren’t really listening to what they were singing about. It’s just one of those things… some bands come over here and just get ignored, while others, who really don’t deserve it, come over to London and become huge. But often, when they go back to the States, they’re still playing in much smaller places. It’s just the way it goes sometimes… I think The Gun Club were much more popular over here and in the rest of Europe than they were in LA. Jeffrey Lee Pierce was a pretty disliked person in LA, but they came to England and people really loved them. The strange thing about them was how consistently great they were, especially when you consider how many different sets of personalities they went through. But their music was always great, all the way through… the live shows could go one way or the other, either really great or really terrible. But they were never boring !’

exene & Lydia, Hollywood, 1982.

  The pictures you have of Exene and Lydia Lunch together, they almost look like twins or mirror images…

  ‘They were trying to look alike in those photos, as they were just about to publish the book ‘Adulterers Anonymous’ together. I can’t remember who it was, but one of them had a real nose-ring in the photos and the other had a fake one… I forget which is which, but they were trying to mirror each other and really playing it up for the pictures. But that was really all their idea… I didn’t tell them to both wear ripped, black, lacy bras… that was just a happy coincidence !’

  I particularly like the picture you have of The Birthday Party in their hotel room, because it comes across as a whole band, rather than ‘Nick Cave’s band’, as is often portrayed by the music press in retrospect…

  ‘Well, the singer is always going to be the focal point for most people in an audience, but in their case it certainly was the whole band and not just his thing. I’m sure there were Rowland Howard fans who thought he was the main guy, but in some ways the music was driven by the bass guitar… the music could get really chaotic and Tracy Pew would be the most consistent thing. I mean, they used ‘non-drummers’, like Mick Harvey, as their drummers, so it could really be a racket. But I remember going to one of their gigs and I took my girlfriend along, who was quite sort of or prissy. We ended up standing right in front of Tracy and he did this sorta slow, hip-grinding thing, and she started pleading with me, ‘Oh, this is so gross, I don’t want to stand here any more !’  He always had a really weird image… he had the whole cowboy thing and a little moustache, like something from the ‘YMCA’ video, and then he’d be doing this bump’n’grind thing as he played ! I don’t know what the Hell he thought his image was ! There was another time when I went to see a friend who was working in a studio. He told me that the last band in the studio were the Birthday Party, and the mixing desk was now fucked-up because the bass player kept putting his feet on the desk and he was wearing spurs… I mean, he was wearing spurs to a recording studio !’

  You got involved with The Cramps pretty early on as well, and ended up taking the photo’s for the cover of ‘Songs The Lord Taught Us’. How did that come about ?

  ‘It was just the same as it was with all the bands. I went to see them play, enjoyed the set, went backstage to talk to them afterwards and asked if I could do some pictures with them offstage. So we met up again a few days later to do that... This was before they’d even moved to LA, because they were staying at a hotel. So I got to know them pretty well and they came over for spaghetti after we took the pictures. It was a really brief time while there was all four of them, but it was right when they were doing their first album, so they asked me to do the pictures for the sleeve. I was really scared about doing it… not of them, but about the responsibility. I had to come up with pictures for an album cover and I didn’t have any ideas, plus, some of them would have to be in colour… I didn’t even have any colour film at the time ! Then somebody from the record company arranged another session around the same time and I got this horrible, sinking feeling… We went over to IRS Records and the band had already narrowed it down to what they wanted, but then a guy from IRS came in and said, Hey, we’ve also got these… this is more what you’re looking for, right ? I looked at these pictures and they were really slick… they reminded me of the covers of the early Pretenders albums. Mine were just these screwed-up, amateur pictures in comparison, but their pictures were so clear and sharp. But luckily the band didn’t like those ones and stayed with mine instead.’

THE BIRTHDAY PARTY, Hollywood, 1982.

 
The thing is, for a band like The Cramps, being too slick just wouldn’t have worked for them…
  ‘Well, they went with something really rough. They went for an image that was just a quarter of a frame in which, in my opinion, Lux had a kinda silly look on his face, with his eyes bugging out. I’d actually put that picture aside and I wasn’t even going to show it to them, but when I went through all the shots with Lux and Ivy, the ones that I thought looked okay, Lux spotted the other pictures and asked what they were. I said, ‘No, you don’t want to see those, they’re horrible.’ But they went through them anyway and decided to pick that one.’

  You make a comment in the book that although you took a lot of pictures of The Cramps, it was only for a short period of time… Was there a reason for that ?

  ‘Well, I saw them right after Bryan left the band, when Julien was playing with them, and that was okay but not as good as it had been. When they got Kid Congo they were really good again, until they lost him. Then they had Fur and I just didn’t like her, although they were much better when they got Candi… But having said that, as long as Nick was there with Lux and Ivy, they were always great. I never went off them, but I just didn’t carry on taking pictures of them. Actually, Lux ended up taking a lot of their photos… he was a really good photographer and even used 3D cameras and things like that. We always stayed friendly and I’d get to see them every few years over here. Ivy would always check to see if my nails were still long ! Ivy could come across as quite scary sometimes, like, the first time we agreed to meet up to do photos… I went to the hotel and she answered the door, but she was really quiet and sullen. She was probably just a bit nervous herself, but I was thinking, oh shit, what’s going on ? But then Bryan turned up and I thought, thank God, somebody normal…. comparatively !’

  You ended up moving to London in 1984… was that something you suddenly decided to do ?

  ‘It wasn’t sudden. It was something I would’ve been happy to do in 1972, when I first came over here as a kid. But I met my wife, Penny, when I came over here in 1984 and when we started thinking about where we wanted to live, there really wasn’t any question… We actually met while we were both queueing up for a gig in Camden. I think it was either The Moodists or Flesh For Lulu that headlined, but it was also the first time I saw The Scientists. It was actually four bands that I’d never heard of, but they were all great ! It was the first gig I’d seen after I arrived in London, so I was thinking, what a great country this is ! I’d never even heard of The Scientists before then… and Turkey Bone were hilarious, they had that kinda Damned thing of just stumbling around on stage.’

  It’s quite strange, when you think about it, that you came all the way from Los Angeles to London and the first band you saw when you got here were The Scientists, who’d come to London from Australia…

  ‘I was staying at Stiv Bators’ house when I first got to London, and he told me about this gig that was happening. I think he had some connection with Flesh For Lulu, so he managed to get my name on the door, which was great. And I also met Penny at that same gig… it was really lucky ! I remember, I could actually hear The Scientists while I was still outside, waiting to go in, and I was thinking, this sounds really good… I think The Scientists were ahead of their time, really. They would have been grunge pioneers had they been around a few years later, but they were playing at a time when most people were just not into music with loud guitars. Just the fact that they had long hair and played loud guitars pretty much meant that no-one would write about them, except for ‘Sounds’. It was just down to the timing… a couple of years later, all the people that ignored The Scientists loved Nirvana. But they had some really catchy tunes and could easily have been popular…’

the scientists, Ladbroke grove, 1984.

 
Obviously, you already knew Stiv when you first moved to London. Were any of your other old friends over here at the time ?

  ‘The only people I knew to hang out with or stay with were Vanian and Stiv… Jeffrey Lee moved over here a bit later and I ran into him one day on the street in Shepherds Bush. But that was a bit later , when he was living with Romi.’

  You’ve lived in London ever since, so you must have felt at home…

  ‘Oh yeah, definitely… even though my first home was in Heston ! Penny would be asking me, Do you really think this is better than where you were ? But it was… Heston was better than Hollywood ! I probably did exactly the opposite to what people in London would have done, but I think people only want to move to Hollywood if they’ve never been there. I remember Dave Treganna, from Lords of the New Church, decided to move there at one point, but I knew he’d come to his senses quickly. And he did, he was only there for maybe six months. Lemmy lived there for a long time, although I guess he was away from there a lot. Most people think it’s a good idea, but after you live there for a while, you realise that maybe it isn’t… Anyone can go there and have a good time for a while, but unless you’ve grown up there, I think it’s a pretty weird place.’

  Many of the bands included in the book are ones which, although they made great music, never really achieved the success or critical acclaim that they deserved. In a way, was this your attempt to put the record straight ?

  ‘Well, yeah, that’s probably true about the whole book. I don’t know anyone in there that really got critical acclaim apart from Elvis Costello and Blondie, or Patti Smith and Nick Cave eventually… But when I took the pictures, most people didn’t want to know. There’s nobody in there that I thought was going to be famous. It was just stuff that inspired me to take pictures. The Mumps are in there and the reason I went to see them was that Lance Loud was the son in an old TV show called ‘An American Family’, which was like an early reality show… they would just film this family, like a fly-on-the-wall thing. My girlfriend had been a fan of that so she wanted to see The Mumps. We went to the gig and it was really good and I took some more photos of them afterwards, backstage. When that was done, we went back into the club and the main band came onstage, which was Van Halen. I don’t think I even had to hear them play a note before I realised that they were not going to be my cup of tea, so I just left. I could have stayed and taken pictures of them just for the sake of it and I suppose they would now be worth some money, but I saw what they looked like and knew straight away that I just wasn’t interested. A few years after that, a friend  offered to set up a photo session with Def Leppard and I just said, please don’t do that because I don’t like them. If you’re going to take pictures of bands you don’t like, you might as well take pictures of anything… If you just want to make money, take photos at weddings and you’ll probably get paid more for it. But I can’t see how you could look at something and be inspired to try and take a good picture of it if you don’t actually like it in the first place.’

gang of four, Hollywood, 1980.

 
When you consider the archive of photos you have, how come it’s taken so long for you to put a book together ?

  ‘Mainly because publishers didn’t want to put out a book of photo’s that weren’t related to a specific theme. People often said that if I had 300 pictures of The Cramps they’d be interested in doing a Cramps book, just based around one band, but I couldn’t do that. Then one day, out of the blue, Long Gone John of Sympathy Records asked me, When are we going to do a book ? We decided to do it there and then, so I started putting it all together with the designer, Mark Cox, over about a year and a half. It seemed like a long time, but we had to put it together in a way that made sense. It’s not about particular bands or a particular scene, and it’s not even chronological… it’s not as if the first part is about LA and the second part about England. But I hope when you read the book it flows both musically and visually. That’s the idea behind it… The bands we included aren’t necessarily the ones that become well-known, but they’re ones that I think deserve to be included and they’re the pictures that I particularly like. The Godfathers photo is one of my favourite pictures, for example, even though a lot of people won’t know who they are. But if they listen to them, which anyone can do online really easily now, they can find out what they missed. And when you see the picture of the Gang of Four, they look like four really normal guys, which is in such contrast to the music they were making. It looks so stark… although, at the time, there were actually screams of agony coming from the room next door because their road manager had an abscess and he was screaming blue murder, so it wasn’t a very relaxed atmosphere. But they were such normal looking guys… if they were walking down the street, you were never going to think, Hey, a rock’n’roll band ! It’s the total opposite of the Misfits photo, which was three guys standing in a kitchen, but they could only ever be a rock’n’roll band.’

  Why did you choose the title ‘Shot In The Dark’ for the book ?

  ‘Well, first it was going to be ‘Shots In The Dark’, but then we decided on ‘Shot In The Dark’. I didn’t want people to think of the Peter Sellers’ film, which is ‘A Shot in The Dark’. I just like it as it is an expression and both literally and figuratively, it describes the pictures. A lot of them were literally taken in the dark and they were also taken ‘in the dark’ as I didn’t necessarily know what I was doing. I did know that the title had been used for films, novels and songs before this, but none of them were about cameras, so I thought I could get away with it. There are some pictures that were obviously taken in broad daylight, like Johansen at the beach, but even with them, I still wasn’t sure at the time what I was doing. I was just kind of hoping that things worked out.’

  Finally, I wanted to mention the quote from Nick Cave that’s included on the rear of the book – ‘He’s an arsehole, but he’s a good photographer.’ It’s an odd one to use for your own book !

  ‘I just thought that was funny, because it was something he said behind my back, to get my attention. He was talking to somebody else. I just thought it was funny and thought it would be great to have it on the back of the book. But I don’t think he actually thinks that of me ! I think he’s a really nice guy with a good sense of humour… Top man ! I’ve got nothing bad to say about him… except for the moustache. What was he thinking ?’
 
   www.davidarnoff.com
 
 The book is also available in the UK via Rough Trade ;
                   
      http://www.roughtrade.com/albums/103388  

And from Amazon ;

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0578167476

All images copyright David Arnoff.  Anyone sleazy enough to "share" will be dealt with severely.