Have you ever had one of those dreams where you’re floating down a river, swimming about as if everything is normal and you notice a strange noise that seems to be getting louder? Suddenly the wind picks up and you start flowing faster and faster down stream and before you know it you are being dragged along helplessly in the bubbling current towards the foaming lip of a huge waterfall, just seconds away from being catapulted over the edge? No? Well neither had Colin Lane, so how could he have known that when he was commissioned to do a magazine shoot for an unknown band, he was about to be sucked headlong into a raging rock n roll torrent.

Colin, acknowledged as The Strokes’ ‘official’ photographer, chats to us about being in the right place in the right time, popping his rock n roll cherry and getting money out of his girlfriend’s arse.

Having established himself as a predominantly fashion photographer in London on magazines such as iD and Frank, Colin felt the tug of New York drawing him back to his home shores towards a greater calling.

“When I returned to the US I started doing a bit of music portraiture for Nylon magazine. It’s weird because I’m a music fanatic, I have a whole wall of vinyl in my apartment, about 3,000 vinyl, about 1,000 cds, but you know, I never set out to become a music photographer. Anyway, I started doing these music portraits and then all of a sudden I was just in the right place at the right time. I got a call from The Face in Jan 2001, It was my first commission from them, and they asked could you shoot this band called The Strokes and I didn’t really know who they were, I’d never heard of them, they weren’t signed, they’d just had that three song EP, the Modern Age, that was circulating around London, so really I was more happy to be shooting for the Face, you know, The Strokes, whoever, just give me a job…”

“So anyway, they came over and we just sort of clicked and I gave them some beers and we were just in my apartment so we decided to shoot a few portraits here which turned out to be the ones that appear on the inside of the CD package. I wanted to shoot them on the roof of a skyscraper and there’s a hotel on Central park called the Essex House and for years I’ve been sneaking out-of-towners up there - you get this beautiful view of Central Park on one side and the other way you see mid town Manhattan. So I figured I’d bring the Strokes up there for the shoot and they were up for it. They were being courted by every label in the world but I had no idea that they were like, the hottest band going. So we sneak up on the roof and of course it’s the one time we got busted – by some guy on a cigarette break or something. But they were so cool about it and I said I knew one other building that we can try and they were like ‘yeah’ and were so up for it and I was shocked, because some other bands would be like ‘fuck this we’re going home’”.

“So in the end we did our shoot on this other building and it turned out great, with the sun just going down in the background and Fab turned to me and said, ‘wow, you’re the first guy to shoot more than a roll of film on us’, so I made some prints for them and took them along to their show. That was really their first sort of photo shoot and a month later they signed with RCA and they just sort of pegged me to be the photographer for their press shoot. Then I got the album cover which was amazing because the arse picture I’d shot about 2 years before I met them”.

So how did the arse shot come to be used as the album cover?

“It was basically my ex-girlfriend - it was all about the black gloves. I’d done this fashion shoot for the Observer and the stylist had left all these clothes at my apartment and there were these black leather gloves which we hadn’t used in the shoot and so I said to my girlfriend, ‘come on lets take some photos with these black gloves’ and she was like ‘no, I’m tired I want to go to bed’ and I eventually persuaded her to do a couple of pictures. I put them in my portfolio and the day we did the press shoot I bought my portfolio along because The Strokes had never really seen my work and the arse shot was in there and Julian saw it and was just like, ‘that’s cool, would you mind if we used it for the cover?’ So my girlfriend ended up getting paid about 1,000 dollars for the shot from RCA and she never complained about modelling for me again”.

“I mean that cover and just being associated with The Strokes really changed my career, it really jump-started it”.

So how was touring with the band, it must have been a bit of an eye-opening experience?

“Do you know that movie Almost Famous, where the 15 year old kid was touring with some big rock group as a journalist. It was like that except I was much older”.

Are you trying to suggest that your innocence was stolen by The Strokes?

“Oh no, nothing like that ha ha, but it was my introduction to the rock n roll lifestyle”.

Vomit for breakfast, farmyard animals and violated overdosing groupies then.

The stresses of being cooped-up in a tour bus with the same five people for days on end must be a bit of a stress, do you manage to get along with everyone?

“They’re all great guys. The great thing about them is that they’re all intelligent, you can have a good conversation with any of them. You see Julian walking around reading books by Dostoevsky. They’re all well brought up, good people. I really get along with every one of them. Julian is a bit more aloof than the others, probably the hardest to penetrate, but they’re all really cool”.

So with all the inevitable rock n roll monkeyshines, are there any restrictions on what you are allowed to shoot?

“They have some sort of routine just before they go on when they like to be alone, just the five of them in their dressing room, I don’t know what they do in there, if they just hang out, spend some quiet time, whatever. But otherwise it’s all pretty laid back. I always try to be as invisible as possible and stay out of their faces as much as I can. I almost never use flash with those guys because it would really bug them”.

“When I’m out on tour with them it’s not like the Stones circa 1972 or anything, its not crazy out of control drug use I mean they like to party but they’re not out of control or anything like that”.

“They’re very sophisticated, Julian’s father started Elite Models and his mother was Miss Denmark, Albert’s father was a big song writer in California, he wrote a lot of hits. It was weird, we were in LA once in the Whiskey Bar in the Sunset Marquee Hotel and it has all these Jim Marshall pictures everywhere, really rock n roll and we were there with The Strokes and all of a sudden this older guy sits down with big curly hair, about 50 years old or something and he’s talking to Albert and it turns out to be Leo Sayer. Albert’s father used to write songs for him and it was bizarre, the Strokes hanging out with Leo Sayer - after a while he broke out a harmonica and started playing it was just bizarre”.

Yeah! Rock. N. Roll. Motherfucker!! Real biting heads off chickens stuff that is.

So when you’re photographing mad antics like impromptu harmonica sessions what medium do you find best captures those rock n roll moments?

“I’m always pushing for black and white because it feels so rock n roll to me and I love the photographers like Jim Marshall, the main guy in the 60s and early 70s, he photographed Hendrix and Janis Joplin and like everybody and it’s all black and white and for me that’s a real reference point for rock n roll photography. But you know these days every magazine wants you to shoot in colour, so I’m always trying to push for black and white and whether they want it or not, I always throw a black and white shot in somewhere. But I can’t say I really favour one over the other, some black and white stuff I take a look at and think that would look really good in colour”.

“Most of the stuff I sent you is shot on Mamiya 7 Rangefinder camera but I also use a lot of outdated old cameras, you know, old Polaroid cameras from the ‘60s and that”.

Are there any of the photos that you sent through, in particular, which you feel really capture a rock n roll moment?

“There were the shots from the Radio City show which was the first time I was with the band backstage. It was with The Strokes and The White Stripes and afterwards this crowd gathered below, the dressing rooms were up on the 2nd floor on 51st street and the crowd in the street shut down traffic and everything. And it was so cool, Jack White and The Strokes kept leaning out the window and the crowd would go crazy and at one point Jack White threw his shirt down and people were going wild and then I leaned out of the window and they went wild for me because I was taking pictures of them and it was just really cool”.

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