From a snarling Debbie Harry to a radiant Amy Winehouse, Furmanovsky reveals the layers of her complex subjects. She explains how she conquered her shyness to tour with Pink Floyd aged 19 and why music has a ‘grounding’ quality
The first rock photograph Jill Furmanovsky ever took was of Paul McCartney, two friends and an elbow. It was 1967 – if her memory serves – and she was 13 years old, whiling away her days outside Abbey Road Studios in the hope of befriending a Beatle. Keeping track of the band’s whereabouts in a fanclub magazine she and tens of thousands others received in the post each month, Furmanovsky read that McCartney had recently moved to St John’s Wood and decided to pay him a visit. “I took the picture outside his house,” she says. “The Beatles were very generous about that sort of thing. It would say: ‘Paul’s moved house’ – they’d virtually give you the address.”
In the half century since that spontaneous snapshot, the photographer has spent her career married to the moshpit. From the smouldering sex appeal of a young Billy Idol (with a kitten), to the Slits, the Clash and Siouxsie Sioux on stage, Furmanovsky’s lens has captured musicians with unfiltered intensity. Seemingly impervious characters elevated to godlike status become humbled in her lens, caught in moments of quotidian intimacy: Roger Waters jokes around with a cupcake during a studio session; Bob Marley, “entirely lovely” as Furmanovsky recalls, reclines in a haze of post-performance weed smoke. “He has a very happy expression on his face, but he was having a lot of problems with the police, so I thought it best to avoid actually showing him smoking – I’ve cut off where the spliff would have been.” A retrospective of her work at Manchester’s central library, guest curated by Noel Gallagher – a frequent Furmanovsky subject – and photo historian Gail Buckland, pays homage to her this month.
