[What A Life! Rock photography by Tony Mott. A free exhibition until 7 February 2016] [Tony Mott. Metcalfe Theatre, State Library of NSW. 29th October 2015] [Tony Mott, a lean, casually-dressed, bespectacled 60-year-old man, wearing a flat cap stands at a lectern] [TONY MOTT] Good evening. Thanks, everybody, for coming, and thanks to the State Library and Louise and her team for putting on the exhibition, which I went to for the first time a couple of days before it opened and was quite gobsmacked and strangely overwhelmed, having to look at my own images so large. So, a big thankyou to the State Library. So, I'll start at the very beginning. [A colour photograph of a large crowd of people] [TONY MOTT] I'm actually a French chef by trade, and back in the early '80s, I used to work at Kings Cross in the Gazebo Hotel and the Opera House. [Tony, standing behind the lectern, speaks into a mic] [TONY MOTT] I used to finish at about 11 o'clock at night, or 10 o'clock at night, and at minimum, three or four nights a week I'd go out and watch bands, and Sydney had such a vibrant, fantastic live music scene that every suburb would have many venues. And Robert Smith of The Cure told me a couple of years ago that The Cure came here in 1981 and toured Sydney for three months and never played the same suburb twice, which is an indication of what a great live music scene it was. Anyway, in the middle of all that, I went down to the Piccadilly Hotel in Kings Cross at some point and the Divinyls had just started a residency there. [A black-and-white photo of Chrissy Amphlett singing into a mic, with her arm around guitarist Mark McEntee] [Tony stands at the lectern] [TONY MOTT] They were an unknown band, and... through my drinking one night... ..I looked at the stage and thought, 'Good God, that must be really difficult to capture on a camera.' And 'cause they played every Monday night, I thought, 'Well, I'll practise.' And I brought my camera along, and this is in the days before mosh pits and security, and no-one cared that I was there with a camera. And luckily for me - in many ways I was lucky, and those pieces of luck were, one, no-one was looking at the photographs apart from me, 'cause I was really, really crap. The photos were just non-event at all, but slowly, by trial and error, I reached a degree of competency, and what I didn't know at the time was I was photographing not the best female performer in Australia - by far the greatest female performer I've ever witnessed in the world. I've toured with Madonna. I've seen Rihanna, Blondie, Pretenders - many female performers. No-one touched Chrissy Amphlett. She was phenomenal. [Two black-and-white photographs of Chrissy Amphlett performing on stage] [TONY MOTT] So, I got really, really lucky that my break was photographing the Divinyls and Chrissy Amphlett. [Hand on hip, Tony stands at the lectern] [TONY MOTT] After about three or four months, the manager of the Divinyls approached me and said, 'I'd like to look at the photographs,' which was sort of, like, a huge thrill, but at the same time, 'Why do you want to look at my photographs?' And he bought one and he used it on a poster, and that was really beginning of a career as a rock'n'roll photographer. [Black-and-white photograph of Chrissy Amphlett performing with her hair flying] [TONY MOTT] As I said, she couldn't have been better to practice on. I mean, she was wild - a banshee, unpredictable, and just... yeah, just a dream to photograph. [A black-and-white photo of Chrissy Amphlett holding a mic stand with a light shining behind her] [TONY MOTT] Eventually, as I got to know them, they invited me onto film sets, video clips, and this is taken on Back To The Wall video clip. [A black-and-white photo of Chrissy Amphlett wearing a white slip and standing against a wall with a beam of light on it] [TONY MOTT] And I dressed her... [Tony at the lectern] [TONY MOTT] ..and when I say I dressed her, I suggested the white slip, and she wanted a black slip, and we argued, and even... Only a couple of years ago, or four years ago, when she was staying at my place, she still actually was not happy about the white slip. [The Back To The Wall photograph of Chrissy Amphlett] [TONY MOTT] It ended up on the cover of many magazines and I still like it, but, yeah, she wasn't happy with it. [Tony stands at the lectern] [TONY MOTT] I'll move on to... I'm trying to find... Have I gone past it? I think I may have gone past it. The first photo is that one. That's the photo... [A black-and-white photo of Chrissy Amphlett standing behind a mic stand with her mouth open wide and hair flying] [TONY MOTT] That's taken at the Piccadilly, in Kings Cross, and that was the first photo that I ever sold, and yeah, I couldn't have been prouder. [Tony at the lectern] [TONY MOTT] They paid me $20, and to show how green I was, the manager said, 'It's 20 bucks and we'll put your name on the door.' And I went, 'Great!' [Laughter] And about two weeks later, he noticed me paying to get in and he went, 'You know your name's on the door?' And I went, 'Yeah, I know.' But I thought there was some mythical door somewhere where they write your name 'cause you helped the band, and continued to pay. So, you can see I was very, very green. So, slowly but surely, as a consequence of that, I liked the idea of being a rock'n'roll photographer. I wasn't trying to make money out of it. I just loved doing it. It was a passion. [A black-and-white photo of a man holding a light tube over his head] [Tony stands at the lectern] [TONY MOTT] This shot is quite a well-known shot, and the reason that I personally love it is in the days of punk, people pogoed, and I had about 20 punks pogoing on my head when I took this photo. And there was no mosh pit, so you were in the audience with all the thousand people moshing. So, it was a very, very difficult photo, plus it's Johnny Rotten. So, that's why it's one of my favourite all-time photos. The thing about photos is, particularly live photos, it really is a moment. It's just 125th of a second. [A black-and-white photo of a bald-headed singer holding a mic and bending towards the reaching hands of his audience] [TONY MOTT] As much as I'm proud of this photo, for every one you get as good as that, you miss 50, in the days of film, and 125th of a second before this was taken, I would have not got it, but when I got it, it was 'cause the lights were right, I was in the right place, Peter Garrett's in the right place, and all those hands are female hands, apart from the one male hand reaching out for him, and it's just that moment, and it... [Tony stands at the lectern] [TONY MOTT] Particularly when students used to ask me about not getting many photos back, it was really... I think they were going through some sort of image that I was... ..everything I took was brilliant, and the reality was that it wasn't. For every one you got that was brilliant, you had plenty of failures. So, it was always great to encourage. It was always great to get clichéd shots. [A black-and-white image of an open-mouthed, long-haired man singing into a mic stand] [TONY MOTT] Jimmy Barnes with a big Jimmy scream. Press used to love it, and this... [A black-and-white picture of Jimmy Barnes standing under a beam of light with arms outstretched and holding a glass bottle] [TONY MOTT] Also your archives are really... they never go away. [Tony at the lectern] [TONY MOTT] This shot never got used when it was actually taken, 'cause there's no eye contact. Magazines always like eye contact with the artist, but years and years later, when Jimmy decided to stop drinking, all of a sudden the magazines wanted shots with the drinking, so the vodka bottle just became part and parcel of it, and this got sold many times years after it was actually taken just purely because of the bottle. [A colour photograph of a lean, blonde-haired man wearing a red suit] [TONY MOTT] David Bowie was just fantastic to photograph live. [Tony speaks into a small microphone] [TONY MOTT] A true gentleman off the stage and just very easy to photograph, and I did his Glass Spider Live DVD cover, of which this is the photo from it. [A colour photo of a curly-haired Ian Hunter singing with his guitar] [TONY MOTT] The reason I've dropped this in is this a band called Mott the Hoople, who most of you have probably never heard of, but Mott the Hoople are my all-time favourite band.