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Geoff MacCormack

Geoff MacCormack, composer and photographer, was David Jones’s shadow for 60 years. They toured the globe together, got into all kinds of trouble as Jones turned into Bowie.

The two met at Primary School in Bromley in the mid-1950s, quickly becoming friends, thanks to their love for music and their fondness for artists like Mose Allison and Georgie Fame. In the 1970s, MacCormack became a member of Bowie’s band. He played percussion in the 1973 world tour and shut himself in the studio with the artist to record classics like Aladdin Sane and Station to Station.

MacCormack always took his camera everywhere he went. In the pages of David Bowie: Rock ‘n’ Roll with Me, he opens his archive to share more than 150 images of the legendary musician. The project has been in the works for a long time – Bowie collaborated with MacCormack nearly 20 years ago to create the first iteration of the book, which now, in its final form, could be considered the definitive visual biography of the star.

The photographic collection and book explore the legendary musician’s childhood and adolescent. It includes images from his school yearbook and an avalanche of memories of the boy to whom everything seemed new. From there, it moves into the seventies, when Jimi Hendrix reigned the stage and the collective imagination.

Bowie fans will enjoy seeing the Londoner in his day-to-day, at times posing with a Kansai Yamamoto model, at times with a terrified face in the Soviet Union, when MacCormack, Bowie and a few other friends got on the wrong train and ended up in the middle of nowhere.

The artist’s friend now manages Bowie’s immense archive and organises exhibitions about his life and legacy all over the world. But despite sixty years alongside the legend, for MacCormack, it is almost impossible to define his friend. He opts for an extraterrestrial solution: “If a martian landed on Earth with its spaceship and asked me to define David, I would say: ‘Where have you been? My friend was looking for you!’” he says with a smile.

Join us for the ‘Travels with Bowie’ photographic exhibition: more info here.