The talk was part of a travelling exhibition – Tony Mott - What a Life, which is on at the gallery. The NSW State Library exhibition is touring Australia.  

Mott told the large audience that he moved to Australia in the early 1980s and discovered that the music scene here in Sydney at that time was one of the best in the world

“I was a chef at the time and I would go out and watch bands after my shift,” he said. 

“I started photographing the Divinyls, then an unsigned band who had a Monday night residency at the Piccadilly Hotel in Kings Cross. The band liked one of my photos of Chrissy Amphlett performing and used it for a poster. Then they asked me to take more photos of them and that’s how my career as a rock photographer started.”

“I think Chrissy Amphlett was the greatest female performer that Australia has produced,” Mott said. 

“She was a screaming banshee, she was exciting, unpredictable and I tried to capture some of that in my photos.” 

He said it was a ‘golden era’ for live music in Sydney at the time. 

“On any night in Sydney, I could see ‘up and coming’ bands such as Midnight Oil, Cold Chisel, The Sunnyboys and INXS playing in pubs. Sydney had three street press magazines and my photos started to be sold in them.,” he said. 

He said there are two types of photography for rock music.

“Live shooting, over which you have no control and portraits, over which you have total control,” he said. 

“You need to establish rapport with the artists and surprisingly some musicians are very shy when they are put in front of a camera.

“In live photography, I am always looking for that perfect moment, which may only last a split second - I might take 200 photos - but you only need one great shot out of them.”

Mott described his time travelling with some of the greats of rock n roll including Queen, Kiss, Michael Jackson, ACDC, Blondie and the Rolling Stones and shared some anecdotes about the idiosyncrasies of some of these performers.

“With the Stones, I was meant to be a fly on the wall capturing various moments of their tour, but I was told not to irritate them with a constant clicking of the camera,” Mr Mott said.

He described working with some eccentric characters in capturing that special portrait, such as Bjork and Ozzy Osbourne, whose portraits feature in the exhibition.

The exhibition continues until Saturday – do not miss it!