Anyway, the fetish crowd, compared to some of the people that hung out with the skinheads, was all pussycats.

Nowadays everyone has a camera and the Internet means everything is instantly accessible. Unlike some photographers, I don't see this as a problem. If anything interesting happens in the world today, there will be someone around to record it.

To me, the counterculture was always what I grew up with the hippies in the late '60s. But, however you define it, it's really the excesses of youth and it's something that everyone goes through to some extent. Or if they don't, they should do.

When I was starting, I was very much influenced by the straight up, eyes to camera style of August Sander. He is really the only one. Had I known then the work of people like Ken Russell, Vivian Maier, Helen Levitt, and Steven Berkoff, they would undoubtedly have influenced me too.

I went from being an underpaid ad man to quite a successful photographer in a very short time. Success breeds confidence and as soon as I got properly confident, I developed my own style. After that I never looked back.

I started out, in the mid-'70s, taking photographs of rock bands that I liked but not because I really wanted to photograph them. Initially, I was pretending to be a photographer, simply so that I could go up to the front of the crowd and be a bit closer to the bands. But, I found I was gradually developing an interest in the photos I took.

That's one of the wonderful things about the whole process of photography - eye contact can be very revealing.