A photocopier is a camera in its own right. I was fortunate to grow up in the time and culture that I did. I was allowed to develop an awareness that the art that really moves me is actually based on an original image.

Boy George of course, was my idol as a teenager. I haven't photographed him, even though I know him now. He wants the pictures to be retouched, and I don't want that.

I heard this wonderful quote - "Only the brave show what they love." It's so-embarrassing to approach somebody and say you want to look at them. But without that risk taking, nothing can happen, so I have to make myself vulnerable. What I think is the unifying aspect in people that I like is that they have a sense of their own vulnerability, and I respond to that.

This coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall and Europe coming closer together, and nightlife and techno and ecstasy culture seemed like a very powerful panEuropean movement.

On the one hand I follow a vocation because I have an ability that I should exercise, but I want to use it for a reason, because I don't see that the freedoms that I enjoy are God-given realities. So I have a very healthy, activist general tension in me which feels that no, this is not gratuitous, it is important to keep this in focus.

Whatever pictures are put into the world, the balance needs to be readdressed, it needs to be observed. That's why I am also really questioning what a lot of photography has done since I began. I am not saying because of me, but I mean, photographing some friends partying and publishing the pictures meant something else in '92 than it does in 2011. And I find the younger generation is not questioning this at all today.

This act of piss, which can be considered sexual by some, a pleasurable experience, is at the same time total disrespect. I had once asked a friend to do this picture and he totally refused. So I carried the idea around with me for years. When I was invited to do a Honcho shoot, I approached Phillip, who was the barman at The London Apprentice, and fortunately he knew who I was. He had a copy of my first book, and that broke the ice. At the end of the shoot with him, I realized I could ask him to do this picture. I had waited four years to do it.