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On the Brink of Fame: Pop Stars in the Swinging '60s (AUTHOR SIGNED)

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As more and more rock and pop stars are putting down their guitars and picking up their pens to write best selling autobiographies, renowned international photojournalist Ian Wright has just published "On The Brink OF Fame, Pop Stars In The Swinging 60s," an expose' on the era from a different perspective. Wright's stunning photographs animate his fascinating and amusing anecdotes about the celebrities, social scandals and the political/economic landscape which many have already come to regard as a social history, chronicling the Swinging 60s.-

In 1962, Wright was a sixteen year old junior photographer for "Teenage Special" a new supplement to a newspaper in the North East of England. Too young to drive, Ian strapped the heavy plate camera equipment to his bicycle, pedaling to local ballrooms, theaters and nightclubs, photographing emerging pop stars and celebrities. "Photograph everyone on the bill; you never know who's going to become famous and keep all your negatives," was the brief given by his editor, the now illustrious editor/publisher, Sir Harold Evans, who wrote the foreward for this book.

Consequently, teenage photographer Ian Wright was unwittingly on hand to photograph the creation of the Swinging 60s. From his first picture, for the Teenage Special, of Ella Fitzgerald in 1962 to his last of Elton John in 1971, Wright photographed everyone on the scene. His intimate back-stage portraits show eager, young performers unsure of whether they would flop or ascend to fame and fortune. Some fell into obscurity while others ascended to indescribable success. Five became Knights of the Realm and many died too young.

Wright's collection of historic negatives, thought lost for 45 years, have recently been discovered in his old darkroom, bringing to light countless unpublished photographs representing a veritable who's who of the 1960's including, The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Roy Orbison, Ike & Tina Turner, Marianne Faithfull, Tom Jones, Moody Blues, Gerry & The Pacemakers, Dusty Springfield, Dave Clark Five, Manfred Mann, Engelbert Humperdink, The Animals, Jimi Hendrix, Peter & Gordon, Johnny Cash, Elizabeth Taylor, Peter O'Toole, Jayne Mansfield, Sophia Loren, Peter Ustinov, Rex Harrison, Michael Crawford, and members of the Royal family.

As you look through this amazing book, I'm sure you will think of the first time you heard the songs and films made famous by the faces in the photographs. You may think of your first date, your first dance, and your first kiss. These photographs and Mr. Wright's reminiscences allow us all to keep those memories forever.

Wright's pictures of the photographers and the crowd scenes in Beatlemania, show a nation rushing into a new era when nobody wanted to be left behind. His lens captured the youthful naiveté of Mick Jagger in 1965 and again the dynamic performer he had become, live on stage in 1971. Wright has managed to vividly capture on film and now in this book, the enormity of what was happening in the 60s.

As Sir Harold Evans says in the foreward, "This stunning collection of photographs by Ian Wright, many never published, affords us a rare pleasure. Here we are, face to face, with the artists who created what we now call the Swinging Sixties and we are intimately back-stage with them. They cannot know what awaits them when they go out to perform, still less could any of them guess whether they would flop or ascend to fame and fortune."

Wow! a $50 book on Kindle? I bought it just out of curiosity. they haven't even tried to make the book look good on Kindle. I am trying to get a refund, don't waste your money. The content is childish, photo reproduction horrible.

There's an old broadcast, tucked away somewhere in some domestic or foreign radio archive in which some perhaps now nameless British broadcaster speculates as to the mass appeal of the Beatles, commenting that some suggested that the sound they make is akin to the "sound of youth." Whatever that sound is, On the Brink of Fame, captures it as well. The book carefully archives the photographs of Ian Wright, young and relatively inexperienced at the time who, through design, circumstance or both, was able to document and capture the British Invasion with particular aplomb. Wright's pictures capture a mood of generally innocent excitement and anticipation that rarely hints at the excess, disillusionment, and tragedy that would come later when the Stones went to Altamont and John Lennon went to New York. In this sense the book should not at all be taken as any sort of complete testament on the times or the groups, but rather of a brief, fluttering slice of what one might have seen as a hanger on during the era.
There are numerous things to like about this book: a striking shot of the Beatles performing at London's Globe Theatre (reportedly occurring simultaneously with the Kennedy assassination)in which John, Paul and George, clad in black, each partly fade into the black background but stand out all the same; Freddie Garrity leaping with what would seem to be weightlessness through the air, arms extended; Roy Orbison, dressed like California, pausing between cigarette breaths outside the Club Fiesta; and a guest-shot (taken by Marianne Faithfull) of the author, posing beside a 3.4 litre Jaguar, encapsulating all the rights and wrongs of the era into a small repository of black and white. Ultimately, the best photos may be those in which the artists take second stage to the audience: numerous shots of the immense crowds that greeted every movement of the Beatles; a beachside crowd shot taken from the rear of a Searchers show; and most notably, a photo of a long, seemingly endless, line of photographers waiting for the Beatles as their train arrives.

I stumbled across this book on a friend's coffee table and was just idly leafing through, as I have no real interest in the 1960's or rock music. But the incredible glimpse into the life of a young person in a Britain still recovering from World War 2 was absolutely riveting. The writing is very much "at the moment" and real time. Married with never-before-published photos of the royal family and film stars (including Richard Burton and Liz Taylor during the filming of "Becket"), the result was a book I could not put down. Required reading for any Anglophile.

To me, this isn't really about the world of rick and roll as much of the story as a talented, intelligent boy born into relative adversity. Through his pen and camera we travel back to an imperial power on it's slow but unstoppable way down.