The following article first appeared in The Herald Monday Jan 17th, 2000. It is reproduced here by kind permission and is under their copyright. Continue down page for more legible text version.

 

Arranging to meet arts photographer marc marnie at Glasgow's Royal Concert Hall, I'd been told to seek out "the hairy hippy in black". This could be tricky. In the midst of a Celtic Connections festival this description could apply to any number of the hirsute and homespun participants and fans milling around.

For the Concert Hall is also playing host to 68 black and white marnie images in his exhibition, An Eye For Music. Together with a revival of his Body and Soul exhibition. Marnie has delivered an unbeatable line-up of the good, the bad and the downright dirty in jazz, blues, rock and Celtic music who have played in Scotland over the years. Where else will you find the Prodigy's Keith Flint supporting a sweaty James Brown, blurred Nick Cave, cheerful Muddy Waters, malevolent-looking Chuck Berry, and a laughing Evelyn Glennie grasping a bucket of drum sticks as if they were a bouquet of flowers?

Thankfully, the photographer behind the images is easy to spot. A distinctively hirsute man, clad head to toe in black, awaits me on the Concert Hall steps. Three chunky silver rings gleam on each hand. It strikes you that marc marnie poses as intriguing a photographic subject as his quarry of musical "characters" - an affable Grizzly Adams gone Goth, equally at home in the scuzzy backroom bars as the upholstered concert halls. Despite assertions that "I'm a lazy sod", his work has featured in magazines, books, and record company PR material throughout the world. He took his first "smuggled" frame in 1979 when Muddy Waters played the Glasgow Apollo and has continued to mix a love of music and photography since. A career he summarises self-depreciatingly. "I was a chancer who got lucky"

Marnie's is the spontaneous style of true intuition in capturing the spirit of the performer - no matter how temperamental they are.