The fact that she’s in profile, with the light behind, makes her look a bit heavenly You’d take a few shots, make adjustments, but there was a bit of guesswork. In those days, you couldn’t look at a digital screen on the back of your camera to see the results like you can today. All the photographers I admired used natural light, so I captured her just as the light didn’t quite burn her out.
#Nextime ure windows
I needed to expose the near side of her face with just enough light coming through the windows on the other side of what was a very small plane. She should have been in shadow, a silhouette. The tricky part of getting this shot with the plane window behind her was getting her lit, because all the light was coming from one side. All I really had to do was point the camera and press the button. She’d always sit with a hand draped over one shoulder or be doing something fabulous. But the thing with having someone like Paula travelling with you is that she was such a natural-born poser. We all loved her dearly so had asked her along to write about the video shoot. All the bands knew Paula through Bob Geldof and her writing for Record Mirror.
#Nextime ure plus
It was cheaper to rent a private plane than to fly the band, plus Paula, plus Anton Corbijn – it was one of the few times we had a photographer with us – and the film crew. It was a one-day shoot and we flew over in the morning. None of this had been done on pop videos before. We cropped the screen at the top and bottom to make it look cinematic. Digital video was just coming in, but it looked cheap and electronic, whereas with film we could replicate the grainy effect of old films and photos. Because of our love of film noir, we insisted on shooting the Vienna promo on 16mm film. The budget was £17,000, which was reasonably expensive back then, but nothing like the sort of silliness that came later with the advent of MTV. I took this shot of Paula Yates on the plane to Austria to shoot the video for the song Vienna. Paula had developed this coquettish manner but was incredibly intelligent – she’s probably reading Kafka I was – and am – simply a happy amateur, but you get better the more you do it and realise what works. There’s that famous Charlie Watts quote about how his first 25 years in the Rolling Stones was “five years playing, 20 years hanging around”. Nobody ever saw how geeky or stupid we got, or how bored we were between the shows. Because of our music and the graphics and imagery, the band were considered po-faced scientists.
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