The Man Who Saw Bowie Offstage

O’Regan was in the Algarve last week for the opening of Bowie: The Photographers at In The Pink Gallery in Loulé, an exhibition bringing together images by photographers who helped shape Bowie’s visual legacy. The gallery opened the exhibition with O’Regan and Chris Duffy, son of the late photographer Brian Duffy, present to meet visitors and sign books.

For O’Regan, whose work with Bowie spanned several tours and decades, the exhibition is not simply a collection of famous images. It is a reminder of a time when access meant something very different.

“You’re here because I like what you do. Just do it,” O’Regan recalls of Bowie’s approach.

That trust gave him something rare. He was not only photographing the performance, but the person behind it.

Set in motion

O’Regan first encountered Bowie not as a professional photographer, but as a young fan. He saw him during the Ziggy Stardust era and remembers being stunned by the theatricality of it all. Japanese influences, mime, fashion, costume changes, movement and music all folded into one performance.

“I thought, what is this?” he said. “That changed my life.”

The next day, Bowie retired the Ziggy Stardust character. O’Regan laughs at the timing. He had discovered him one day, and the next, he was gone. But something had already been set in motion.

By then, O’Regan had begun taking pictures with a small, inexpensive camera. He later smuggled a camera into a Queen concert, and that image became his first sale. From there, one chance encounter led to another. A borrowed flash at an early punk concert connected him to Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy. Thin Lizzy became his first tour. The Rolling Stones followed after another bold moment, when he simply asked who their official photographer was and offered himself for the job.

That Rolling Stones tour would eventually lead him to Bowie.

The Stones’ tour accountant, Bill, was later involved in putting together Bowie’s 1983 Serious Moonlight world tour. O’Regan wanted in. He was told to produce a business plan. His idea was a book, one that would document Bowie not only as a performer, but as a man living through a major moment in his career.

Bowie liked the idea.

The result became Ricochet, built around the Serious Moonlight tour, Bowie’s largest ever, which took in 99 concerts in more than 60 cities. O’Regan’s photographs offered an unusually intimate view of life on the road with Bowie, and the images were personally approved by Bowie himself.

“It was the first time he was opening up,” O’Regan said. “He didn’t have a character. It was really him.”

That access meant sitting through soundchecks, travelling together, waiting in hotel rooms, watching moods shift, and learning when to step close and when to stay away. O’Regan describes the atmosphere of a tour as a kind of family, with all the warmth, tension, boredom and pressure that implies.

There were difficult moments too. In Japan, Bowie once became angry because O’Regan had not captured a moment outside the backstage door when fans were waiting. O’Regan remembers being upset by the exchange, but what stayed with him was what happened later.

When they met again in Australia, Bowie invited him out for a picnic. He hired a car, organised the food and took a small group to a nature reserve.

“No one I ever worked with would ever have done that,” O’Regan said. “That was how sweet he was, and how normal he was deep down.”

Making history

The stories O’Regan tells are full of these contrasts. Bowie could be demanding, exacting and occasionally impatient, but he was also curious, funny and collaborative. He wanted O’Regan’s eye, not just his obedience.

That mattered because O’Regan was working in an era before digital safety nets. The film was expensive. Light was difficult. Concerts moved quickly. There was no screen on the back of the camera to check whether a shot had worked.

“Every shot counted,” he said.

He learned to anticipate. A raised arm, a turn of the body, the moment before a crowd responded. One of his most striking Bowie images was taken by changing perspective entirely. Rather than photographing from the stage and allowing the audience to fade into the background, he climbed to the side of the scaffolding so the crowd rose behind Bowie. The result made 65,000 people feel even larger.

“It looks like a million,” he said.

His memories also place Bowie inside a wider cultural history. In Berlin, O’Regan went with Bowie back to his former apartment, and later to Hansa Studios, where Bowie had recorded “Heroes.” They looked out toward the Berlin Wall, then went down to take photographs beside it. At the time, O’Regan had no way of knowing the wall would come down within 18 months.

“You don’t know it’s a piece of history when you’re in it,” he said.

That may be the real power of his work. O’Regan photographed people who were famous, but he did so before many of the moments had hardened into legend. Freddie Mercury’s last show with Queen. Bowie in Berlin. The Rolling Stones before a long break. The private planes, hotel rooms, dressing rooms, jokes, arguments and pauses between performances.

Now, decades later, those images carry a different weight. Some of the artists are gone. Some moments cannot be repeated. The photographs are not manufactured or reconstructed. They are evidence of being there.

At In The Pink, surrounded by Bowie’s image in a gallery far from the stadiums and backstage corridors where many of those pictures began, O’Regan seemed less interested in myth than memory.

He did not set out to become the keeper of rock history. He wanted to travel, photograph the artists he loved and be close enough to see what others could not.

The result is a body of work that shows not only David Bowie the icon, but David Bowie between the icons. Onstage, offstage, in motion, in thought and, occasionally, in ordinary human kindness.