Three days before my birthday in July I got to photograph one of music’s sexiest men with an editorial brief of ‘…sex’. Essentially I had been given a legitimate excuse to flirt (purely for the sake of art!), with mega, super, incredibly handsome Killers front man Brandon Flowers. For a whole 45 minutes. It was like the best early birthday present I could wish for…except I chose to keep referring to breaded chicken.
It was like verbal diarrhoea, I mentioned it three times at different junctures of the shoot and then finished off with a monologue about my Nan being from Austria and still making very good Schnitzel. It started when we met at the buffet table whilst I was still setting up and he was about to eat lunch. The first discussion was a natural one, we were surveying the food on offer, a casual mention of how good the chicken looked. The second, maybe ten minutes into the shoot on a quick light change just checking if the chicken was as good as it looked, still a natural progression you might say. The third, less casual definitely, leaving my lips a good 30 minutes in now out of nowhere I’m pondering whether there was flavour in the topping. Then came Schnitzel chat.
The good thing about all this (along with being very lovely and polite) is that Brandon could have posed with the plate of chicken (why didn’t I try that?) and still looked sexy as hell, so my poultry wittering didn’t really ruin the vibe. He’s so well versed in front of the camera but still happy to try suggestions and together we worked to create a set of pictures that I really love and that he looks super cool in. Like that old school rock n roll sexiness that you don’t always see in musicians these days.
Fortunately for me he was sexy enough for the both of us.
