We define celebrity by who we consider famous and interesting: for me early in my career John Cale (like John Waters and J.G. Ballard) was a celebrity, especially in my circle of friends and acquaintances. He had, after all, been one of the founding members of the Velvet Underground, and even if you ignored his career in avant garde music before then, or his work as a musician and producer afterward, that made him a very big deal. Cale arrived in Toronto in early 1987 for a gig at the Diamond Club, between records and with a very intimidating reputation for indifferent, even hostile encounters with the press that nearly rivaled that of his old bandmate, Lou Reed.

It was probably appropriate that my handful of portraits of John Cale, shot for Nerve magazine, should have been taken from a low angle, to underscore his uncompromising image (or at least my own rather abject approach to him as a photographer). To be frank, though, this was a simple function of my inexperience, and my new camera - a Mamiya C330 medium format camera, a beast of a TLR with a waist level viewfinder that meant my lens was always at least a couple of feet below my subject's face if they were standing. I had barely owned the camera for a month or two and so far my only working method was to hold it in one hand while my other hand held a flash off to the side. The flash and camera would be juggled awkwardly while I tried to focus and compose; when I wrote about this shoot on my old blog, I said that this made me "light stand, tripod and photographer, all in one."

Poverty - and cheapness, let's be honest - meant that I only shot one roll of John Cale and his guitarist, Chris Spedding, alone and together. I might also have been afraid to impose on Cale for longer than he seemed willing to tolerate me. As such my portraits are just variations on the same pose and background, shot with the hope that at least one would be composed and focused correctly. My ambitions were very basic back at the beginning of my career as a photographer. But I also managed to shoot two whole rolls of the concert later that night; I hadn't yet come to dislike concert photography yet, and achieving something like the legendary live pics I'd seen for years in various rock mags was still an ambition I felt it reasonable to achieve.