ROCK PHOTOS:She was the subject of some classic love songs, including 'Layla' and 'Wonderful Tonight. Now rock muse Pattie Boyd is bringing her photo exhibition to Dublin, writes Brian Boyd
THERE IS indeed something in the way she moves. Model, photographer and the person at the centre of rock music's most notorious love triangle, Pattie Boyd, says "follow me" as she leads you around the Shelbourne Hotel looking for a bar that's open and somewhere quiet to talk.
As she gets stuck into her Guinness, the woman who was the direct inspiration for a trilogy of famous songs (George Harrison's Somethingand Eric Clapton's Laylaand Wonderful Tonight) has all the elegant grace and charm of a Joanna Lumley and remains arrestingly beautiful.
Now 64, Boyd is in Dublin to talk about her upcoming photographic exhibition, Through The Eye Of A Muse, at Gallery Number One. A modelling contemporary of Mary Quant, Boyd first started taking pictures during the London Carnaby Street Swinging Sixties scene and continued clicking away during her marriages to George Harrison and later, Eric Clapton.
"It was because I was photographed so much as a model in the early 1960s that I developed an interest in photography," she says.
"I would have been working with people such as David Bailey and Terence Donovan and I would hear them talking about stuff like 'framing a shot' so I supposed I learnt from them how to do it and never looked back."
Although people knew she had a large collection of photographs from that time, she always resisted making them public.
"It was only a few years ago that a friend asked to see a particular photo and I had to go and open what was like this Pandora's box for me. "Those photographs were all taken during the time I was married to a Beatle and there were a lot of emotions associated with them."
What's most striking about the photographs is how intimate and relaxed they were.
Chroniciling the innocent days of early Beatlemania, the group's meeting with the maharishi in India (Boyd was supposedly the first to switch The Beatles on to Eastern mysticism), their messy decline and her 20-year relationship with Clapton, the photographs are not just a social history of the time but also an insight into the beginnings of celebrity culture.
Harrison always knew she had the photographs but, as she says, "George always hated how he looked in pictures so that was the only thing he only ever said about the photographs." Clapton, she says, has made no comment on the photographs.
Boyd still works as a photographer for Harper's Bazaarmagazine and has a certain amount of empathy with today's music celebrities whose every wrong turn is splashed across the tabloids. "It is a difficult existence being pursued by a camera all the time. And the drink and drug problems, which we had in the 60s, are still very much there."
The main problem she faces now as a photographer is trying to capture women who have expressionless faces. "Even in their mid-30s, some women are resorting to surgery and all sorts of other tricks," she says. "When they can't display emotion properly, how can you possibly try to capture their image in a photograph?"
• Through The Eyes Of A Museis at Gallery Number One, 1 Castle Street, Dublin 2, from August 21st to September 5th. www.gallerynumberone.com. Pattie Boyd will be in Dublin for the official launch of the show on August 28th. People who have bought her work before this date will be invited to this invitation-only launch.