REWRITING RORY

Originally born in Paris, Odile Noël moved to Britain in 1969. According to her website, Odile got her first big break when she was taken on as a secretary by Larry Westland who was beginning to organise music events. In 1975, she obtained her first camera as a Christmas present and swiftly started to take photographs, combining her two passions of music and photography. Although photography was originally meant to be a hobby, Odile’s skills became recognised and she ended up as a semi-pro photographer and later self-employed providing various services to the music industry. In 1989, Odile changed career paths and moved into translation. She is now semi-retired and lives in France.

We reached out to Odile in autumn 2022 because we are huge lovers of the photoshoot she did with Rory in 1989 and wanted to know more. We summarise some of her reflections below:

Thanks for getting in touch and your kind words.

I was sent to take pictures of Rory by Roland UK while he was trying Boss effects (seen on top of the Fender amp) and being interviewed by one of Roland’s staff – and I was jolly glad the interviewer was there to keep Rory busy and animated because I didn’t know what to say to him… Of course I always liked his music, saw Taste three times in the Sixties and a couple of concerts after that, but by then I hadn’t followed what he was doing because, being self-employed, I was simply too busy (more’s the pity!).

As you can expect, Rory was charm personified and I was reasonably relaxed, despite not having enough self-assurance at the time. He was a big star, after all, and you can’t help being a bit in awe of such a person. What I did notice was that he didn’t look well, even taking age into account.

I wasn’t there to chat but to concentrate on my job at that particular moment, which was to shoot a few decent photos. [As I said], he was mostly chatting about gear with the guy from Roland UK. The whole thing took about ten minutes. What was it like? Relaxed, as Rory was paying little attention to me, which is exactly what I wanted as a photographer!

[By the way], I read the first instalment of your blog with interest. As it happens, last December I was asked by a friend, a French music journalist (Jean-Noël Coghe), to transcribe a long interview of Dónal (on tape) he had done twenty years before. A long job but totally fascinating to hear directly from Rory’s bro. I was relieved to find his Irish accent is very soft and my French ears didn’t have any trouble understanding him. 

We also asked Odile briefly for the highlight of her career and she said this:

Actually way before my career as such when I was a 17-18 year old kid with a crappy camera and zero knowledge of photography. Yeah, meeting Jimi Hendrix (three times) is definitely one of the highlights of my life! 

If you’d like to know more about Odile’s work, here is a link to the huge selection of photographs that she has taken over the years on the music scene.