David Bowie - Victoria Station 1976
This photo became the centerpiece of what came to be known as 'The Victoria Station Incident'.
David Bowie hates flying, so when he returned to the UK for some concerts as the Thin White Duke in 1976 he arrived by a special train. It pulled into Victoria Station in the middle of a quiet Sunday afternoon, that's if you call a bunch of girls screaming at the top of their lungs quiet.
He walked a few yards from the train carriage to a waiting open topped BMW which then whisked him to another platform where the car reversed towards the hordes of screaming girls. It stopped near us photographers, David stood up in the back of the car and waved to the crowd, then, he drove of to an undisclosed location.
Unfortunately because of the gloomy late afternoon light at Victoria Station I used fill in flash on the four or five frames I managed to rattle off before he split.
When I showed the image to the NME the following day they decided to enhance his left arm by drawing a hand on the image, because of the flash it was partly missing. But when we saw the paper on Wednesday it looked very much like he was giving a Nazi salute.
The press picked up on this and put it together with some quotes on fascism he had made in Europe and lo and behold David was vilified as a Nazi. I feared it might harm our relationship but he shrugged it off saying it wasn't my fault, that I'd just caught a wrong moment and that he was indeed waving at the crowd. Nobody believed him of course and the Victoria Station Incident became part of a Bowie folklore.