Charles Hutchinson reports on the North Yorkshire photographer who aimed high and struck lucky when he was starting out.

WHAT were you doing after hours when you were 15 or 16?

Homework? Holiday jobs? Playing sports? Put yourself in the Sixties shoes of young Paul Berriff, who left school with his immediate sights on a journalistic career.

The precise year was 1963, and the teenage Yorkshireman had just been signed up as a trainee editorial assistant on The Yorkshire Evening Post in Leeds, step one on the ladder to becoming either a reporter or press photographer.

To further his chances, the admirably forward-thinking nascent snapper photographed the pop stars of the day as they toured the northern cinema circuit of Leeds, Wakefield, Doncaster and the rest.

This brought him into contact – something surely unthinkable in today’s ultra-protected pop environment – with The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Hollies, The Searchers, the doe-eyed Marianne Faithfull and Sandie Shaw, pictured for once in tights rather than her trademark bare feet.

There were plenty more: the already established, ultra-handsome Adam Faith and American invader Roy Orbison; Gene Pitney, looking uncannily like a young Gustavo Poyet. Liverpool lad Gerry Marsden and a leaping Freddie Garrity, out of Manchester’s Freddie And The Dreamers.

The Kinks, the Davies brothers already looking less than happy with each other; The Walker Brothers, with dark eye liner and darker stares.

All from Yorkshire, all from 1963 or 1964, save for Jimi Hendrix, solo and with The Experience, in Leeds in 1967, and two images of Pink Floyd, when Paul was invited to film Syd Barrett and co at the Abbey Studios in London in the same year.

Under the title of Rock Legends In Yorkshire, these black-and-white memories of pop’s golden age are now on show in Gallery 2 at Salts Mill, Saltaire, near Bradford, where Paul will give a 3pm talk on Sunday afternoon.

Most of them have never been shown before, but two years ago and 47 years after taking such a remarkable set of stills, Paul returned to stills camera work to complement the television film-making that had become his career subsequently.

Searching in the attic of his Bedale home for the by-now vintage negatives, he found them in pristine condition, as when he had taken his pop portraits with the same Rolleiflex camera he still uses today.

How did Paul manage to secure access to The Beatles, Stones et al at such a tender age, filming Paul McCartney on no fewer than four occasions? “Using my press credentials, I made contacts with the managers of venues around the county and managed to gain unprecedented access backstage to take pictures of what were then up-and-coming stars,” he says.

“Only a few months later, the singers and bands would become national and international stars and would never again give such an opportunity to a teenager.”

Unwittingly, he had found himself at the epicenter of the new pop scene, these photographs primarily being taken to help him practise and refine his photographic skills.

“A few months later, I became an official press photographer for the Evening Post, and the ‘practice’ negatives were put in a box and forgotten,” says Paul, whose duties included covering Don Revie’s burgeoning Leeds United side for the Evening :Post’s Saturday night Green’Un.

A long and distinguished career followed, initially as a BBC news film cameraman and later as a director, producer and film maker on both sides of the Atlantic. Awards rolled in, including a BAFTA nomination for cinematography and a BAFTA for Best Factual Programme.

Paul also received The Queen’s Commendation for Bravery for carrying out a dramatic rescue while filming. He was injured on 9/11 2001 during filming with the New York Fire Department and went on to make a film about the three fire fighters who were alongside him when the Twin Towers collapsed on top of them.

Now his 50-year-old photography has come to the fore once more, it must be hoped a publisher will follow up the exhibition posters, postcards and magnificent prints for sale with a hardback book.

“This exhibition not only chronicles the birth of some of the greatest names in rock and pop history but it gives an insight into the fashions of the day, life ‘on the road’ in the early 1960s and the innocence of some of the great characters, many of whom are still performing today and some of whom are sadly missed,” says Paul.

It is surely time to put those memories between covers, Paul?

• Paul Berriff will host An Audience With Mr Berriff in Gallery 2 at Salts Mill, Saltaire, West Yorkshire, on Sunday at 3pm, when he will discuss his teenage days of photographing The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, concluding with a question-and-answer session. Tickets cost £3 on the door. His Rock Legends In Yorkshire exhibition will run at Salts Mill until January 12.