Photographer Pennie Smith has taken some of the most iconographic rock ’n’ roll shots of the last 30 years. Unpretentious, plainspoken and a self described romantic and true believer in the band-as-gang ethos, her portraits of acts like The Clash (the London Calling cover shot of Paul Simenon smashing his bass recently polled as Q magazine’s best rock photo of all time), The Stone Roses, Oasis and The Strokes are regarded as definitive. Alongside legendary figures like Nick Kent, Charles Shaar Murray, Mick Farren, Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill, she was also one of the rag-tag crew that made the NME the leading rock paper of the 1970s – last year she and former partner in crime Kent received the God-like Genius Award at the NME’s Brats Awards.

The first ever comprehensive exhibition of her work (including that London Calling shot and her first ever NME commission, a Led Zeppelin on-the-road job) will take place at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast from May 5-11, running as part of the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival. Prints of the shots will be on sale, and the photographer will also give a talk about her trade.

“The exhibition’s a bit of a weird one,” she says, on the phone from her London office. “Stuart Bailie approached me, obviously having worked with me in England, and said, ‘Have you got 20 pictures we can shove up on the wall?’ and I said okay thinking I could dig them out of the cupboard. Then all of a sudden it was 40 pictures, which is a sort of weird hybrid ’cos now I had to do a sort of mix and match: pictures that people like seeing plus a few extras.”

Smith was the product of a late ’60s arts lab background, studying graphics and fine art at Twickenham Art School before setting up a studio in a disused Underground station in West London. Frendz magazine art director Barney Bubbles persuaded her to take up photography, and she graduated from there to the NME, shooting the majority of the paper’s covers from 1975-1982, eventually quitting when the direction changed and the format moved to colour.

“Basically everybody had come from all bits of the planet, or their own navels or wherever,” she says of the halcyon NME days. “Nick Logan (NME editor and later founder of The Face and Arena) was perceptive enough to say more or less, ‘You all know what you’re up to – go out and get it!’ There was absolutely no brief on the writing or the photos or anything.”

Is that why the paper was so remarkable for the time?

“Oh yeah – because everybody was doing an art. The reason my photos kicked in is if I’d looked at music papers I would’ve realised they were taking sort of football photos, line-up shots, whatever. I hadn’t picked up a music paper until I worked for it. I just wasn’t in that culture, I’d come up through art school and had only done half a day a week in photography in the last year and didn’t like it. So what I was doing – and still do really – was glorified home snaps of people that were doing a job of work that happened to be musicians.

“I think it was the same really with Nick (Kent)’s writing until he sort of tightened it all up and made it more ‘authentic’ music journalism I suppose. I mean, obviously he’d read Lester Bangs and some of the old school, but it was very much him written into his pieces in the same way that it was me going out and documenting what I saw, not what a music paper was supposed to look like.”

Of course, the joke was that when Bangs first visited London in the mid ’70s, he was somewhat taken aback that all the journalists – particularly Kent – looked more like rock stars than the rock stars themselves.

“I know! It was great really, everybody was ducking and diving, it was a load of scallywags just sort of running around doing the only thing they could do, a bit like a real musician should do. And we deliberately both stayed out as freelance. I was paid a minute retainer for a millisecond but basically we were all independent souls, and still are I think.”

Smith’s departure in 1982 heralded the end of the golden NME era. Sharp and all as new pop theorists like Ian Penman and Paul Morley were, their anti-rockist diatribes and raincoat think-pieces just didn’t crackle with the same immediate energy as Kent and Parsons’ frontline reportage, Murray’s cool analysis, Burchill’s teenage spleen or Farren’s conspiracy theories.

“I think what finally pissed me off was the real depression,” Smith says. “I mean, it had always been vaguely left wing, but what struck me… I suddenly walked in the office and there was this chart on the wall that had holiday dates. I didn’t realise up to that point that if you worked for a music paper you had to plan your holiday six months in advance – it didn’t strike me as very good.

“And secondly I remember, it was possibly Neil Spencer, I really don’t want to hammer him, he’s done a good enough job becoming an astrologer or whatever he is for The Guardian, but he was trying to depress the dole queues, you know what I mean? And it just struck me as completely wrong and no fun at all. You don’t write about how doomy and despairing the planet is, and all the left wing causes, when people are actually standing in queues waiting for their money – they want to be inspired.”

The shots

The Clash
“I wasn’t gonna shoot that night, the end of the tour, I was gonna pop out and see some friends, but I thought no, I’m not very good at shirking, so I went to Paul’s side of the stage – ’cos I usually worked Mick’s side if I was on stage rather than grovelling around the pit or somewhere. I was sort of half watching Paul get more and more rattled (at the audience’s lack of reaction), and he didn’t usually get rattled. It was gut reaction – photographer puts camera up to eye and waits, really. I had hardly shot anything that night but then whipped that off as he approached me wielding his bass around my head.”

Led Zeppelin
“I think they were a bit taken aback because at the time photographers were what the journalists dragged in, and journalists were bad enough, particularly in the case of Led Zep, so I think they were probably more startled to find that the photographer was a female ’cos I don’t think many girls were around at the time. But I dunno, I mean this isn’t a brag or anything, but I’ve always seemed to sort of slot in on that base level, they used me quite a lot themselves after that point, they were perfect gentlemen.”

The Stone Roses
“It took me ’til the Stone Roses to feel I wasn’t jilting The Clash. Dance had hit at various points and was not really photogenic, I mean you can only do so many pictures of a synthesizer in my opinion; I can’t get my head around Adidas t-shirts! I think people are either romantics or classicists, and I always tend to fall for the romantics, and it wasn’t until I actually was in front of The Stone Roses that I’d forgotten about The Clash; all of a sudden it was clicking in the same way again. Strangely, a few months back, Mick Jones said to me, ‘Once I saw some of your pictures of the Roses I knew you’d got that same sort of thing going’ and it was perfectly true. I suppose it’s soul, inner content, just somebody who knows why they’re there, standing on that particular spot, why they’re on that stage as opposed to being daintily arranged like a flower arrangement on the stage.”

The Strokes
“I walked in and was immediately back home as far as I was concerned.”