Early Years
Born in London in November 1953, O'Regan grew up in Barnes, West London and attended St Benedict's School, following which he was offered a place at nearby Ealing Art College, famously attended a generation before by rock elite Freddie Mercury, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood, Ray Davies and Pete Townshend. However, parental influence prevailed and he was temporarily diverted towards a position in the City of London as a trainee broker at Willis Faber & Dumas, then as a trainee underwriter at Lloyd's of London.
Prior to this orthodox career move, O'Regan had seen The Beatles at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1964 with his mother, Marie. In the early 1970s, he smuggled a camera into the same venue to photograph Paul McCartney and Queen. Inspired by seeing Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page perform at Alexandra Palace, and David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust at Hammersmith, O'Regan taught himself photography. He resigned his day job, toured Europe on a student rail pass, and returned to comprehensively document the readily-accessible Punk explosion in London. A major contributor to NME in the late Seventies, O'Regan combined his love of photography and travel when in the Eighties he toured with some of the world's top rock bands, including those he had grown up with as a fan.
Read more about this topic: Denis O'Regan
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or years:
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It seemed the mockery of hell to fold
The rottenness of eighty years in gold.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)