Hello, I'm Kirstie Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive for

rights reasons we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1991 and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

My cast away this week is a photographer, confident, cheeky and perceptive. He took the

fashion world by storm during the 60s with his pictures of Jean Shrimpton. Since then

he's been married to or associated with a string of beautiful women including Catherine

De Nerv and Marie Helvin and taken hundreds of pictures of his many famous friends.

Today he's directing commercials and confesses to hating nostalgia. He sees himself as one

of the new old and hopes like his hero Picasso to do some of his best work in his 90s. He

is David Bailey. So what is this new old David? I mean how would you define yourself?

There's never been, like all the new old before, there's a whole new generation or an old

very old generation like me or Jack Nicholson, that are still doing things that are our age

we should think about digging the garden. There's a kind of new spirit. There's still

a spirit that didn't seem to exist before with older people. Old people used to get old.

Once they were 25 they started to get old. So it's not just you saying, look I'm 53 I

know but don't write me off yet. It's you saying I still have an enormous amount of creative

energies? Well yeah, I hope so. I hope until now it's just been a rehearsal.

And you must have around you lots of kind of budding Bailey's as it were just like you

when you were 20 and you had a contract with Vogue. Do you look around and see these ambitious

young things and think how can I help them? Or do you find them a total pain? No, I think

how can I stop? Does it worry? I mean do they worry? No, I'm an ambitious 53 year old.

There's more dangerous than they are because actually my backlog of knowledge.

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