Look Sharp! Brian Griffin’s iconic shot for Joe Jackson’s debut album in 1979, which Rolling Stone voted one of the best record covers of all time. He went on to create many of the most celebrated cover images of the 1980s, establishing himself as one of Britain’s most sought-after portrait photographers

Brian Griffin was a broke 31-year-old photographer when he took this picture for Joe Jackson’s 1979 debut album Look Sharp! Armed with his Olympus OM-1 and with just two lenses to his name, he headed to his favourite London location.

“The South Bank was like my studio at that time,” says Griffin, speaking from his riverside apartment in Rotherhithe further east along the Thames, the neighbourhood he’s based himself for the past 30 years. “I would use all the nooks and crannies. I’d met Joe at the Wimpy in Waterloo station and we walked to the Hayward Gallery. It was a sunny day and the light was peeping through the crevices. Joe was wearing white Denson winklepickers and a chalk-stripe suit. I just said to him, ‘Joe, can you stand there’, pointed the camera to the ground and I had the cover.”

Twelve years later it was voted the 22nd best record cover of all time by Rolling Stone magazine, despite being one of the most simple music shots he ever took. Griffin went on to create many of the most celebrated cover images of the 1980s, for recording artists including Depeche Mode (A Broken Frame made number 75 on the Rolling Stone list), Kate Bush and Echo & The Bunnymen.

“When I did Look Sharp!, record label art directors used to farm out album covers to designers like Barney Bubbles,” he says. Griffin and the legendary designer collaborated on a number of records, including Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces and Depeche Mode’s Speak & Spell, as well as more personal projects. But in 1983 Bubbles committed suicide. “The awful thing about it was that I was doing Killing Moon that day for Echo & The Bunnymen. Barney phoned me up, and a few hours later he killed himself.”

Griffin stopped shooting strictly commercial work in 2001, vowing to focus on personal work and assignments that allowed him creative freedom, such as his recent 2012 London Olympics commission from the National Portrait Gallery.