‘Joey didn’t surf. And he didn’t like this photo. He said, “You made my legs look thin.” Like it was my fault he had skinny legs’

The first band I ever saw were the Beatles, on 19 August 1964 at the Cow Palace Arena near San Francisco. I was 13. I remember every 29 minutes of it: 17,000 screaming girls making a deafening din and thousands of flashbulbs going off at once, lighting up the entire stadium. I’d been a Beatlemaniac since seeing a clip of them at the London Palladium on the Jack Paar show, then live on the Ed Sullivan show. I bought magazines with them in and wondered what kind of person took the photographs. So my first forays into photography were taking photographs of photographs of the Beatles with the primitive family Kodak.

When I was 15 I took a very basic photography class, but later, after three years of college, I dropped out, sold my Nikon and went to England. I started dating Ian Dury, then after we broke up, a friend gave me a one-way ticket to New York where I started going out with Richard Hell, whose band Television played CBGBs every Sunday night. Richard and I split up on good terms, and he asked me to take pictures of him. My first was the famous fake blood photo of the Heartbreakers, the band he formed with Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan from the New York Dolls. Richard suggested captioning the poster “Catch them while they’re still alive” because they had a nefarious reputation.

‘The string section we got in thought I was the tea boy. When I asked for a psychedelic improvisation like A Day in the Life, they went: “Why is this guy telling us what to play?”’

We’d made our first album and were waiting for it to come out. But we wanted to carry on writing more stuff while we were in the mood. I even cut Christmas dinner short at my uncle’s in Brixton, London, so we could get back to the studio. We would work until we passed out, then I’d sleep underneath the mixing desk with my head in the bass drum, as that’s where the pillow was.

‘The art director wanted it to read “1999”. But Prince wasn’t having that. So the next thing I knew, I was writing “Free” on him with my fingers in cold paint’

I grew up loving Prince’s music and remember thinking: “I’m gonna work for that guy one day.” Through high school and college I photographed local bands. I’d say I worked for a newspaper but I didn’t tell them it was the high-school newspaper, so they’d give me passes to U2 or Boy George. Once, when I went to photograph Lionel Richie, Sheila E was supporting, who I knew had a Prince connection. I ended up talking to her guitar-player and told him I was a photographer and artist. He asked me to draw something, so I did a quick portrait of him on a napkin and he said we should stay in touch.

Around the Sign o’ the Times album he called to say he was joining Prince’s band, and said: “I’m gonna take you with me.” He showed Prince some of my artwork, which he apparently liked. I was asked to paint a stage for him – that was the first job I did, and one day he asked: “Have you ever taken photos?” I was in the right place at the right time. I got a digital camera and became in-house art director at Paisley Park, taking photos from 1988 until 1996.