Denis O’Regan (71) captured an iconic shot of the late Princess of Wales with one of Britain’s most successful and pioneering musicians after his Glass Spider concert in Wembley Stadium in June 1987, as the Independent reports.
Buckingham Palace attempted to block the release of a photo of David Bowie and Princess Diana to dampen the media storm around her love life, Bowie’s former photographer has claimed.
Denis O’Regan (71) captured an iconic shot of the late Princess of Wales with one of Britain’s most successful and pioneering musicians after his Glass Spider concert in Wembley Stadium in June 1987.
O’Regan said that the Princess — 25 at the time — had shyly asked him whether Bowie would want a picture with her, to which the photographer responded: “I think he would.”
“I thought it was so funny,” he said, adding that Diana had been “so sweet”.
But he explained that the picture almost did not make it into the public domain at the time.
“So the next day, my agent got a call from the Palace, saying don’t use the pictures, because word had gone out about James Hewitt. So that’s when it kind of erupted. It was interesting, on a number of levels.”
Diana attended the Bowie concert with Major James Hewitt, with whom she had a five-year affair from 1986.
“They just didn’t want Diana in the press,” O’Regan said
“It was really that they didn’t want to fuel the fire. So the more pictures that weren’t out there, the better. Because someone would have said: ‘ This is her at the show that she turned up to with James Hewitt’ — even though I didn’t get the multi-million-dollar shot of the two of them together, because no one knew who he was… it was obviously a tiny moment in history.”
It comes ahead of the release of his new book, David Bowie by Denis O’Regan, which charts the rock star’s career through O’Regan’s lens over more than three decades.
The pair’s working relationship began in 1974, five years after Bowie’s breakthrough hit, Space Oddity. The singer was recording at a studio and O’Regan was working at the newspaper shop across the street.
O’Regan said: “I partly missed him, and came back the second day. That’s why, when he saw me two days running, he said: ‘ You should work for NME’.”
O’Regan has since captured images of the most famous musicians in the world, including Freddie Mercury, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Bob Marley.
But the Ziggy Stardust star inspired it all. He said: “When I saw David Bowie, that was it. I saw another side of music and the visual aspect of it.”
O’Regan described Bowie, who died aged 69 in 2016, as “very down to earth” and “different to his stage persona”.
“I spent a vast amount of time with him,” he said, adding: “We became very close, really, considering it was not what I expected, because I expected this enigma to keep me at arm’s length, which he definitely didn’t.”
