IT’S ABOUT MALE MODELS. I’D READ AN ARTICLE ABOUT A GROUP of male models who were suing one or two photographers because they’d been abused and humiliated by them.

Some of the photographers they were talking about I knew. Now, I didn’t actually know what they got up to in those particular sessions, but because I’d been photographed by them, I did know that the modus operandi of these photographers was to say, ‘Come on, baby. Come on, give it to me. Come on, fuck me. Oh, show me that tit . . .’

In other words, they tended to be extremely vulgar. It used to come with the territory. You’d say, ‘That’s just him.’ He’d say, ‘Come on, pretend you’re fucking some chick.’ This is the way some of those guys worked, to get you to not just stand there looking boring. They were trying to excite something. Like people in so many professions – pop stars, cops – they’d become caricatures of themselves.

That’s why I wondered whether some of these models just didn’t understand the murky territory they’d entered. It may also be that the photographers went further and touched the models inappropriately. That I don’t know, but this song is fictional, and I was imagining the models getting upset simply because of the vulgar attitude that these photographers had.

The song starts off with the photographer saying, ‘Look into my lens / Give me all you got / Work it for me, baby / Let me take my best shot’. That’s a mild representation of how the photographers worked back in the sixties and seventies – only now they would be ten times more vulgar. I was imagining a line of male models, and they are a line of bicycles for hire and objects of desire. They’re trying to get you to desire them in the pages of a magazine, but they’re working for the squire. In the magazine world, the photographers are a pretty big deal.

‘They can talk but they never say much’. Models aren’t traditionally known to be the most intellectual people going – disclaimer! – although I know some who are extremely intelligent, and it’s always tricky to generalise with any profession. ‘There go the Pretty Boys / A row of cottages for rent’. I’m imagining the sort of little sheds you can rent on seafronts. I’ve come to understand that “cottaging” refers to gay sex in a public toilet, but that meaning wasn’t in my mind at the time I wrote the song.

I’ve got this very simple little guitar line – just two fingers on the strings, and then the other notes are all open. That’s all it is.

‘You can look but you’d better not touch’. You’ll see a model giving you a come-hither look from a magazine. That’s what they’re supposed to be doing, because you’re supposed to want to buy the clothes they’ve got on or the product they’re selling. This song focuses on the experience of male models, but it’s the same with female models and the bra they’re wearing; you’re supposed to think, ‘My girlfriend would look good in that.’ Models are used to selling commodities, and I suspect they’ve also commodified themselves.

Photographed by daughter Mary. Sussex, 2020

It was interesting to put ‘Pretty Boys’ together, as it’s a perspective I don’t often write from. But that’s one of the joys of being a writer. A lot of people might have a similar thought – in this instance, about the treatment of models – but don’t have an outlet for it. I’m lucky to have the opportunity to crystallise these thoughts into a song. The idea of a model being treated as a commodity raises interesting comparisons to The Beatles too. We were musicians, not models, but at the height of Beatlemania, people wanted to put our names and faces on all manner of things, and it felt out of control sometimes.

So, that was part of the reasoning behind setting up Apple and then, later on in my case, MPL. It was a liberation for us from the men in suits who had been in charge before. We no longer had to work for the squire. Now, we could take control of our destinies. And MPL celebrated its fiftieth birthday in 2019, so it seems to have worked out pretty well.