Candid camera

A.A. Gill talks to his friend Terry O’Neill, whose iconic photographs captured an entirely new kind of celebrity

I remember the first time Terry O’Neill took my photograph: he wore blue; I wore grey and the Great War helmet of the third regiment of Pomeranian Grenadiers. We were at the Imperial War Museum, and the nice curator gave me the tin hat with reverence. ‘They’re surprisingly hard to get hold of in good condition, considering how many were made,’ he said. This one had been lifted from a corpse in Arras. And I can pass on to Spectator readers — because I know how much you love this sort of thing — that the second world war version is slightly smaller than the first, to save steel. I donned the coal scuttle and a Teutonic demeanour. ‘Look fiercer,’ said Terry in his snapper’s accent — f-stop cockney. ‘Come on, really aggressive. You look swish, for God’s sake.’

When the photograph appeared on the cover of the Sunday Times Magazine, all I could see was a long exuberant nostril hair. ‘Why didn’t you tell me I had nose hair, Terry?’ ‘Yeah, no. I like that. It’s my favourite bit. It’s like your Hitler moustache had gone into hiding.’

Terry finished wearing his own helmet with National Service, and he picked up a camera his mum had given him, went to Heathrow and started taking pictures of random celebrities. Quite what moved him to do so is unclear, or rather he smudges over it. Terry smudges quite a lot of his life. On light-sensitive paper his focus is pin-sharp, in sensitive life it can get blurry.