When we started, there was no digital anything, can you believe that kids? No screens, no internet, no safety net. At London’s Town & Country Club in the eighties, we shot The Cramps through plumes of cigarette smoke, sweat and flying pints of beer and piss, hot-swapping rolls in the dark and trying not to wear half the bar. No one imagined how quickly the kit would change, or how completely it would rewrite the rules.

Fogged lenses became windows on a world outside time – art not just seen but felt: onstage and in the pit, breaking over the crowd and rushing into the cosmos. Urgency was the engine: one frame, one truth, before it’s gone. Many of those wild, burning orbs have vanished forever – but the photographs move again. Because they are life.

Decades later we walk back into the same room – no cigarette smoke, no film, still the occasional nostalgic amber rain. Technology has changed; the mission hasn’t. We arrest motion. We let it move again.

Most photographers don’t even look through a viewfinder anymore—that extension of the heart, the soul, the eye. We do. And through a well-worn lens, we’ve learned a few things. Time sharpens the eye and steadies the hand. Life keeps writing its score, and in music and photography we stay tuned—curious, present, ready to catch the note that matters.

There’s room for every sound and every frame. Pop’s shimmer, Goth’s shadow, Metal’s spark, Classical’s poise, Country’s straight-from-the-gut truth – if it’s honest, it belongs. Each picture, each song, is another thread in what we’re making together.

This is 1st 3 Magazine- born in the darkroom, raised on blown speakers and dubious showers, still chasing the split-second where a face turns, a chord lands, a room lifts. The tools evolve; the vow stays put. Our aim is simple: meaningful work, thoughtfully made, hopefully worth returning to.

Got something to say? Write it. Review it. Shoot it. If you feel the itch to join in, get in touch. We’ll help each other out…