R.I.P. Mick Hutson

I first met Mick Hutson at 2 a.m. in a Red Roof Inn somewhere near the Port of Miami. It wasn’t nearly as seedy as it seems. It was January, 2014, and Metal Hammer had sent the two of us on assignment to cover 70000 Tons Of Metal, a four-day floating metal festival on a luxury cruise ship in the Caribbean. During those four days, forty bands — a carefully-curated lineup skewing most heavily towards mid-tier death, black and extreme metal — would play two sets each and mingle freely about the ship with the rabble. There’s no VIP deck and there’s no headliner — just two thousand fans and 500 band and crew members living in ear-clattering harmony while threading the seas between Florida and Cuba.

Mick and I had contributed to some of the same features in the past but we’d never met in person. We were booked into the same cheap hotel room on the night before the cruise left and when I arrived, sometime around eleven, I expected I’d need to be careful not to wake Mick up. After all, he was flying in from London so it was 5 a.m. for him. Except he wasn’t there.

By the way, far too many people assume that when music journalists are sent on assignment, it’s all first class airfare, luxury hotels and thousand dollar dinners with rock stars and record labels. Not even close. It’s nearly always coach airfare — often with connections because those flights are cheaper than direct ones — budget hotels and everything else comes out of your own pocket, including meals, transport to and from the airport, etc. Music journalism is, more than it ever has been, a labor of love and if you break even, you’re winning.

The room was empty. Well, empty of people - there was a duffel bag on one of the beds. It was too late to order food, so I pillaged the vending machine and waited back in the room until, sometime around 2 a.m., Mick stumbled into the room and immediately began chatting with me as if we were old college chums. He was completely oblivious to, or more likely, unconcerned with, the usual pleasantries. It was sort of refreshing to be able to skip straight to the banter.

Mick had led an unusual life. He started out working on oil rigs but eventually took a leap of faith and started applying his photography skills to his passion for music. He had a keen creative mind that looked beyond obvious compositional tropes and instead conceived different angles or approaches that captured his subjects in a novel and highly-arresting way. His shots of Ozzy Osbourne, Marilyn Manson, Carcass and others were legendary — it was more than those old familiar facial expressions that he caught, but rather the razorwire emotions that bubbled beneath the surface.

The next morning, we grabbed breakfast near the hotel and then cabbed it over to the cruise ship. After a thoroughly-absurd wait to pass through a metal detector (which sounded like a pinball machine, considering that nearly every cruise ship guest was a metalhead, clad in stainless steel jewelry, piercings, studded clothing and in one case, chainmail), we arrived in our cabin. It was at this point that Mick discovered that he’d forgotten something. His camera.

I thought he was joking at first, but sure enough, he dumped his camera bag out upon his bed in our teeny little cabin and sure enough, a smattering of accessories dropped out but no camera. So we’d arrived on the ship, which would be taking off in a few minutes, and the high-end photographer flown in from London had forgotten to bring his camera.

Luckily, I’d brought along my Canon EOS 60D — a serviceable digital camera that I’d used to shoot gigs. It was something that I enjoyed as a hobby. Of course, nearly every time that I was at a show, I was either covering it as a writer — meaning that I had a photographer partner there with me — or I was there as a fan. So the photos that I took rarely saw the light of day beyond my social media accounts. Thankfully, that camera, along with the lenses I’d brought, were enough for Mick to use.

Mick knew all of the musicians and they all seemed immensely pleased to see him. He made sure to introduce me to anybody that I hadn’t met, which proved incredibly handy throughout those four days — with his intros, I was able to set up impromptu interviews as needed but mainly it just opened the door to some incredibly interesting chats with some cool new friends.

There was a committed “Work Hard/Play Hard” mentality with Mick, who joyfully indulged in the complimentary drink aspect of luxury cruise ships. So much so that I — 8 years sober at the time — wondered if we’d be able to pull it all off. The one shot that we absolutely needed to get was the fabled “hot tub shot” — one with the ship’s hot tub packed with tattooed metal girls and shirtless dudes hoisting beers, howling with boozy joy. On the last full day, the German cruise promoter arranged for some of the girls to meet at the hot tub in the afternoon — they rightly assumed that plucking dudes passing by to join the shoot would be easy. And they were right. So late in the afternoon, we all rallied at the appointed spot; everyone but Mick. We waited for what felt like a month, as I fended off the withering glare and increasingly-annoyed interrogation of my Teutonic colleague, demanding to know why the Metal Hammer photographer was not present for his own shoot. Eventually, another photographer showed up and grabbed some shots, which assuaged the promoter but which had me worried that perhaps the feature had already slipped from our hands. After all, there were still a number of bands that the magazine had requested we cover that we had not yet covered. By my calculation, there was no way that we’d be able to pull this off now. I wondered how we’d explain this to the magazine and then I wondered if I’d ever write for Metal Hammer again.

Photo by Mick Hutson

What I learned that night was that the feature was never in jeopardy. What Mick did on that final evening was nothing short of superhuman. He covered every single gig on the ship that night. There were four or five stages across the boat — everybody got their steps in on that cruise — so I was ping-ponging all over the ship to catch as many sets as I could. With forty bands in play over, realistically three full days, and two chances to see each band, I was basically running around nonstop all day long. That night, at every show I caught, I’d spy Mick off in the wings shooting photos of all the bands. He’d be in the photo pit for one set, then on the stage with a different band a half hour later. I remember seeing The Haunted playing in the ship’s bar and suddenly, from the back of the room comes Mick — crowd surfing upside down on his back, shooting the band while he’s getting passed up to the stage. He shot everyone and his photos came out great.

Photo by Mick Hutson

And the hot tub shot? He got the best one of the whole cruise — he waited until late at night, with the party at peak euphoria, and caught a jubilant crew of swashbucklers, capitalizing on the unique nighttime lighting — something the guys in the afternoon didn’t get.

Photo by Mick Hutson

We worked our asses off but Mick always made time to give me photography tips. The first night he took me up to one of the higher decks at sunset and gave me an impromptu portrait class. I took a bunch of shots of him and he took a bunch of me. We laughed our asses off constantly, spent a day in Carlos & Charlies where I watched him down one of those liters of beer (or a margarita or whatever) and at the end of the day, the feature came out great.

Mick passed away suddenly a few days ago. He was only 58 and over the years, he struggled with mental health — something he wrote about occasionally on. his Facebook page. He left in his wake scores of people who adored him and who have shared intensely fond memories of him. And he had loads of fans who are still commenting on Instagram and Facebook about how deeply they enjoyed his art and the inspiration they drew from his dedication to his craft.

I hadn’t talked to him in years. But I’m grateful to count him among my friends and today I’m a little sadder and the world is a little more empty than it was last week.

Photo by Joe Daly