After a successful run at the MEP museum in Paris earlier this year, The Photographers’ Gallery is hosting Music + Life, a solo exhibition of Dennis Morris’s evocative photography, which will also appear across outdoor spaces in partnership with BUILDHOLLYWOOD, including in the borough of Hackney, where he spent his childhood. Music + Life brings together the two strands of his photography, a reflection of the fact that for Morris – who recalls music being a cornerstone of life within the West Indian community that raised him – “they were all one and the same in some ways”.

The exhibition has already received rapturous critical acclaim, but Morris always sensed this moment would come, having backed himself from the beginning. “I basically had to have the confidence in myself,” he remembers.

“Sometimes I got the feeling that no one took me seriously, because it was quite unique at that time for a young Black kid or any Black person wanting to be a photographer – and not a wedding photographer,” he recalls. “A lot of times I felt people were just humouring me. And so when the opportunity came, I just took it, and when I took it, I made sure I came up with something that they would never have thought of.” This ambition became a kind of armour for him. “I never let any of the barriers, the racism, whatever you want to call it, bother me. So long as I could get to that point that I wanted, which was to get that shot, that great shot.”

As his photography goes on display, Morris reflects on some of the defining moments in his remarkable career.

You picked up a camera when you were very young. What appealed to you about photography?

It’s difficult for a generation who were brought up on digital to get, but the essence of photography, the process of it, is absolutely magical.

I was nine when I first saw the process. I was a choir boy in the East End of London, at a church called St. Marks in Dalston. They had a benefactor, a man called Donald Patterson, and he was a manufacturer of photographic equipment. He made chemicals, enlargers, developing tanks, and he was also a royal patron – he supplied the royal family with all their photographic equipment. He became extremely wealthy from what I gathered and he wanted to give something back, so he got involved in the church.

One of the things he did was he created a photographic club for the choir boys. In the vicarage, there was a darkroom and I wandered in there, and I saw one of the older boys standing in front of this thing, which was an enlarger. He took a piece of paper out of a box, put it on the easel, switched on the light for the enlarger, the image went down onto the paper, he counted a few seconds, switched off the light, picked up the paper, quickly put it this dish, and then rocked the dish, and this image appeared. I just thought, whoah, magic. From that day, from that second, I just knew that was going to be my life.

Bob Marley is such a big part of your story, again at such a young age. Can you tell me a bit about how you got that break with Bob Marley?

At that time in England, within the West Indian community, everyone was very excited about his music. He was the new sound coming out of Jamaica. When I saw that he was coming to do this tour, I decided that I wanted to take some pictures of him.

So I didn’t go to school on the day of his first show, which was going to be at a club called The Speakeasy Club on Margaret Street in the West End. I went down to the club and got there around 10 o’clock in the morning, without really knowing anything about the music industry and that bands don’t do sound checks at 10 o’clock in the morning. And so I waited and waited and waited, and eventually he turned up. As he was walking into the club with the rest of the band, I walked up to him and said, “Can I take your picture?” And he said, “Yeah man, come in”.

He was fascinated by me in some ways, like I was by him. He was asking me what it was like to be a young Black kid in England, and I was asking him about Jamaica, because I had very little knowledge of Jamaica. He really took to me. He told me about the tour and asked me if I’d like to come along, and I said yeah. And so the next day, I packed a bag and went to his hotel. In those days they only had a transit van as a tour bus. And I jumped in and [took] one of my most iconic shots. He turns around and looks at me, says, “You ready then?” And I said, “Yeah, I’m ready”. And so the adventure began.

The tour was supposed to last a few weeks if I remember rightly, and within a few days, they weren’t into it, because it was the tail-end of winter and it was still quite cold, and they never came prepared for that weather. One morning they woke up and they wanted to play football. It was snowing. When they opened the curtain and they saw it, [band members] Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer said, “wah dat?” And I said, “it’s snow.” “What do you mean, snow?” They were convinced it was a sign from Jah that they should leave Babylon. Peter and Bunny hated touring. They didn’t like the food, they didn’t like anything about it. Bob was quite willing to put up with it, but they weren’t. Anyway, they refused to continue, they went back, and the tour collapsed.

Three years later, Bob came back without Peter and Bunny, and with Rita [Marley] and Marcia [Griffiths], and played The Lyceum. Bob knew that was his moment, and he took it, and it was magical. I had a photo pass, and I was in the photo pit, and I ended up getting the cover of the Melody Maker and NME and Timeout.

My ambition was never to be a rock photographer. I wanted to be a war photographer. I was influenced by people like Don McCullin, [Robert] Kapa, Gordon Parks, and the techniques that I learned was reportage. The work of those photographers, they’re studies of people. I took that into rock.

I was reading about your work with Sex Pistols and that you were described as the only person to really put them at ease. Is that something that you would try to do consciously?

I think I have a natural ability in that way. It’s funny, in all the work I’ve done and all the people I’ve met, I’m actually quite a shy person, but when I’ve got a camera in my hand, I’m a completely different person altogether. Something comes out in me.

And in some way I’m able to make a person really take away that mask that they wear and reveal the other side of themselves, which is the beauty of themselves. That’s what I’ve always been able to bring out in my subjects: the beauty of themselves and not what you may have read about them. Like the shots of Sid Vicious. You hear about him being – like his name – this vicious, cantankerous individual, and then you see the shots of mine and you’re like, wow. There’s this really beautiful, poetic James Dean type of person. And then there’ll be another shot of him where you get that other side of it, which is the violent side, but then at the same time, you don’t just see him as just this out-and-out destructive person. There’s some form of emotional destruction going on, if you see what I’m saying.

I wanted to ask you about some of your other projects as well, including the work that you made in downtown Kingston, Jamaica. Did moving between the two – London and Kingston – shape your perspective?

Yeah! My first trip back to Jamaica was through Bob, and it was a real eye-opener for me. There were all the vibes of growing up in London, thinking I was young and tough, or I thinking I had it hard, or whatever it may be. And then you get to Jamaica, and you find there’s this kid on the corner that gives you a look that makes you realise that basically you’d better keep quiet or it’s all over. And then you meet another person who has never really been to school, but you see the wisdom that they have just from having to learn how to survive. There’s all kinds of things that went through my mind. And then you’ve got, for me, this vibrancy of the fact that this is where I was born, and everybody was just so positive and thinking of the future.

When I came back to England and I looked around, for me, it was like, this is in some ways a piece of cake. What I need to do is keep myself together and keep my focus, because that’s what it was all about in Jamaica around that time – what they call consciousness. It was all about being conscious of yourself, your abilities, what you want to gain out of life, not just necessarily money but your health, your views, and all these sorts of things. So it was really a massive influence.

When you think about it, that’s what a lot of that first wave of West Indians brought over to England. England was a very, very dark, grey place, but that generation came over and started saying, “Hey, let’s party”. Or the way we dressed, always looking sharp. The way we walked. Every Jamaican walked with a bounce, and suddenly you started seeing white kids wanting to dress the same, wearing two-tone and pork pie hats, and walking with a swagger. When you look at people like Liam [Gallagher], the way Liam walks, I mean, that’s pure Jamaican. In Jamaica, we say “bussin”, which means you think you’re special, you’re extra, you’re hard. Liam walks with that swagger.

And so these are the things that I gained. I gained a vibe and saw how that would help me get through all the obstacles that were placed in front of me in that sense. Because it was never easy. Racism was there and in some ways is still there. But it’s learning how to deal with it, learning not to let it break you down psychologically, always thinking like, OK, fine, that’s how you think, whatever.

You also made in the Sikh communities in Southall in the 1970s, which was an incredibly difficult time for that part of London and that community. But there seems to be a warmth and a happiness to a lot of the portraits that you made there. What was your experience of making that project?

When I came across Southall, which was the other side of London, it was fascinating for me. Even though we as West Indians had a community, from Brixton to Hackney to other places, what was unique about Southall was, when I first came off that train at Southall Station, even the station name was in [Punjabi]. They were showing Bollywood movies in cinemas. And a large majority of the pubs were owned by Indians, Sikhs, so if you went to the pub, you could get poppadoms with your pint, and the landlord was a Sikh.

That never really happened in the West Indian community. We didn’t really have many pub landlords who were Black. They’d built something really, really unique in Southall, and I was just completely blown away by it. And so I just wanted to get more and more to get involved with it.

But at the same time, what I realised is the difficulties that we were having, they were having the same difficulties as well. When you look at the pictures of the West Indian community, even though the housing conditions were bad at the time, people were still looking sharp. And when you look at the Sikh community, the conditions were bad but they were also looking sharp and positive and had a vibe about them. And so the similarities were there, just a different twist to them.

These documentary photographs of everyday life within London are perhaps less familiar than your music photography to some people. What has your experience been like sharing both sides of your work with the world through your exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery?

The strangest thing about, let’s say, the Growing Up Black images is they have always been there. And they have actually been used or been printed in singular form, as such. We’ve come to a time now where basically people are fascinated by an era, a time, that’s gone by. It’s not nostalgia. It’s catching up on a past or a time that we were all too busy trying to do whatever we were doing, that certain things just passed us by. We’re now in a time where, basically, people need and want to see such images.

I’m immensely proud of it all, I really am. But as I said, for me, it’s quite strange. When the show opened in Paris, it was phenomenally successful. Simon Baker, the head of the museum, at one point said to me, “You don’t seem very excited by it all, Dennis”. And I said to him, “I am very excited by it, but the truth of it is, for me, it was always going to be that good”.

Alongside the exhibition, your photography is on display in the streets around London as part of the BUILDHOLLYWOOD collaboration, including around Hackney and East London. How does it feel to show your work in such a public way in the area where you grew up?

I think it’s great. I think in some ways, it’s going to give the community that exists now an insight into the community that existed then. A lot of people say Hackney is being gentrified. So it will open the eyes of the new community to see what it was before – the history, the legacy of the area. And for any of the people still around, it will also hopefully give them a feeling of joy and a feeling of, oh yeah, we did this. We went through all that, and here we are, still standing.

Do you know if anyone that you have photographed in your career has been to the show and seen their own face?

Funnily enough, somebody got in touch with me. It was one of the group shots. It was him, his mother and his brother, and he was quite surprised by it all. He said, “we all look so innocent”. And I said, “we all were!” We were all so innocent. It’s that thing of coming from another place at a very young age.

What would you like people to take away from experiencing your work, whether it’s in The Photographers’ Gallery show or in the BUILDHOLLYWOOD street displays that will be going up around London?

A feeling of positivity. I’m sure that whatever picture it is, when people look at it, what they will see is a feeling of hope. I think that’s what people get when they look at any of my photographs. If it’s Bob Marley, if it’s from the Growing Up Black series, whatever image you look at – when you look at the people’s faces, there’s a feeling of joy, a better tomorrow, a better day.

Dennis Morris: Music + Life is at The Photographers’ Gallery until Sunday 28 September, book your tickets now