About

Based near Warwick in the centre of England, I became passionate about photography from an early age.

With music always playing in the parental home, I was weened on a rich harvest of sounds during the sixties and seventies. Bands such as Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, The Beatles, Pink Floyd and Led Zep were always on the record player, and I was a regular listener to Alan Freeman, John Peel and Annie Nightingale on Radio One.

I took my first live concert shots at Birmingham Town Hall in 1974 when I smuggled a small rangefinder camera into a Black Sabbath gig. After student life at Swansea University and Leicester Polytechnic (a haze of lost years induced by cheap beer), I subsequently studied photography at Warwickshire College, gaining 7 distinctions and later becoming a member of the Royal Photographic Society.

Since those early beginnings, and having taken thousands of images and attended hundreds of concerts over the years, I still get the adrenaline rush when I see a band walk on stage. I am represented via the international music picture library Redferns, which has one of the largest collections of music images in the world. My pictures have appeared in many magazines, newspapers and websites around the world (inc. The Times, Telegraph, Guardian, News of the World, Sunday Mirror, Independent, New York Times, Rolling Stone, Wall Street Journal, Billboard, Classic Rock, Metal Hammer, Guitarist and BBC) and I provide images for numerous bands and organisations. Please feel free to contact me for assignments, projects etc.

The gallery represents a small sample of my work and is updated regularly. All of the images on this site are available to purchase for licensed editorial use, so please contact me to discuss your requirements.

FOR YOUR INFORMATION:- The images on this website are the property of William Stephen Thorne and protected under UK and International copyright laws. Copying, downloading, saving as digital files, printing, manipulating or reproducing without the prior written permission of William Stephen Thorne is strictly forbidden and would constitute a breach of copyright.

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