Palace tried to ‘block picture of David Bowie and Princess Diana'
The Palace attempted to block the release of a picture of David Bowie and Princess Diana to dampen the media storm around her love life, Bowie's former photographer has claimed.
Denis O'Regan, 71, captured an iconic shot of the late Princess of Wales with one of Britain's most successful and pioneering musicians after his Glass Spider concert in Wembley Stadium in June 1987.
O'Regan told The Telegraph that the Princess, 25 at the time, had shyly asked him whether Bowie would want a picture with her, to which the photographer responded: 'I think he would.'
'I thought it was so funny,' he said, adding that Diana had been 'so sweet'.
But he explained that the picture almost did not make it into the public domain at the time.
'So the next day, my agent got a call from [the] Palace, saying don't use the pictures, because word had gone out about James Hewitt. So that's when it kind of erupted. It was interesting, on a number of levels.'
The Princess had attended Bowie's concert with Army Major James Hewitt, with whom she had a five-year affair from 1986.
'They just didn't want Diana in the press,' O'Regan said, adding: 'It was really [that] they didn't want to fuel the fire.
'So the more pictures that weren't out there, the better, because someone would have said: 'This is her at the show that she turned up to with James Hewitt', even though I didn't get the multi-million dollar shot of the two of them together, because no one knew who he was… it was obviously a tiny moment in history.'
It comes ahead of the release of his new book, David Bowie by Denis O'Regan, which charts the rock star's career through O'Regan's lens over more than three decades.
The pair's working relationship began in 1974, five years after Bowie's breakthrough hit, Space Oddity. The Modern Love singer was recording at Olympic Studios in Barnes at the time and O'Regan was working at the newspaper shop across the street.
O'Regan said: 'I partly missed him, so I came back the second day, and that's why, when he saw me two days running, he said 'You should work for NME'.'
Bowie's words were 'prophetic', as described by the photographer, who ended up being a regular contributor to the music publication NME.
O'Regan has since captured images of the most famous musicians in the world, including Freddie Mercury, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Bob Marley.
But the Ziggy Stardust star inspired it all. He said: 'When I saw David Bowie, that was it. I saw another side of music and the visual aspect of it.'
Among the pictures featured in his new book are Bowie laughing with Mick Jagger from the Rolling Stones at the 'Bill Stickers' club in Soho and a behind-the-scenes capture of Bowie's shoot with Helmut Newton, the fashion photographer in Berlin.
One intimate photograph shows Bowie asleep and shirtless on the bow of a boat in Thailand, where O'Regan had accompanied him during his Serious Moonlight tour in 1983, which had extra shows in Bangkok, Singapore and Hong Kong.
Describing the thought process behind the shot, O'Regan said: 'So we'd had lunch, and David then lay on the boat, as per that picture, having a snooze.
'By this time, I knew him really well. So while he was asleep, I just walked up to him, put a foot under each arm, and then just shot down at him with the sweeping river.'
He added: 'And I thought it'd make a really good picture. So there's a picture of him dozing, then there's a picture of him waking up, and there's the picture of him laughing. It sort of sums us up, really, but at the beginning of that tour, I never thought I'd ever do something like that in Thailand with David.'
O'Regan described the musician, who died aged 69 in 2016 after being diagnosed with liver cancer, as 'very down to earth' and 'different to his stage persona'.
'I spent a vast amount of time with him,' he told The Telegraph, adding: 'We became very close, really, considering it was not what I expected, because I expected this enigma to keep me at arm's length, which he definitely didn't.'
David Bowie by Denis O'Regan will be released by ACC Art Books on July 22 2025.
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