Hailing from North London, photographer Miles Aldridge lived a charmed life as a young boy, his formative years spent within the inner circle that made the 1960s swing. His father, Alan Aldridge was an illustrator who got his start doing covers for Penguin Books before opening his own graphic design firm, INK, in the heart of Soho, where he worked with the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the Who, and Elton John. “I grew up around my father’s psychedelic images and the rock and roll lifestyle ofSwinging London,” Aldridge says. “My sister Saffron and I would go backstage at Elton John concerts and see the incredible pageantry from behind the scenes.”
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But things fell apart when his parents divorced. “The family imploded,” he says. “I tried to put the pieces back together and of course they never do.” From the age of 10 until he went to art school in his 20s, Aldridge struggled to adapt as his mother fell into a depression and their once vibrant psychedelic home fell apart. When he found punk music in the 1970s, he discovered an outlet to release his pent up rage through music. He then formed a band called the X Men and played psychedelic-garage-punk music.
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Realizing his true talent laid in art, Miles Aldridge left the band to study illustration at Central St. Martins. After school, he worked in publishing doing book covers that stand up to this day but found this line of work was too solitary for his liking. “I wanted to do something more energized, collaborative, bigger, bolder and sexier,” he says. “Being a film director or a photographer were the two career options I toyed with. For a while I did both.”
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