Life on the London Underground in the 1970s and 80s - PHOTO

The rockers are there in studded leather jackets, proudly showing off their tattoos; so too are the snarling punks and less fashion-conscious, older commuters - with one middle-aged lady nursing a pint of beer as she sits in the carriage, back when the floors were still wooden.Such were the scenes on the London Underground in the 1970s and 80s, beautifully captured on camera by Bob Mazzer, whose chronicle of life on the Tube was a happy accident.Now aged 65, Mazzer, from Whitechapel in the East End, used to be a film projectionist in King's Cross - a job that saw him travelling home late at night.And that was when some of his best shots were taken: of people asleep on the trains; revellers out on the town; couples kissing; and youths jumping over the gated barriers.'I felt the Tube was mine and I was there to take pictures. It was like a party,' he told the Evening Standard.Mazzer always had his trusty Leica M4 with him and started snapping away.But it was only later he realised he had put together quite a collection of images of Tube life.'You don't think you are starting a project, but one day you look back over your recent pictures and there are a dozen connected images, and you realise it is the beginning of a project - and then you fall in love with it,' he added.Mazzer, who now lives in Hastings, East Sussex, got his first camera - an Ilford Sporty - aged 13, as a Bar Mitzvah present.His passion for photography really took off while he studied at Woodberry Down School, which had a dark room.Around this time, he also began attending the Saturday Art Club at the Hornsey College of Art, where he would later enrol.It was in 1976 that he acquired the camera he'd use to take the Underground shots - a black enamel Leica M4 with a 35mm lens.This was far superior to his Sporty - a 'crap little camera of plastic and tin' was how he described it to Spitalfieldslife.In the early days, he used Kodachrome 25, a slow film meant for taking pictures in bright sunshine.But the results speak for themselves: wonderful images that hark back to an age before a sea of mobile phones lit up the carriages.His pictures proved so powerful, some were first shown at a GLC exhibition at the Royal Festival Hall in the 1980s.Mazzer still travels on the Tube when he goes to London.As always, he carries his camera with him - and though the times may have changed, there is never a shortage of colourful characters to photograph, each with their own story to tell.(dailymail.co.uk)ANN.Az