David Bailey: "Life is a seduction"

"I try and simplify everything," Bailey tells me on the phone in between disappearing to hammer nails into the wall of his new studio. "The more simple it is the better I like it. If I'm photographing Kate Moss why do I want a f***ing palm tree in the background?"

Ah well, there you go. Even talking about his photographs he - and we - can't escape the women or the attitude.

But then they have always been part of the Bailey story. When he got a job at Vogue back in the 1960s he joked that it allowed him "to pursue my three main interests: photography, women and money".

He has been pursuing all three for more than half a century now. Bailey has been married four times, made money from photography and advertising (he reckons he's shot about a thousand ads in his time) and even now he is still taking photographs at the age of, what, 78? "I'm 77 still. You're only six months out."

Bailey is what everyone calls him and of course it's also a brand. He's still probably the best known photographer in the land. Back in the 1970s he appeared in TV ads for the Olympus Trip camera in which various stooges would turn to him and say: "Who do you think you are? David Bailey?" The joke was, of course, that everyone knew that's exactly who he was.

There's a new exhibition of his work opening in Edinburgh. Bailey's Stardust. Notice the name above the title. It is full of the images you'd expect. Here are The Rolling Stones in their pomp, his mates Michael Caine and Terence Stamp, the model Jean Shrimpton, and, yes, Kate Moss sans palm tree - all of them caught in bold, punchy, eye-catching black and white. All of them Baileyed, you might say.

Actually, he points out, Shrimpton and Moss are the only two models in the exhibition. Can that be right? As I've not seen what's on the walls I don't know if that means there are no images of his current wife Catherine, or that he doesn't see her as a model any more. And come to think of it I'm pretty sure Jerry Hall is in there too. But no matter, the point he's making is about the range of his work on display.

Because the exhibition is also full of the other things he's done too. Like the images of the London East End he grew up in, of starving children in refugee camps in Sudan in the mid-1980s right up to his photographs of tribal elders in the small Indian state of Nagaland which he took in 2012. When he was well into his 70s, in other words.

"That was physically exhausting," he admits. He is not uptight about his age. "I wish nobody had told me I'm getting old, then I wouldn't have noticed."

Why is he still taking photographs, you wonder. He surely doesn't have to any more. He could be putting his feet up, doing some gardening maybe. "Well, I have my own wood in Devon. And Catherine's the gardener really."

Instead he carries on doing what he has always done. Taking photographs. Out of habit perhaps, but out of curiosity too, he says.

Curiosity is part of his make-up. In conversation he's also brusque, bullish, sweary, at times disengaged (if the question doesn't interest him he doesn't answer it and starts talking about something else), sometimes boorish, annoyed (don't get him started on the failings of former Labour leader Ed Milliband) and unreflective. More than once he says to me: "I never gave it much thought." But he's rarely uninteresting.

And he is definitely a giggler. Laughter constantly bubbles out of him. He even frames his life as a form of amusement. He once told me his childhood was Felliniesque, I remind him. In what way? "All I remember is Hitler trying to kill me until I was seven and a half," he says, laughing. "I spent most of the war down the coal cellar. I hated Hitler. I only knew about four names. I knew my parents' names, my sister's names and Hitler." He stops, recalculates. "And Churchill and Stalin. They were the only f***ing names I knew."

The coal cellar is where he'd later start developing his photographs when he first became interested in photography around the age of 12.

His father wasn't around much when he was a kid. Did he notice his absence? "Not really, no. It was during the war. By the time I was eight I didn't care really. He had a club in Hackney, a kind of dodgy club. And he got slashed, I think, by the Krays when they were about 19 or so.

"My mum was good. She was tough. I think my dad was easy-going and charming. She read books. I never saw my dad with a book. She was smarter. My dad used to talk a lot of Yiddish and cockney rhyming slang. My mum wouldn't have any of that because she thought it was common.

Clearly his parents didn't get along when Dad was in the picture. "She'd come in and say, 'Tell your dad his dinner's on the table'. And he'd be in the room. He'd say, 'Tell her I don't want it.' I was like a ventriloquist's doll."

Life was poor. At times rough too. He was in a gang, he says. "Just local gangs from the age of eight," he says. "Not like the Krays."

And then came national service. He was sent to Singapore, stuck Picasso images above his bed rather than pin-ups on the wall ("that caused a lot of punch-ups," he laughs), dreamed of being a jazz musician until an officer borrowed then lost his trumpet and finally realised he was more interested in the William Claxton photographs that were on the covers of his jazz albums. That and seeing a Henri Cartier-Bresson picture opened his eyes to the power of photography.

After national service he returned to London where he was taken on by the fashion photographer John French. Soon he was taking photographs for the Daily Express, married for the first time, to Rosemary Bramble, a typist, and able to turn down a staff job on Vogue (because they didn't pay as much as Women's Own). He took the job at the second time of asking, had his first Vogue cover in 1961 and was on his way to changing the face of fashion photography.

Did it feel back then that a door was opening for the likes of him? "I knew the working-class thing was changing from the way people treated you."

At the beginning he was tolerated rather than welcomed. "I used to take my pictures to Town Magazine - it was called Man About Town in those days - and they'd say, 'Tell Mr Bailey we like his pictures', because they never believed that someone with my accent could take f***ing pictures. I don't know how I got into Conde Nast. They were so snobbish there you had to be the friend of somebody."

He points out that the doors weren't flung open for everyone. "Oh yeah. There was a great model called Paulene Stone. Vogue used to say, 'Listen to her accent.' F***ing hell, we're not photographing her accent.'"

Still, he admits, things did change for many. "By the end of the 1960s it became a bit of an advantage to come from the East End."

Of course some of that can be put down to him. In his pop history of the 1960s the writer Shawn Levy sees Bailey as one of the transformative elements, particularly in his relationship - both professional and, yes, very personal - with the model Jean Shrimpton, freeing up the stuffiness of fashion photography and giving it a more democratic, modern edge. His Box Of Pin Ups, a collection of his friends and acquaintances including Caine and Stamp and Mick Jagger and the Krays, is now one of the relics of that era.

Shrimpton was in there too. I think it's fair to say that sex was always part of the equation in his work. By the 1970s that would backfire on him as feminists pointed to the way he objectified women. (It didn't help when he published intimate photographs of his third wife Marie Helvin. Helvin wasn't best pleased.)

When he took a photograph of a woman back then, I ask him, was it always an act of seduction?

"No, life's an act of seduction. That's why we're here. Everything we do is seduction, isn't it? We're programmed to be seductive."

It's just biology? "Of course it is." He is giggling again.

"I mean I preferred the girls to the frocks. I was never really interested in the frocks unless they were by great designers."

In the years that followed he married Catherine Deneuve, then Helvin and had many, many girlfriends in between. "David Bailey/Makes Love Daily" as the saying of the time went. "I'm not gay," he says when I broach this part of his life. "If I was I might have a different answer."

Anyway, he says, he doesn't think there was anything especially different about the 1960s. "Nothing changes. People sleep around more now than they did then. In those days you were scared of making someone pregnant."

There's an element of jousting to some of his conversation. He likes making a game of it and it offers him a measure of control. When I bring up his pictures of the acts who performed at Live Aid ("I like them when they're coming off because they looked wrecked," he says. "Going on they were too nervous") he says he has no strong memories of that day. I find that hard to believe, I say. "I thought Freddie Mercury snogged you on that day?"

"Oh yeah. There are only two men who have stuck their tongue down my throat and he's one of them."

Which raises a question. Who was the other one? "An American photographer called Bob Richardson."

Ah yes, the infamous Terry Richardson's infamous dad. He was Anjelica Huston's partner at one point, wasn't he? "Mine as well, by the way. Not the guy. Anjelica," he sniggers.

Not long after Live Aid he went to Sudan to the camps where those fleeing the Ethiopian famine were to be found. There he took photographs of starving children breathing their last. "They died a couple of hours later a lot of them," he says. How do you steel yourself to take those images, I ask him? "You have to cut yourself off. You mustn't think about it. If you thought about it ..."

He veers off and starts talking about doctors getting in his way at the time. It's as if he doesn't want to follow that sentence through.

Was there a reaction later, though? "Well, Don always says that. He doesn't really see them 'til he prints them," Bailey says, a reference to the veteran war photographer Don McCullin and, you might note, another swerve around the subject.

"It's a form of protection, I guess. You just cut yourself off."

Could he have imagined doing what McCullin did; going to war zones in Vietnam and Biafra? "No. I don't want to be shot at. I went to Afghanistan four or five years ago. The army protects you so well. It's not like being Don in the Congo dealing with mercenaries.

"The camera protects you in a funny sort of way. I think it does."

He's looking forward to coming up to Scotland, he says. "I like the Scots actually," he says (as if he shouldn't). "The Isle of Skye is one of my fondest memories." Oh yes? Why's that? "I seduced my wife there. Couldn't miss," he cackles.

Of course he's been married to Catherine since 1986. His seduction days are behind him.

But then when you're 77, not quite 78, lots of days are behind you. I ask him: if I was to speak to him in another 15 years from now ... and he interrupts. "What age are you?" Early fifties, I say. "OK, so you're optimistic as well," he snickers. "It's no good worrying about something that you can't do anything about."

It's probably a sensible attitude in terms of your mental health. You do wonder though. Friends and colleagues are no longer around. Of the "black trinity" - as fashion photographer Norman Parkinson dubbed those working-class wide boys Bailey, Brian Duffy and Terence Donovan, who rewrote the rules of fashion photography in the 1960s - only Bailey is still with us after all.

"You lose a lot of friends," he admits. "But you lose a lot of f***ing enemies as well."

He is still laughing as I put the phone down.

Bailey's Stardust opens at the Scottish National Gallery on Saturday and continues until October 18