    Portrait of an icon   Mark Dapin  David Bailey is an
irascible, opinionated, absent-minded wind-up merchant. He's
also one of the most influential photographers of all time,
particularly for chronicling swinging '60s London.  Photographer
David Bailey, 76, is testing film in his London studio. He is
dressed in a dollop of colourful clothes, which he wears loosely
and carelessly, like a painter. His patchy white hair is
similarly unstyled. He's a little bloke with laughing eyes,
which harden suddenly when he thinks he hears something that
offends him - but the words aren't in the air, they're in his
head, echoes from another era.  It's the first time I've met a
noun: when I was growing up in England in the 1970s, if a boy
picked up a camera and took a photograph, he was, inevitably, "a
proper little David Bailey".  Bailey behaves a bit like a noun,
too - as if his meaning was fixed long ago, and he will, always
and inevitably, be used only in a certain way by people who put
together sentences.  Bailey has