Music Photography

Frankly! It’s A Pop Festival @ Brisbane Powerhouse, 04.09.2011

Another year, another Frankly! and, like last year, another Frankly where I didn’t keep any notes or write any tweets of what happened during the day.

Looking through my list of posts yet to be written, a sizeable chunk of them are festivals, and this is normally true at any time.  Photographing festivals is hard work when you take the approach of making the most of a photo pass, rather than the alternative of coming in later in the day and shooting a few of the big name acts towards the top of the bill.  The aftermath is worse than your average gig, with the physical side of being on site for the day only telling half the story of the work that goes in to photographing a festival, and so getting around to blogging about them nearly always ends up being left to last and a often long time after the actual event.  In a lot of ways it’s also hard to write much as at most festivals you see a band for the three songs you’re photographing and then move on to the next stage.

With only one stage, Frankly isn’t like that and the lack of words is a lot more to do with the busy time of year: Wednesday, Thursday and Friday had been BigSound, the Friday night was the Trail Of The Dead show at The Hi-Fi, Frankly was on the Saturday and then I was back to Melbourne for work first thing Sunday morning.  It’s the same every year, and it’s the same reason why there were no words to write about the 2010 Frankly.

One thing I’ve always liked about Frankly was that it was a daytime event and all over by about 7:30pm and the rest of the night was yours to do whatever you wanted.  Having eagerly put in to cover it again this year, it was a surprise to find that the event had been shifted to the evening, with the first act not until 6:30pm.  It didn’t seem to affect numbers and once again there was a more than healthy turnout.  As has become expected, Blank Realm were a highlight from the early early evening.  The Twerps were too twee for me and Wet Hair just not really my thing.  I enjoyed LA Vampires, especially from a photographic point of view, but the later start and the need to get home and get ready to fly down to Victoria in the morning meant that I didn’t get to see all of their set.

Although I’m always keen to photograph Frankly, I’m hoping they shift it back to being a daytime event in 2012.

Jan 25, 2012 | Categories: Music Photography | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | Leave A Comment »

Big Day Out @ Gold Coast Parklands, 22.01.2012 – Quick Round Up

Sunday was my second time at the Big Day Out with a photo pass.  My day of photographing 21 bands looked like this (it would have been 22 but thanks to Kanye West being 45 minutes late, I missed Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds).


View 1/22/12 11:06 AM in a larger map

Total distance: 14.73km
Total time: 10:30:27
Moving time: 6:40:15
Max speed: 12.07km/hr
Average speed: 1.40km/hr
Average moving speed: 2.21km/hr
Min elevation: 27m
Max elevation: 96m
Elevation gain: 312m
Min grade: -12.5%
Max grade: 13.6%

I don’t know if I quiet believe the GPS stats I collected via my Android phone.  Whilst there are a few higher parts of Parklands, somehow I managed to find a 69m difference between the highest and lowest points and some of the tracks look a little off from what I think they should be.  I forgot to start the tracker when I got off the bus and didn’t set it going until after I had picked up my photographer’s vest (the starting marker is the very left side of the main stages, the end marker is the bus stop for the trip back to Helensvale train station).  The extra metres from the bus stop to the stage at the start of the day would have put the total distance for the day over the 15km mark, which I could well believe though.

In due course I’ll probably write a post about the day (although I didn’t take any notes or tweet anything that happened and it’s already becoming a bit of a blur).  In the meantime there’s a gallery of my photos over on The Vine to go with Andrew McMillen’s review.

Highlights? Battles and the craziness of the two songs we got to photograph OFWGKTA. Cage The Elephant were fun, as were what I saw of Royksopp.

Lowlights? Kanye being 45 minutes late, all the dreary triple j Oz rock bands towards the start of the day, and the embarrassment of having some of the international acts play the tiny Hot Produce stage to tiny audiences.  The numbers were definitely down on previous years I’ve been to Big Day Out and the tent stages all looked liked they’d been downsized for the smaller crowd.  I’m not a religious man, but that the heavens decided to open within seconds of the dull Kasabian starting their main stage set was enough to think it was a sign of divine retribution.

Although there’s been the usual increasing complaints, if you can find four or five bands that you want to see, as with any other day festival, it’s worth going.  Interesting to see what the fallout is and what happens next year.

Jan 24, 2012 | Categories: Music Photography | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | Leave A Comment »

Frankly! It’s A Pop Festival @ Brisbane Powerhouse, 04.09.2010

A long time ago, all the way back at the start of September 2010, more than 16 months ago, I went and took some photos at Frankly! It’s Not A Pop Festival at The Powerhouse.  Given that I love going to Frankly I really wish I had something to say about it, but,  having not set up a blog and added some notes, my mind is a complete blank trying to recall anything about the day.  You’ll just have to enjoy the photographs instead.  It must have been good again as I went back in 2011.

Jan 20, 2012 | Categories: Music Photography | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave A Comment »

Explosions In The Sky + Harmony @ The Hi-Fi, 13.12.2011

My last gig for 2011.

Having made a first New Year’s resolution to stop photographing at Woodland at the Kurt Vile show last week, after tonight I decide that it’s time for a second resolution come January – to stop going to see instrumental post rock bands.  I usually go and see these acts based on recommendation and /or reputation but time after time I find them to be fairly boring affairs.  Quiet/Loud/Quiet/Repeat for 90 minutes.  Sure there are times when they improve, usually when they’re at their loudest volume levels and the undertones and textures come to the fore, but these moments are often too fleeting when stuck within the rigid template of the bands I keep going to see.  Maybe it’s just that I was spoilt by seeing my bloody valentine play ‘The Holocaust’ three nights in a row and knowing that nothing is ever going to surpass that as a movement of extreme noise.

I’m surprised by how popular Explosions In The Sky are.  Although I don’t come to The Hi-Fi that often, it’s only the third time I’ve been here and they’ve had the upstairs balcony open (The Drones’ show on opening night and OFWGKTA being the other two).  Maybe I just have a habit of going to see bands that aren’t very popular.  Whilst most/all post rock bands aren’t usually much to look at, annoyingly EITS play in almost complete darkness.  As the songs go on for so long, instead of the usual “first three”, we’ve been given 15 minutes in the photo pit.  I keep anticipating that the lighting levels will go up when the band hit the “loud” phase of a song but keep being disappointed that nothing happens at these times.  Watching people watching an instrumental post rock band is a weird experience; a whole room of people stood still, nodding their heads in unison at the appropriate times.

Having made those comments about post rock bands, the real reason I’m here tonight is to see the opening act, Harmony.  Although this is the third time I’ve seen the band (the other couple of times being down in Melbourne, supporting Ben Salter at the Northcote Social Club and a week later supporting No Anchor at the Old Bar), it’s the first time photographing them.  Requesting to cover them tonight was also brought about by not being able to get to either of their two Brisbane shows the week before.  Photographing them tonight also means that I’ve photographed all three ex-members of mclusky in the last week; Harmony’s bassist Jon Chapple tonight, and Andrew Falkous and Jack Egglestone at last week’s Future Of The Left gig.

Over the last few months, the band have become one of my favourite new(ish) Australian bands, particularly when they play live.  I guess they could be lazily described as a more gospel and (probably) more primal but less abrasive version of The Drones.  Although I think I read that their album was recorded live and very quickly after the band formed, it comes nowhere near doing justice to how they sound playing live right in front of you.  There’s something about seeing a band that relies heavily on the presence and power of group backing vocals that just can’t be captured in a recording.  It’s good to see a few days after the gig that they win ‘Best New-ish Act Mess+Noise’s annual Readers Poll and come in at Number 13 in the Critics Poll for the albums of the year.  As M+N’s album review summarises “The stuff that will never win any awards or top any triple j polls, but fucking well should”.

Jan 19, 2012 | Categories: Music Photography | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave A Comment »

Kurt Vile & The Violators + Blank Realm + Kellie Lloyd @ Woodland, 08.12.2011

The afternoon doesn’t get off to the best of starts when the set times are tweeted: Kellie Lloyd at 9:15pm, Blank Realm at 10:15pm and Kurt Vile at 11:15pm. It brings a quick tweeted response of my darkened mood. It’s a Thursday night, I have work to go to tomorrow and I do not want to be at the gig where the main event doesn’t start until 11:15pm. Given that reports of his other Australian shows have him playing a two hour set, potentially I could still be out in the Valley seeing a band play at 1:15am, before needing to get back home and then get up and go to work a few hours later. The show is at Woodland so I really shouldn’t expect much, given their continuously ludicrous show times, which I keep writing about, like a stuck record.

Kellie Lloyd kicks the evening off with a solo song before being joined by Tape/Off for the rest of her set. Her solo songs are a lot grittier, noisier and have more edge than the much more poppy Screamfeeder songs of hers that I know. They remind me of something but I can’t keep put my finger on it. She starts her set slightly later than had been time that had been tweeted earlier in the day and technical issues in the second song push the end time further back.

By the time Blank Realm set-up and start, it’s 10:45pm, 30 minutes later than their advertised start time. They’re still one of my favourite Brisbane bands though and I’m really looking forwards to new recordings from them in 2012.

Kurt Vile starts at 11:45pm, again 30 minutes later than he was supposed to play and although part of me considers only staying for a few songs to get some photos, I end up staying for just over an hour and bailing at 12:45am. I stay because Smoke Ring For My Halo has been one of my favourite albums from the year and his live show is really enjoyable and sounds great. And yet I find it hard to completely relax and enjoy myself as I keep checking my watch.

I hear the next day that he played until 1:15am. It’s times like this that I become more and more convinced that the music scene in Brisbane exists solely for students, the unemployed and the people in the music industry who work these hours and don’t have any responsibilities. I decide that my first New Year’s resolution is to stop covering gigs at Woodland unless there’s something spectacular happening, maybe another MereNoise Meltdown or a Flavours Of Scuzz. It’s not just a work day thing, I don’t really even want to bother with weekend shows as they finish even later and previous experience has seen me seeing bands at 3am there. I don’t want to be hanging around until 3am to see a band. Judging by the small amount of people still there at these times compared to when the venue was at its most full, hours earlier, I know I’m not the only one. Having already put in to cover a couple of gigs in the New Year, at the moment I’ve got no further plans to get back to Woodland in a hurry. It’s just not fun and it’s making me hate going out to see live music.

Jan 18, 2012 | Categories: Music Photography | Tags: , , , , , , , , | Leave A Comment »

Future Of The Left + Turnpike + Tape/Off @ The Zoo, 06.12.2011

Tonight is the night I finally get to see Future Of The Left for the first time. Although they have played Brisbane a few times they also seem to plan their Australian tours to coincide with the New Year and I’ve always been out of town when they’ve been here before.  In addition to the show at The Zoo, they also played a short set at Tym’s Guitars which I really wanted to get to but I end up being stuck at work. I think they only played four songs so it must have been a fairly short set.

I was a bit of a late-comer to mclusky.  So late that it was after the band had folded and after I’d moved to Brisbane when Pete from Vegas Kings had to explain who they were to me when he put on a Shooting At Unarmed Men (featuring ex-mclusky bassist Jon Chapple) show at Rosie’s (from memory it might have been a MereNoise celebration and it it might have been a free show and possibly an invite-only show).

It’s the evening after the night before and thanks to a poorly positioned empty beer bottle, I’ve got a camera that’s far from fully functioning.  Although the LCD screen isn’t working, I can set the ISO, aperture and shutter speed using the display in the viewfinder.  There’s obviously no preview facility to look at the photos I’ve taken to fine tune exposures or keep a record of what and how many photos I’ve got of each member of the band or whether I’ve taken anything that’s any good: Essentially I’m kicking it old school with a digital camera that might as well be a film camera. There are a couple more difficulties though in that I’ve no way of knowing how many photos I’ve taken until the memory card is full and I’ve no way of knowing how much power is left in the battery until it runs out.

It’s also my first time seeing Tape/Off and I really like what I see.  I thought I had seen them before but think I had them mixed up with Lunch Tapes, who I didn’t think much of.  At the start Tape/Off sound a bit like early Pavement but as the set goes on start to sound more like an early 90s shoegaze band.  The highlight of their set is a song called “History” which has some fantastic layered guitar lines and really nice textures and sounds great.  The last song the band plays goes on for far too long but they show enough promise during their time to be the best new (even though they’re not that new) Brisbane band I’ve seen since Dune Rats earlier in the year.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen Turnpike.  They’re a band that are well liked in Brisbane and I want to like them but find them just too technical but don’t have the hooks to make their songs memorable enough.

Future Of The Left are good but I can’t help thinking that I probably would have enjoyed them more if I hadn’t had seen a stunning show from Mudhoney in the same venue not 24 hours previous.  Starting with Arming Eritrea, they play a mix of songs from their albums, a few from their forthcoming 2012 album, The Plot Against Common Sense, and include three crowd-pleasing mclusky songs; To Hell With Good Intentions, Without MSG I Am Nothing and Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues, the last of these providing Falco with a further chance to engage with the crowd when someone at the very front, and who has already checked out the setlist, shouts out the name of the song before Falco has time to introduce it.  Even if you don’t like the music, it’s almost worth coming to a Future Of The Left show just to listen to Falco’s banter.  Throughout their set he gives us his views on a whole matter of things; Ben Elton, Supergrass, Phil Collins, Sebastian Coe, Gavin And Stacey, and deals with hecklers with a caustic sense of humour.  His keyboard is brought on stage for Manchasm and he describes the analogue keyboard as “The twat of musical instruments” and instantly follows it up with “Or the Mitchel Johnson” to a stoney faced and silent crowd other than me.

Having no idea of  how many photos I’ve been taken, I manage to fill up a 4GB memory card, about 160 photos over the three bands, and put my camera away, which means that I end up missing the action in the last song of the night, Lapsed Catholics.  At the end of the song Falco disassembles Jack Egglestone’s drum kit one drum at a time and re-arranges them across the stage, forcing him to move from his drum stool towards the front to keep the beat going, and a couple of girls are brought out of the crowd and given a drum stick each to help out.  I kept thinking I should get my camera back out and put in a new memory card but kept thinking that by the time I did that they would have finished.  The ending goes on for a while though and so I miss out on getting any photos of it.

Hopefully next time I’ll be better prepared with a camera that works.

Jan 17, 2012 | Categories: Music Photography | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave A Comment »

Mudhoney + Precious Jules @ The Zoo, 05.12.2011

Back in the day I never got into Mudhoney. I don’t know why but they never really did anything for me.  I had friends and housemates that loved them, so got to hear bits and pieces from their earlier albums but the songs just never grabbed me.  I’d seen the band a few times down the years at Reading but again nothing.  I mean they were ok but didn’t make me want to rush out and buy any of their albums.  The last opportunity I had to see them was at the Ten Years of ATP festival at Minehead back in 2009.  Although I had wanted to see them (having never seen them inside at a smallish venue I was keen to give them another try) they played on the tenth and final day of my 2009 ATP experience (that I will get around to finishing blogging about one of these days), the ten days had taken their toll and I was so under the weather that I had to go back to my chalet for a lie down and managed to miss their Centre Stage set.  Reports of the weekend had them as being one of the highlights; maybe I’d missed my chance to see them at their best.

But tonight at The Zoo I finally “get” them.  I don’t know what they did or whether they did anything different from previous times I’ve seen them.  Maybe it’s just that they have my undivided attention tonight, something they were going to struggle to do when playing the main stage at Reading.  The atmosphere definitely helps; it’s the craziest crowd I’ve seen at The Zoo in a long while, with an energetic mosh pit and crowd surfers.  Although others have disagreed with me, it gets even better when Mark Arm loses the shackles of his guitar and bounds around the stage with his microphone, with the energy in the room reaching an even higher level.  Having been really looking forward to finally getting to see Future Of The Left back here tomorrow night, I start to feel sorry for them that I’m going to see them with tonight still really fresh in my mind.

It’s such an epic set and I’m really enjoying myself until…

Until.

About three songs from the end I’m back near the front, squeezed in at the side of the stage under the speaker, watching the show, enjoying myself.  A few songs earlier, someone (not mentioning any names…) had put their empty beer bottle on top of the speaker stack above my head, when suddenly, obviously due to the vibration from the speaker, it falls and whizzes inches past my face.  ”That was lucky”, I think to myself.   Although the bottle hits the floor it doesn’t break but I’m guessing it still might have hurt if it had hit me on the way down.  Then I look down at my camera, which I’ve had slung over my shoulder, and notice that while the bottle managed to miss me, it landed right in the middle of the LCD screen and it was probably that impact that stopped it from smashing when it finally hit the floor.

My LCD screen currently looks like this:

Part of me wishes that it had have hit me, rather than just about the most fragile and most easily breakable part of the camera.

What’s annoying is that with having had it for more than three years, and with its replacement model having been recently released, it was, almost Lethal Weapon-style, “days away from retirement” (or at least semi-retirement as a back-up camera) as it was “getting too old for this shit“.  At some point in the New Year, maybe a few months in, when the price might have dropped a bit from the initial release price, I was going to get a new camera.   Thanks to this, it looks like I’ll be getting it sooner rather than later.

And the evening was going so well.

Jan 16, 2012 | Categories: Music Photography | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | Leave A Comment »

Naboo DJ Set + Los Huevos @ The Zoo 16.05.2010

A depressing evening all ’round.

Tonight is the second show of two shows to be announced but the first to take place, the Sunday before the original show next Saturday. This show is taking place because the first show sold out so quickly. Tonight isn’t a sell out but The Zoo has a reasonably sized crowd. It’s depressing because the people here tonight have paid $45 (these days about 30 quid) to spend an evening with a celebrity DJ-ing. That same $45 is more or less what you would see an overseas touring band at The Zoo. It’s depressing because the people could have spent the money they’ve paid out tonight to have seen some really good live music rather than being caught up in the cult of celebrity.

After a set from Los Huevos and DJ sets from Fans before and after the band, “Naboo” hits the stage. Except it isn’t “Naboo” in character but the actor who plays him in the show, Michael Fielding. I don’t bemoan Fielding for that; he’s obviously here in Australia on holiday and playing a few shows to pay for his trip. It’s much more the deceit of the promoter for billing and advertising it as a “Naboo DJ Set”, but then again, if he’d advertised it as a “Michael Fielding DJ Set” he wouldn’t be able to sell out shows and get $45 a ticket. It’s depressing though as I was sold on the fact that it would be something out of the ordinary – essentially a Mighty Boosh themed party – and worthwhile photographing. I was even prepared to break my usual self-imposed, non-festival social photo ban although very few are dressed up tonight and even fewer want to have their photo taken. Maybe they are as disappointed as me at how the evening has turned out, maybe they are embarrassed at having gone to the effort and being in the minority. I’m not sure if the show the following Saturday went any better. Saturday night would have been the obvious night, rather than this Sunday night show.

What’s probably most depressing of all is that Fielding can’t really DJ. He can push a button to start and stop a track but that’s about it and is shown up by the Fans DJ sets earlier in the evening by someone who can actually mash up tracks and seamlessly move between songs. The low point of the night is when Fielding knocks a cable out and white noise is emitted through the PA at extreme volume. The look of sheer panic on his face is something to behold as he waits for someone to run on stage and fix it for him.

If it had been a Saturday night down at the Camden Barfly and you’d paid a tenner for a band or two and the post-gig club you would have said “fair enough”. There are very few positives to take from tonight although having spent their well earnt money on the promise, or at least assumption, of something different from what actually eventuates, the majority of people seem intent on making the best of a bad situation and try to enjoy themselves as much as they can. It’s about all they can do to rescue the night.

Jan 13, 2012 | Categories: Music Photography | Tags: , , , , , , , | Leave A Comment »