No rest for the wicked and straight onto Blog No. 105; Sinead O’Connor, with Damien Demspey supporting.

Sinead played at the first Glastonbury I went to back in 1990; she was second on the bill on the Saturday night, playing before The Cure, riding high at that time with ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’.  It was a really impressive performance, one of the highlights of the weekend full of highlights.

This was back in the day before Glastonbury became the soulless, corporate shell of a festival it is now, back when there were two main stages (the Pyramid stage and the Acoustic tent), not the forty-something stages they have now and when Sunday was World Music day on the main stage.  As such, you could buy bootlegs of most of the performances the following day from a couple of stalls in the market, and I came away on the Sunday with the tapes for The Cure’s, Sinead O’Connor’s and *cough* Jesus Jones’ *cough* sets.  And then when I got back to civilisation, I went out and bought ‘I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got’ at the first available opportunity.

Saturday’s show was, at it’s best, sublime. Particular highlights were a couple of songs from her new album, ‘Theology’ (‘If I Had A Vineyard’ and ‘Something Beautiful’, I think), an amazing acappella song (I don’t know what it was called), and the songs from ‘I Do Not Want…’, including a strangely mid-performance ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’. However, the BCC, for all it’s amazing acoustics is a bit of a soulless seated venue and there was a noticeable lack in atmosphere.  In addition, she doesn’t come across, despite her amazing voice, as a very confident performer/communicator, singing with her eyes shut and singing to her feet for large periods of the concert and coming across as very nervous in the between-song banter, even when joking about her jeans falling down and telling the audience ‘no beaver shots!’ 

It wasn’t a great photographic experience; in usual fashion the ticket desk knew nothing about me photographing (although there was a ticket for me), there was the usual waiting around and speaking to half a dozen people to arrange taking photos, and after all that I could only photograph from the side aisle and had to kneel as not to block anyone’s views. Kneeling for 3 songs in one spot gets uncomfortable, means all your photos are from the same, very side-on position, and the low position means that the on-stage monitors and lights tower above you and limit your view. The distance that I was photographing from also shows up the age and image quality of my 3 year old, 6MP camera…  In addition, being so far to the side meant that when ever Sinead stepped back from her original mic stand position my view was partly obscured by the bassist’s and guitarist’s mic stands. Needless to say the best photos were the ones where there’s a mic stand across her…

A few more photos on flickr.

Today is the second anniversary of me starting to do a regular photo blog. Everything that was on my old Myspace blog has now been transferred over to this site and all the links and images that weren’t working (due to websites I have photographed for in the past changing their site layouts and page naming conventions) have been fixed. Some things I have learnt over the last few weeks:

1. In the two years I have written 103 blogs, with this post now being blog number 104;
2. In those two years my Myspace blog has had 4,645 views; and
3. In the 5 or so  weeks that I have been putting content onto This Is Not A Photo Opportunity I have had 8,447 Page Views. And not all of them have been Google bots…

So it’s all going well and I’m really happy to have moved away from Myspace and set up my own formal little bit of the internet. Lots more stuff on its way in the next week or so, including Sinead O’Connor, Whitesnake, and hopefully Queens of the Stone Age and the Jesus and Mary Chain.

Stay tuned.

One night, two choices: The Bellrays at The Zoo or Ozzy Osbourne at the BEC.

I put in for both but with The Bellrays as my preferred choice.

Reasons why?

I photographed The Bellrays last year but could only stay for a couple songs and, as they won a Best International Live Act ‘award’ from Drum Media last year, I was keen to see a full show. I also saw/photographed Heaven & Hell (the Dio-fronted Black Sabbath line-up) last year and included in my blog for the night about how having seen them, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see the Ozzy-fronted Black Sabbath line-up. Additionally, I thought that most of the other photographers at Rave would be very keen and didn’t think that my chances of actually getting assigned to cover it would be that high.

So, it was a bit of a surprise to find that when the weekly list of who’s-covering-what came out that no one had put into photograph Ozzy. That’s no one from about a dozen photographers…

And then I started to feel pangs of regret for not requesting to cover his show; the chances of getting a second opportunity are probably pretty slim, and the chances of seeing The Bellrays again, or at least of having the opportunity to see them, is probably quite high.

The Zoo lighting was typically of a dubious standard, which further made me wish I was at the BEC. And this feeling was further enhanced by both support bands, neither of whom really impressed me much. It’s a shame they didn’t get a local band to support, like they did last year with the Vegas Kings. The Bellrays were good and put in a really energetic performance, although despite all the accolades and last year’s reception the turn out was surprisingly poor. Being Maundy Thursday I guess people were heading away for the Easter weekend, plus it clashed with the first day of Blues & Roots in Byron, which would have undoubtedly taken away a chunk of the audience that you would have expected to be there. Got a few ok photos, although a pet hatred of mine is people with their eyes shut; Lisa Kekaula sang for just about the whole gig with her eyes shut… I bet Ozzy would have opened his eyes ever now and then…

More on flickr.

They say that time flies when you’re having fun. Whether or not this is true, time definitely has flown since the last time that I saw Buffalo Tom, (which from memory was in London at the LA2 in November 1999) let alone the first time that I saw them back in the early 1990s at The Riverside in Newcastle.

When the tables and chairs are on display towards the front of The Zoo it is usually a sign that it’s a quiet night. However, there was quiet a healthy mid-week crowd in (which made having a load of tables and chairs near the front of the room more problematic…), although not sold out. There have been a few posts on the Mess+Noise message board about the tour and about how there seemed to be a real lack of promotion from the tour, with this apparently being a regular trait of the promoter in question. I was glad I was there and had a great night, but it’s just a shame that they weren’t playing to the full-house they deserve to be playing to.

Whilst nostalgia is a powerful and alluring sentiment, and increasingly being played on by the music industry, watching Buffalo Tom play you can’t help but feel that if a group of 20-somethings released a bunch of songs as good as theirs in today’s musical scene that they would be universally acclaimed and be all over the radio and the music press.

However, sadly, when you’re a bunch of 40-somethings the industry pays a lot less attention. Whilst the set played heavy on their back catalogue, especially 1992’s ‘Let Me Come Over’, new songs from last year’s ‘Three Easy Pieces’ show that they haven’t lost the knack for coming up with hook-laden, 3 ½ minute pop songs.

Hopefully it won’t be a nine year wait between albums next time, and hopefully they’ll be back and playing to the size of audience they deserve soon.

More photos on flickr.

Buffalo Tom

Screamfeeder

A few weeks ago it was Brisbane Sounds; this time around it was The Brisbane Sound, as in the definitive article.

As part of the exhibition, there was a series of three concerts; I went to the second one, curated by Robert Forster.

Although the exhibition was celebrating the indie and experimental music scenes and the art scene in Brisbane during the post-punk years of 1978 to 1983, the concert was a mix of the bands/artists of the day (The Apartments and Robert Forster) and the slightly more recent (Adults Today and Trevor Ludlow And The Hellraisers, who have their roots in the mid-1990s Brisbane scene).

I always enjoy photographing Robert Forster.  In addition to being part of arguably Brisbane’s if not Australia’s greatest band, The Go-Betweens, who, through the UK weekly music press of the late 1980s and early 1990s, were one of the non-mainstream Australian bands that I knew long before moving here, which obviously makes him an important part of Brisbane’s music scene, he’s also amazingly photogenic, with a steely look and the air of a wise professor.

I played around with this shot to mix some additional layers and over-sharpen the image – there’s a picture of Michael Stipe that I saw a while ago (and for the life of me can’t find now) where a similar effect has been used and it makes him look like he’s been carved from rock; that was what I wanted for this shot and I think it works well.  It would have been better without all the smoke from the smoke machine but that was a running theme throughout all the photos from the night…

I’d never seen the name ‘Adults Today’ before I put in to cover this gig.  I looked it up on myspace and found out it was a mid-1990s band containing the original Sensitive Side (Gentle Ben’s band) – Nick Naughton, Dylan McCormack and Trevor Ludlow – but with Glenn Thompson (Go-Betweens drummer in their later incarnation) on vocals/guitar.  As you’d expect from the line-up it was really great stuff, with a slightly country tinged pop that Brisbane does so well.

The last act of the evening were The Apartments, another Brisbane band that left the city in the late 1970s to seek fame and fortune overseas, in this case in New York, although they also seem to have had a quite big following in France.

This was the third time that I had seen them after the Pig City warm-up gig at The Troubadour last year and Pig City itself but probably the longest set that I’d seen them play. In a way, I think I preferred the shorter set that left you wanting more; although there are some really great songs – I’ve always considered them a slightly sombre, more jazzy, late-night-with-a-glass-of-red-wine version of The Go-Betweens – they seemed to lose some momentum as the set went on. 

In retrospect, I think might just have been me flagging and becoming increasingly irritated by the art crowd scenesters (the guest list for the night seemed huge…), who stood at the back of the room and talked so loudly that you struggled to hear Peter Milton Walsh explaining the stories behinds the songs in the between song interludes.  In fact, I’ve heard that a woman was overheard complaining in the toliets that she was becoming hoarse due to having to talk so loudly to make herself heard over the noise of the band.  How do you respond to that?  Sadly it seems that he’s still unappreciated in his own city 30 years later.

More photos on flickr.

Ever since I have started going to gigs one of my main thoughts as I walk up to the venue concerns just how popular the band playing is and how many people will be there; my ultimate nightmare is that they’ll be playing to near empty room of the proverbial three men and a dog sat at the bar, with me right at the front taking photos.

Walking up the The Tivoli you normally get a measure of the band’s popularity by the number of people walking through the quiet streets leading to the venue, the people waiting outside the front door and the first sight of the venue’s outside smoking area. None of these signs showed much promise so it was a bit of a surprise to walk in and find the venue already mostly filled by 8:30pm. The upstairs section was open, although it included seating around the balcony; a sizeable crowd but not at full capacity.

I guess the lesson learnt is that the (best known) late 70s/early 80s MOR stylings of Toto are more popular in a small town like Brisbane than I had initially given credit for.

Great lighting but no barrier, with my choice of side to photograph from proving my undoing. I chose the left-hand side of the stage, which is my preferred side, especially when photographing right-handed guitarists. It also gave me the best view of drummer Simon Phillips and singer Bobby Kimball, whose microphone was set up on this side, with Steve Lukather being in the middle of the stage. The main downside of this was that Steve Lukather’s microphone was set up with the main boom going sideways across him; this meant that from my viewpoint, for the most part, he had the microphone stand across him, even when he stood back to solo. In hindsight I should have changed sides at some point during my three songs, especially when each of the songs included an extended solo/jam in the middle and at the end. If I had grabbed my stuff, squeezed through crowd to the back of the room, crossed to the other side and made my way back to the front at the start of the guitar solo in the second song I reckon I could have made it by the time the solo finished…

But I didn’t, and afterwards ended up watching the rest of the gig from the right-hand side of the stage wishing that I had changed sides during my three songs as the viewpoint was so much better.

I think I may have said it before but I prefer taking photos of older, more established musicians. These guys have been there, done that, bought the T-shirt. You’ve got someone like Leland Sklar playing bass – he’s an extraordinary looking guy (with Lukather making Lord of the Rings gags whilst introducing him…) and, therefore, an amazingly photogenic man and his list of recording credits is phenomenal. And you look at the rest of Toto’s combined recording credits and it’s amazing – Lukather’s Wikipedia entry credits him with having “arranged, composed, and recorded on over 800 number one albums”. Although I think 799 were probably ‘Thriller’…

So I’d much rather photograph musicians who have experienced life rather than the latest Sydney/Melbourne haircut band or the latest music media darlings who Triple J are playing ad nauseum. I’m not too sure if there is a difference between the two…

Fun gig. Cheesy as, but they know it, the crowd knows it, and they all love it. Watched a large part of the gig stood next to this – well, I was going to say middle-aged, but I guess these days I’m middle-aged which must make him old – guy who was punching the air and shouting “You rock, you rock”. And that was after a 10 minute keyboard solo. Seriously…

More photos on flickr.

CocoRosie are a band that has perplexed me for a while. Whilst only familiar with their music via their myspace and random snippets available on the web elsewhere, I found the polarisation of views and reviews to be really interesting; you either love them or you hate them; they either get 5 star gushing reviews or they get 1 star reviews. Even listening to their songs on myspace some come across well whilst others make you grind your teeth. Had heard that they were an interesting prospect live so put into photograph them and camera in hand strolled up to The Zoo to see them play.

First impressions entering The Zoo are that they obviously have a largely select audience; as was pointed out by my gf, it’s the women who you would find in the Women’s Room at university…

The band played with no stage lights, with the light coming from the projector showing images on a backdrop at the back of the stage. Coco stood in the dark for the whole gig, although I think there must have been a UV lamp near her as all you could make out of her face was her fluorescent make-up. Rosie occasionally got some light on her when lit up by the projector. In addition to the two sisters, there was also a male pianist. Last time I looked The Zoo didn’t have a lift so I’m guessing some poor saps had the job of getting a baby grand piano up and down the stairs at the back of the building. I don’t envy them…

A few good songs but an overall impression that a lot of the songs follow a similar blue-print and are a bit too samey; people watching was far more entertaining, especially with all that interpretative dancing…

Always good to see promoters organise extracurricular sideshows for bands playing festivals in Brisbane – in this case with both Broken Social Scene and Stars playing the following day at the Laneway Festival. And even better that the sideshow at The Zoo sold out; one step closer to hopefully convincing more promoters that it is worth putting on the extra shows that Sydney and Melbourne always get. On the downside, a sold out Zoo is never the best place to photograph bands…

Had been listening to the Stars album on their myspace page and sounded ok; some songs better than others. And was same experience seeing them play live. They started well, but lost a bit as their set went on. The trouble is that whilst at their best they have an air of The Postal Service about them, at their worst, with the male/female joint vocals, they creep just too close to Deacon Blue for comfort.

For Broken Social Scene positioned myself near the front but a couple of rows back. Trouble was that I was behind a guy who as soon as the band hit the stage felt the need to constantly punch the air, which meant an elbow-camera-nose interface twice in the first song which didn’t put me in the best of moods…

I had planned on doing 3 songs and getting out but found it very hard actually getting clear shots with the combination of the air-punching guy and all the people at the front with their P&S cameras held above their heads…

Did 4 songs, didn’t get anything very good. Went to the bar…

Tried a few shots from the other side of the stage later in their set but the view was just as bad. Spiral Stairs from Pavement made a guest appearance; I don’t think he has the same Picture of Dorian Gray thing that Malkmus has got happening…

The Don’t Look Back series of concerts finally made it across to Australia this month, although in typical and familiar fashion Brisbane got the rough end of the deal with only one concert – the double bill of Died Pretty playing ‘Doughboy Hollow’ and Ed Kuepper playing ‘Honey Steel’s Gold’ – missing out on the famed Sonic Youth ‘Daydream Nation’ set that even Perth and Adelaide got to see, and also The Scientists playing ‘Blood Red River’.  

Having now photographed Ed Kuepper three times (solo and acoustic at the Pauhaus Festival, with The Saints at Pig City and tonight), there are a number of things I have learnt:

1. He doesn’t like lights;
2. He plays 90% of the set with his eyes shut; and
3. He constantly rocks back and forth (whilst playing in the dark).

Was also the third time of photographing Ron Peno (both other times with him playing in the Darling Downs with Kim Salmon) and the main reason I wanted to photograph this gig.  He may have fallen from the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down but there is still something extremely photogenic about him, and as a photographer he gives you a lot to work with. 

However, it was a pretty disappointing lighting set up with strong backlighting and very little front lighting for the three songs I was allowed to photograph, so most of the photos weren’t that special.  A couple of ok-ish shots where the backlighting and silhouetting work well and remind me of the work of probably my favourite music photographer, Herman Leonard.

More photos on flickr.