Archive for April 2009
After a seemingly quiet few weeks, the Summer Tones mini-festival finds itself at The Zoo on a balmy Friday night when Brisbane is enjoying an embarrassment of gig-riches; the Fire & Flood benefit at The Tivoli, featuring Powderfinger, The Grates, Robert Forster, The John Steel Singers, The Boat People and Dan Parsons, Violent Soho’s farewell Brisbane gig before their jaunt overseas at The Step Inn and Sixfthick, Spencer P Jones and The Horrortones at The Troubadour. In the face of all the competition there’s a reasonable crowd in tonight, but possibly not as large as it might have been or as large as I had anticipated given Dan Deacon’s live reputation.
Ruby Suns start the night off, with a DIY charm that threatens to fall apart at times, but manages to keep it together. They include a cover of Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up That Hill‘, which makes a change from the seemingly standard Kate Bush cover of ‘Hounds Of Love‘, covered in recent years by Futureheads and also included in Patrick Wolf’s live set (although in founding that link I also found out that he has also covered ‘Running Up That Hill‘ and remembered that Placebo did a version as well). In theory I should despise anyone covering anything by Kate Bush as they are never going to do the song justice, but in practice I enjoy hearing people interpret her songs; possibly because with Kate only having ever toured properly once, back in 1979, it’s always a pleasant surprise to hear one of her songs played live, possibly because it’s refreshing to find like-minded souls with such good taste in music. Ruby Suns’ cover is nice enough but I’m not sure if the song itself really translates that well to being played live. Even Kate Bush singing it live at the Secret Policeman’s Ball in the mid-1980s with Dave Gilmour and a bassist with the best/worst mullet ever doesn’t match the majestic heights of the studio version.
Looking around the venue tonight, you can tell the out-of-towners, and by that design the people playing in tonight’s bands; they’re the ones wearing shorts that would get you beaten up in the Valley on an average Friday night out. Chief culprit is James Milne aka Lawrence Arabia, who’s shorts are so short they’re off-putting. The band have some nice harmonies going on but sometimes they are so sugary that it veers far to close to being something like The Everly Brothers.
High Places are a real highlight tonight, captivating with their shimmering pop beats and Mary Pearson’s calming vocals. They’re hard to photograph though, hunched over their laptops and instruments as they are, and I seem to spend far too much time camera held up and ready in anticipation of  either of them lifting their head ups so that I can get a decent shot. Holding a camera in position for lenghty periods is hard work, and on the rare occasions when they do look up, the combination of hand shake and the slow shutter speeds needed tonight to cope with the Zoo’s darkness means that the photos aren’t very sharp.
Beaches were a huge disappointment at ATP Mt Buller earlier in the year but watching them tonight it’s like watching a completely different band, and a really good one at that. From memory, the couple of songs I saw at Mt Buller, before I got bored and wandered off, were both instrumentals (or at least mostly instrumental) so it’s really surprising to hear an abundance of vocals during the rest of the set. And it’s really fantastic, really enjoyable and nice to be proved wrong from my first, less than flattering impression of the band back in January.
The Dan Deacon live experience is a surreal event; it’s fun and amusing, with a large proportion of the night taken up with Dan talking to the audience and explaining the audience participation that he wants to be done in the next song. The main trouble is that the “show” so dominates proceedings, afterwards I can’t say what the music sounded like.  It also gives me flashbacks to Music & Movement from primary school; probably not a good thing… As far as the music goes, I remember some high tempo beats, some cheesy keyboard sounds and some weird squeaky vocals, with Dan using two microphones and putting them through a line of effects pedals, but when it comes to melodies, song structure, memorable lyrics or anything that really grabs you away from the spectacle, it’s a complete blank. His latest album, ‘Bromst‘, has been well received so there must be something of note in the music as a standalone experience, it just doesn’t stay with you solely from the live show.
Some more photos on flickr.
One of my very early musical memories was this on Top Of The Pops. So when Gary Numan rolls into town to play at the Tivoli, how can I refuse.
The trouble is that I only really know the very early stuff, and whilst these songs (‘Cars’, ‘Down In The Park‘, ‘We Are So Fragile‘, ‘Are ‘Friends’ Electric?‘) sound great tonight (although he does have me worried having changed the intro of ‘Are ‘Friends’ Electric’, so for an instance I have that blood-from-face-draining experience that he’s made it into a jazz-lite solo piano version, before the all too familiar synth riff kicks in), my unfamiliarity with the later stuff (i.e. anything after the early 1980s) means that the ‘newer’, harder, more industrial songs sound too samey and make him come over like a lightweight Nine Inch Nails. Having influenced bands like NIN he’s definitely borrowed something back from those bands, visually as well as musically, although I’m sure there’s some irony that he’s now regarded as a godfather of industrial music when he seemed to spend most of the 80s being looked down upon as a poor man’s David Bowie.
From a photographic point of view it’s surprising how hard it is tonight and how sluggish and unsure I feel after a month away in on holiday in New Zealand.  I don’t even move much from my original position in the pit. For tonight’s gig I start with my 28-70, change in the second song to the 70-200, and back to the 28-70 for the third song. The lights seemed to be all over the place, so although I start in manual mode, I end up changing to shutter priority to make life easier for myself and give myself something less to think about whilst trying to get up to speed with the photographing again.
It’s often hard trying to get the right balance when doing music photography, a balance between having too many gigs to photograph, which leaves you exhausted and not wanting to photograph, and not having enough, which leaves you feeling a yard off the pace, like tonight. At the moment I’m trying to do a maximum of two gigs/week. When you add in time for processing and blogging, photographing two gigs ends up taking up most of the week as it is, not helped by possibly my greatest weakness, playing around in Photoshop. Some photos go through up to 6 different versions as I play with toning and different processes, even then still ending up unsure of which is the best version, which should be uploaded to flickr or shown on this blog and which should be hidden away from public gaze on my hard drive. I have included an example below and included a few more on flickr. And I still can’t work out which of those three photos below is the best; probably the last one, the second one is too dark, but then again the darkness gives it something, and the original colour version isn’t too bad either…Â
More photos from the night on flickr.
When I photographed G3 a couple of years ago I crossed a couple guitarists from my formative teenage music years off my list of guitarists to photograph. Jeff Beck playing Brisbane means the list can be updated, along with a few other names I’ve added in the meantime:
The List
Yngwie Malmsteen [x]
Joe Satriani [x]
Steve Vai [x]
Jeff Beck [x]
Jimmy Page [ ]
Dave Gilmour [ ]
Pete Townsend [ ]
Edward Van Halen [ ]
The one name I’ve always wanted to cross off is Eddie Van Halen – I’ve had the pleasure of at least seeing (if not photographing) Messers Page, Gilmour and Townsend play live – but I just know it’s never going to happen and even if it did it’s just not going to be the same as it would have been seeing him back in Van Halen’s 1980s heyday. Time waits for no man, not even Dave Lee Roth… Interesting Eric Clapton was touring the country at the same time but didn’t come anywhere near Brisbane (although, to be honest, I’ve never been much of a fan. Plus he makes you photograph from the mixing desk, although sadly I think Van Halen make you do this these days as well).
Photographing guitarists is always a fascinating experience, getting to observe guitar nerds in their home environment, and tonight was no different, with plenty of fans coming down to the front to pay homage and check out his guitars rack at the side of the stage and his pedal board. It was interesting to see that less than five minutes before the start of the show the white Strat that he used (at least for the first two songs I saw) was in two pieces and unstrung; nifty work from his guitar tech to get it set up so quickly.
Tonight was a two-song affair before being escorted out of the venue - with the songs being ‘Beck’s Bolero‘ and ‘Pump‘, neither of them particularly long songs. The photography wasn’t helped by BCC’s rules to photograph kneeling in the aisle, so not to block anyone’s view in the all-seated venue. This meant photographing from a very low angle and losing Jeff behind the stage and the fold back speakers. However, the most annoying aspect was that I was on the wrong side of the stage, with Jeff facing the rest of his band during those two songs meaning I got to see far more of his back than I really wanted to. A shame but got a couple of reasonable photos.
A few more photos on flickr.
The UnderExposed exhibition that I have previously blogged about and more formally written about opened on Thursday night with the VIP/private viewing night. And it was a really fantastic night. I got there just before the official opening time and definitely had a real sense of awe at walking into the gallery and seeing all the photos up on the walls. Patience and John from The Grates were there (and put a photo of my Patience and Luke from Violent Soho photos on their Tumblr site), as was Ian from Powderfinger, and plenty of other movers and shakers from the Brisbane music and arts scenes. And much red wine was drunk, probably way too much red wine if Friday morning was anything to go by.Â
I was photographing elsewhere on Friday night so didn’t go to the public opening night, but by all accounts it all continued on from Thursday night. I did get up early on Saturday and go to the Music Photography Symposium and saw some really inspiring and entertaining talks from Tony Mott, Dan Boud and IP Lawyer Ellen Beattie, who I feel is going to become my new best friend in the next series of battles against various industrial conglomerates and media entities regarding copyright infringements.
Photographer Mark Lobo took some photos at the launch night and they can be seen at his website and Charlyn Cameron, another exhibitor at UnderExposed, also has some photos of the launch and the symposium on her blog.
The exhibition is open until Monday 4 May, so if you’re in Brisbsane you should go and have a look around.
I think I’ve probably said enough about The Drones on my blog like here, here, here and here. And knowing that I’m down to cover them again in a couple weeks, when they play the launch night at the new Hi-Fi Bar in West End, I won’t say much about them now, even though a Gareth Liddiard solo show is a bit different, with the songs stripped down from their usual wall of sound to just vocals and acoustic guitar. The power and intensity of the songs remains the same and it does have the advantage of allowing more space to concentrate on his excellent lyrics. If there was one disappointment from the night, it’s that previously he has used solo shows to road test new material, where as tonight (and for the other dates of the tour) it’s just been songs from the band’s existing catalogue. Actually, thinking about it there was a second disappointment in the amount of chatter going on through his set at the back of the room, something that he picked up on and responded to with some fairly colourful language, not that the people at the back were listening anyway…
As well as having said more than enough about The Drones, I’ve also probably said more than enough about difficulties photographing in the dark at The Troubadour, including here, here, here  and here. Having a new-ish camera that does handle higher ISOs much better than my old camera, which was more or less unusable at anything over ISO 800, has made a difference, but although I can get reasonable colour photos I’m still preferring converting them to black & white or monochrome images. I’ve also probably blogged more than enough about my love of black & white photos and about the influence that the likes of Anton Corbijn, Herman Leonard and Steve Gullick have had on my photography. The trouble is that it’s becoming an increasing source of internal artistic conflict; I keep feeling to take my photography to the next level I need to start targeting larger gigs, more “mainstream” acts, less local acts playing tiny venues with no lighting, photographing at larger venues, with much better lighting and higher production values, so that it gives me the best opportunities for keeping images in colour. As much as I adore black & white, next to no black & white photos get published in music magazines these days. Usually the only time you see black and white music photos it’s in places like ‘Mojo‘ and the main reason it’s in black & white is that it was taken on black & white film. And yet half the reason I like reading magazines like ‘Mojo’ or ‘Word‘ is they have all these amazing black & white photos of “classic” 60s and 70s acts.
My music photography has been driven mainly by the music; it’s why The Zoo is my second home and why I photographed more at The Troubadour than at either the BEC or BCC last year. But maybe I need to focus on the photography side a bit more.
Following on from their ATP Australia shows, Laughing Clowns returned to Brisbane to play their own show as part of the Up Late season for the GoMA’s Optimism exhibition. It was another excellent performance from the band, and one that was surprisingly well attended. There probably weren’t as many people as at Wolfmother’s gig at the closing night of the Warhol exhibition last year but it was still an impressively large audience.
In the five previous times of photographing Ed Kuepper in his various guises – Pig City, Pauhaus Festival, Don’t Look Back and twice at ATP Mt Buller – I’ve never really got anything that I was happy with. He’s an infuriatingly hard subject to photograph well, as he tends to rock back and forth whilst hunched over and plays with his eyes shut. And from my experience this is usually happening in the dark and/or accompanied with plenty of smoke. Getting photos of him isn’t the problem; it’s just getting something more than the extremely ordinary and mundane.
The winning strategy, as I discover tonight, is to photograph him between songs, when he’s stood at the microphone, eyes open, arms waving and engaging with the crowd. This strategy also has the advantage of being able to watch and enjoy the gig before going into a 30 second photo mode between songs, a nice change from watching a gig through a camera viewfinder. I have used this method before, it can be very useful when photographing in dark venues as it’s easier to get a sharp image of someone at very low shutter speeds when they’re stood reasonably stationary at the microphone between songs.
As a result of using this approach, it was also one of those nights where you push the shutter release button and KNOW you’ve got a good photo; reviewing them on the LCD screen with that sense of excitement at having nailed it and the giddy anticipation for getting the photos downloaded and processed. Of course LCD screens are notoriously poor places to review photos, as it’s invariably followed by the disappointment of viewing them on a proper computer screen and realising that they’re not actually as good as they looked on the camera screen. It was no different this time, with the onscreen images not having the same saturation and glow of the photos previewed on the camera screen, but I was still happy to have finally gotten a few decent photos of Ed.
I read in his Guardian blog that Everett True had his issues with the gig though. Having seen Neil Young twice in four days after a gap of 12 years and Iron Maiden twice in a year after a gap of 17 years I can see where he’s coming from. For me it was about not being able to replicate the excitement and enthusiasm after so many years of waiting and anticipation for the first show in such a relatively short time for the second show. Not having had the luxury of seeing Laughing Clowns back in their original glory days I’d be more than happy to see them anytime soon (although they’re only playing in Sydney and Melbourne in May) and not have to wait 23 years, where as I think I need a few years until I see Neil Young and Iron Maiden again.Â
Some more photos on flickr.
This week’s edition of Rave has the UnderExposed exhibition on the front cover. The montage includes one of my Afrirampo photos (just underneath the ‘-VE” of RAVE).Â
The lead feature is a story I wrote about music photography to promote the exhibition, based on an interview with Time Off photographer Stephen Booth, one of the photographers exhibiting at UnderExposed, and Tim Steward from Screamfeeder, who are headlining one of the six live gigs at the exhibition space over it’s 3 week run (Screamfeeder are playing on Saturday 18 April). The picture of Patience from The Grates at last year’s Splendour In the Grass accompanying the article is also one of mine.
It was a pretty tough challenge for my first effort at writing something for print, especially as the timeframe was tight, with a shortened working week due to Easter and everything for the magazine needing to be submitted by Thursday at the very latest (instead of the normal Monday). The earliest that Tim and Stephen could be available for the interview was the Sunday night and so I spent a couple hours chatting to them then to get a photographer’s view and a musician’s view of music photography. I spent Monday at work listening back to the recording on headphones, jotting down the times on the recording where the quotes I wanted to transcribe were and transcribed them on Monday night, ending up with almost 3,000 words of quotes for a 1,200 word article. Tuesday night I wrote the article, culling over half the transcribed quotes in the process, and came up with a first draft of almost 1,700 words. After some more culling it was down to just over 1,200 words. I submitted it for review on Wednesday morning and after some expert subbing at Rave it was all done. Â
You can read the article on Rave’s website – http://www.ravemagazine.com.au/content/view/14621/30/
Brisbane not being Sydney or Melbourne (or at least not Mt Buller) means we are deprived of the full ATP line-up, making do with a week of selected highlights; Harmonia, Michael Gira, and Psarandonis playing separate gigs in the Powerhouse’s Visy Theatre, the main one-day, one-stage festival, with Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, The Saints, Spiritualized, Robert Forster, The Necks and James Blood Ulmer, and a closing night line-up of Fuck Buttons, Dead Meadow and Afrirampo in the Powerhouse’s main theatre space.Â
Afrirampo have already started by the time I get there and on first appearance seem a bit lacklustre when compared to their outstanding Mt Buller gig. However, it only takes a few songs for them to find their feet and the night ends up as the same jubilant experience that they had produced at Mt Buller, culminating with Oni and Pika being paraded triumphantly around the venue, with Everett True carrying Oni on his shoulders and Damon from Secret Birds carrying Pika.  Hugely fun and entertaining, but whilst I know that I’d be there in a minute if Afrirampo were playing  tonight, I’m still not sure if I would actually buy one of their albums to listen to in the comfort of my own home.
Dead Meadow’s set at Mt Buller felt as if it was a bit too early in the day for them and for us; stoner/psychedelic rock just doesn’t work on an outside stage at lunchtime on a nice sunny day. However, the dark confines of the Powerhouse on a Friday night are a much more fitting time and place to experience them and it all makes perfect sense, even though the darkness makes photographing them problematic. It’s light on much in the way of any audience engagement but heavy on the music, which is probably as it should be.
By the time Fuck Buttons take to the stage the room has cleared considerably; Brisbane obviously craves its stoner rock more than its experimental/noise/post-rock. Having now seen a full Fuck Buttons show to go with a few songs at ATP Mt Buller, the jury is still out on them They are at their best when the songs have some sort of direction and purpose, where they build up into something with a definitive structure, even if their best bits are reminiscent of the soundtrack to Wipeout on the Playstation in the mid-1990s. But too many of the songs, especially those towards the start of their set, just seem to lack any purpose and come over more like a primal scream therapy session played back over a random array of beeps and beats and, as such, you can’t help but think that there’s something of the emperor’s new clothes about them.
A few more photos on flickr.
Fuck Buttons
Dead Meadow
Afrirampo
