Einstürzende Neubauten @ The Tivoli, 23.02.2013

Einstürzende Neubauten @ The Tivoli, Saturday 23 February 2013

After a long, hot, arduous day photographing at Soundwave, the air conditioning and jugs of ice cold water of the Tivoli bring massive relief.

I’ve had to sacrifice seeing Mick Harvey’s support set for Soundwave but there’s probably more chances of seeing him again sometime soon than there is of seeing and photographing Metallica.  Einstruzende Neubauten are due to start at 9:20pm so it means missing the end of Metallica but at least I got 75 minutes worth and some photos.  It’s just a bit of a shame that I didn’t get to see songs like ‘Battery’, ‘Creeping Death’ and ‘Seek and Destroy’ again.

EN are good but not as good as they had been at ATP Altona a couple of weeks earlier.  As well as having the advantage of the first time seeing them (remember, seeing an act for a second time on the same tour is almost never as good as the first time), they didn’t bring all of their instruments with them to Brisbane, so the show isn’t quite as visual as it had been down south.  The Blixa Scream remains an extraordinary sound regardless, it’s worth going to see EN just to hear it.

I stay for 80 or so minutes, most of the set but not all of it.  I watch from the comfort of the sofas near the bar with a view of clear view of Blixa and Alex Hacke, downloading the photos from the whole day and just relaxing.  I feel so wrecked from the day that I make the slightly early getaway to get the train and get back home. I start feeling even worse on the train, so it’s probably a good move and it takes days to get over the heat exhaustion of carrying around more than 10kgs of camera gear all day and walking miles in the heat of the day without enough food or water to keep me going.

Looking back at the photos, they’re one of my favourite sets from the whole year (so far). I’m really happy with how they turned out and that’s something that doesn’t happen a whole lot.  It’s strange to go to a festival, photograph far too may bands, to the point of complete band fatigue but then go and photograph one final act for the day and come away with a really strong and interesting set of images.  It once again shows what I’ve always said, that photographing music’s elder statesmen is infinitely more interesting than photographing the latest flash-in-the-pan crop of young bands being hyped by the music industry.

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