This Is Not A Photo Opportunity

Splendour In The Grass 2008– Part 5

Eighteen year old teen sensation Laura Marling pulls a pretty sizeable crowd in the GW McLennan tent. Although I’d seen the name before, mainly in the UK broadsheets, I’d not heard her music. It’s quiet, acoustic, sounds a bit like Joni Mitchell and is a perfect lazy Sunday afternoon soundtrack. On stage she cuts a fairly shy and timid figure, not surprising as she has previously said that playing in front of large crowds makes her petrified. Ultimately there are only so many photos you can take of a singer playing an acoustic guitar stood in front of a microphone and playing gentle, acoustic numbers. So after two songs I’m out of there.

Scouse/Norwegian, ex- stage school (Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts) pupils, The Wombats, play to the biggest audience of the weekend, a crowd that far exceeds the numbers who saw Devo the night before and the numbers that will see Wolfmother later this same day. They go straight into ‘Kill The Director’ and the masses are going mad. But in following with much of the Supertop line-up is it really warranted? They sound not a million miles away from a Busted or a McFly and you feel that it is only their lack of boyish good looks that prevents them from being a true, bona fide boy band. I’ve got better things to do so I don’t stick around to see the crowd carnage that one can expect when they get around to playing Triple J favourite ‘Let’s Dance to Joy Division’.

Better things include seeing Paul Dempesey over on the GW McLenna stage. But once again I’m denied by unhelpful security telling me once again that I haven’t got the right pass to get into the photo pit. To be fair to them, there is an A4 poster by the side of the entrance which has the passes allowed into that area and it doesn’t include the Photographer pass, but it’s largely dependent on which guard is on the gate and the how many photographers have turned up at that time to get into the pit; the more photographers, the greater chance of being waved through. So once again I take a few photos from the crowd but it’s somewhat dispiriting to have walked over, carrying a heavy camera bag as I go, and not been allowed access. I think I only take about half a dozen shots and go for a sit down instead.

The next Dew Process Splendour shoe-in, officially launching their album launch at the festival are Brisbane’s The Grates. Whilst I abhor the phrase ‘guilty pleasure’, as it’s the remit of the worst kind of music scenester, one who doesn’t have a true love of music but only likes music because someone told them it was acceptable to listen to a particular band, The Grates are my ‘guilty pleasure’. They’re a band that are so unashamedly joyful and fun that you can’t help but like them, and they have the added bonus of having the songs to back up the cartoonish on stage jubilation. Despite my festival photographing weariness, Patience dressed up as Bat Girl cannot but fail to give me a new spring in my step. And whilst from a purely show-biz point of view it’s all about Patience, musically it’s all being held together by the Alana, the world’s happiest drummer.

It’s always a complete pleasure seeing Robert Forster, but seeing him playing Go-Betweens’ classics like ‘Clouds’ and ‘Head Full of Steam’ to a fairly small (but adoring) crowd is something of a tragedy, even more so when compared to the numbers watching The Wombats only a couple of hours earlier.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 24th, 2008 at 9:54 pm. It is filed under Music Photography and tagged with 2008, Belongil Fields, Byron Bay, Justin Edwards, Laura Marling, Paul Dempsey, Robert Forster, SITG, SITG 2008, SITG2008, Splendour In The Grass, The Grates, The Wombats, www.notaphoto.com. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.