Tag Archive for "2010"
Having photographed Splendour In The Grass in 2008 and 2009, I find myself in an interesting position for 2010. I have a free media pass but because Mess+Noise (who I’m covering the festival for) forgot to apply for a photo pit pass before the deadline and before all of the passes were allocated, I don’t have any pit access. They’re happy with crowd shots and scenic panoramas and hopefully, as long as it’s not too busy now that the festival is being held at Woodford with an increased capacity of 30,000, they’ll be some potential for shooting a few of the earlier bands from the wrong side of the pit: it has happened a couple times in the GW McLennan tent previous years down at Byron even with a photo pass due thanks to over-zealous security guards.
On the upside I don’t have to worry too much about editing and meeting deadlines as I would if I was photographing as many bands as I could fit in over the three days of the festival; it was hard enough when Splendour was just the two days. Plus I’m still trying to blog All Tomorrow’s Parties from last December and Soundwave from February in the neverending backlog of blog posts that has built up since last year. And, as I found out at BluesFest, camping and photography don’t really mix. So it looks like I’ll get to focus on the important things such as having a few drinks and seeing some bands instead of spending three days running between stages and seeing a few songs of most of the acts. (Of course if anyone is offering a photo pass I’d bite their leg off, but it’s not going to happen so I’m having to get used to it).
Normally I do a bit of lineup analysis at this point in the post and compare it to previous years. This year, with the extra day, you can’t really compare it to past Splendours. Of the 86 acts on the lineup (including the DJs), I’ve photographed 27 of them before, plus The Stroke’s Julian Casablancas’ recent solo show, Jónsi when he was played with Sigur Rós a couple of years ago and Van She when they’ve played as a band as opposed to their Van She Tech DJ set. Of that total of 30, nine have been overseas acts, 21 Australian (doing the whole Australian thing and assuming NZ band Fat Freddy’s Drop to be ‘local’).
Links to those blog posts are hyperlinked in the list below.
| The Strokes | Alberta Cross |
| The Pixies | Surfer Blood |
| LCD Soundsystem | Space Invadas |
| Broken Social Scene | British India |
| Midlake | Washington |
| Ben Harper & Relentless7 | Philadelphia Grand Jury |
| The Temper Trap | Clare Bowditch |
| Mumford & Sons | Band of Skulls |
| Florence and The Machine | Two Door Cinema Club |
| Scissor Sisters | The Drums |
| Empire of The Sun | The Mess Hall |
| Art vs Science | Violent Soho |
| Band of Horses | School of Seven Bells |
| Goldfrapp | Fat Freddy’s Drop |
| Richard Ashcroft | Last Dinosaurs |
| Grizzly Bear | John Steel Singers |
| Angus & Julia Stone | Yacht Club DJs |
| Hot Chip | Jonathan Boulet |
| Wolfmother | Dan Sultan |
| Passion Pit | Oh Mercy |
| Jónsi | Cloud Control |
| Paul Kelly | Boy & Bear |
| Foals | Ernest Ellis |
| Sally Seltmann | Tijuana Cartel |
| Bluejuice | Frightened Rabbit |
| Laura Marling | The Joy Formidable |
| Operator Please | Skipping Girl Vinegar |
| Lisa Mitchell | Gypsy and The Cat |
| The Vines | Money For Rope |
| Miike Snow | JaC Stone |
| Kate Nash | Zennith |
| Black Rebel Motorcycle Club | Tim & Jean |
| Tame Impala | Bag Raiders |
| The Magic Numbers | Van She Tech |
| K-OS | Anna Lunoe |
| Midnight Juggernauts | Kid Kenobi |
| Little Red | Yolanda |
| Ash | Be Cool |
| Whitley | The Only |
| Yeasayer | Purple Sneakers DJs |
| Miami Horror | Miami Horror DJs |
| Delphic | Graz |
| We Are Scientists | Levins |
Excluding bands I’ve already photographed, there are a few bands that I really would have liked to photograph; Florence and The Machine, Kate Nash, Scissor Sisters, Goldfrapp (although I’ve heard it can be awkward/difficult through a combination of artist temperament and management contracts), Richard Ashcroft, Ash (both for old times sake rather than anything else). But there’s always next time, right?
Although there’s an extra day and even more bands the price is really exorbitant; even more than in the last few years. This year an event only ticket is $360.20 ($350 + $10.20 booking fee) if bought online or $362.20 for phone bookings (with an extra $2 charge for using a telephone). The event plus camping ticket is an incredible $461.80 ($450 + $11.80 booking fee) for online sales, $463.80 for phone bookings. Last year a two-day event ticket was $240 + booking fee, which itself was a 20% increase on the $199 + booking fee for the 2008 festival. There’s an extra 50% of festival with a third day, but the ticket price has gone up by almost 46% since last year and just under 76% since 2008. As ever, I’m amazed but not surprised that the 30,000 tickets sold out in the first few hours. The festival bubble might be bursting for some but obviously not Splendour.
With the extra day, direct comparison of value for money on an overseas versus Australian band basis can’t really be done. This year 36 are from overseas, 50 Australian, roughly a 42%:58% split.
In last year’s first Splendour-related post I wrote:
The disappointment is in the Australian acts, which are the same tired old acts that get wheeled out at every Australian festival on a two-year rotating cycle, e.g. Grinspoon, Hilltop Hoods, Little Birdy, Josh Pyke, Midnight Juggernauts, Augie March, etc. There’s the usual Dew Process shoe-ins in Sarah Blasko (who I quite like) and Yves Klein Blue (who I don’t and who also played last year) and I’d expect new signings Bluejuice to be added in the next round of announcements. Nothing from the Modular roster as yet (certain NY band pending), but Tame Impala seem to be omnipresent at the moment so I’d expect them. With Little Birdy just having released a new album and with Hilltop Hoods about to release a new one, you know that they’ll be playing Homebake, Falls Festival, Big Day Out and every other festival in-between for at least the next twelve months. Let’s just hope that they don’t take it to Wolfmother extremes and stretch it out to about 4 years…
Another year and nothing much changes.
Applying that 2 year cycle theory, there’s eleven bands from the 2008 lineup:
- Band of Horses
- Laura Marling
- Wolfmother
- The Vines
- Operator Please
- Little Red
- Art vs Science
- British India
- Bluejuice
- Clare Bowditch
- Bag Raiders
And if you include Van She/Van She Tech and Jónsi from Sigur Rós that makes thirteen, more than 15% of this year’s lineup.
In addition, there’s five acts who played in 2007:
- Ash
- Hot Chip
- Paul Kelly
- Midnight Juggernauts
- Operator Please
And a further five who were on last year’s bill:
- Midnight Juggernauts
- Bluejuice
- Little Red
- Art vs Science (who replaced The Middle East who played last year as well)
- Miami Horror
This means that Midnight Juggernauts, Little Red, Bluejuice, Art vs Science and Operator Please will have the somewhat dubious honour of having played three of the last four Splendours, with Bluejuice, Little Red and Art vs Science the last three years in a row. And there seem to be more Dew Process shoe-ins to the bill than ever; Bluejuice, Whitley, Ernest Ellis, Last Dinosaurs, Mumford & Sons and Alberta Cross.
It is good to see that they took my comment from May 2009 on board though – “John Steel Singers? They’d be a good band to put on at Splendour” (although if you believe everything you hear they’re on their way to being a Dew Process band anyway). Velociraptor for 2011?
What’s even more surprising is that as well as relying heavily on bands that have played the festival in recent years, this year there is also a contingent of overseas bands that have played other festivals and tours earlier in the year; The Pixies, Florence & The Machine, Mumford & Sons, Grizzly Bear and Passion Pit. Is there such a dearth in bands at the moment that festival organisers are having to get back bands that were only here a few months ago. On a related note, with The Pixies’ headline spot being advertised as their “only Australian show”, there’s a cast iron, winnable lawsuit in the making thanks to them also playing a show at The Zoo the night before their Splendour set. It would have been good to have seen them in such a small environment, although recent experience has shown that it would be unlikely to hold a candle to the band that they were 20 and more years ago.
The timetable has just been released and as I can’t get there until mid-Friday afternoon (thanks to a very expensive one-and-a-half-day work conference down on the Gold Coast that was booked six months ago) I’ll be missing at least two bands that I wanted to see in Violent Soho and School Of Seven Bells, and possibly a few more by the time I get in, get a tent put up and find my bearings.
Depite the lack of proper photo pass I am looking forward to it. I’m not sure what the mobile reception is like at Woodford or if I’ll have access to a media tent but if either of those things are happening I’ll be trying to do the usual tweeting and hopefully some daily blog posts from the site. It’s crept up on me so I probably should think a bit more about getting organised for the weekend.
If anyone’s going and wants to go see some bands and have a few drinks let me know.
Although I did see a few Kid Sam songs at this year’s Laneway Festival, I will admit that choosing to request this show was largely a result of them being nominated for the Australian Music Prize, just in case they won the award at the previous week’s winner’s announcement.
In the end, rightly or wrongly the award and the $30,000 prize money went to Lisa Mitchell. Much has been written on the subject of the 2010 winner so I won’t add much more other than a couple of points:
- Firstly, could any of the judges on the panel look me straight in the eye and tell me with a straight face, hand on their heart, that in their honest opinion Lisa Mitchell produced their favourite (and by default, the ‘best’) album last year, better than everything that they heard/reviewed in 2009? and
- Secondly, on a slightly more pedantic note, if you write an album overseas and a significant proportion of the album consists of co-writes with a host of British musicians (5 of the 14 songs according to Wikipedia, plus a Rogers & Hammerstein cover), at what point does it stop being Australian?
So whilst Kid Sam didn’t win the AMP, I’m fairly surprised to find that The Troubadour is sold out fairly early on in the night. Listening to Triple J in the car (the car is the only place I generally listen to the radio. And that should probably read ‘listened to’…) over the next couple of days it’s obvious that Triple J‘s support of the band has played a big part in them selling out the venue, with Down To The Cemetery on high rotation, as well as Kingsmill (I think) doing an interview and providing a listof the tour dates on the day after the gig. Somewhat surprisingly, tonight’s gig isn’t supported by Triple J, although it got me thinking of a question that I have previously posted in a few Australian music forums but without anyone providing a decent answer: how it works when Triple J ‘presents’ gigs/festivals.
I don’t listen to Triple J much but whenever I do they seem to play a song and then tell us not to forgot that Triple J are presenting the band that they just played and give us the tour/festival dates. They also seem to do this with their CDs (Like A Version, Unearthed, Hottest 100 etc) and their magazine (JMag).
When street press ’presents’ gigs/festivals, it gives a discount on advertising to the festival/tour/act, gets to have its logo/name/banner plastered over ads and venue etc and also gets the plum interviews, giveaways and vip tix to said events. So is Triple J just giving free ad space (and plenty of it) to commercial promoters just in return for some free tix? And what is the criteria involved in them selecting what tours they are going to be involved with and flog constantly between songs?
My interest in this is largely driven by remembering the BBC getting into trouble a few times with the media regulator in the UK for doing something similar to this (i.e. cross-promoting its own ‘products’ for free on its own channels) a few years ago. And I have been led to believe that the ABC Act bans the broadcast of advertisements. So, if anyone can explain how it works with Triple J advertising their own products and tours that they generally co-present with commercial enterprises, please add a comment and enlighten me. Thanks.
Anyway, a couple more photos on Flickr, nothing very good as the combination of Troubadour darkness and Troubadour sold out capacity doesn’t make for anything near good photos.
Kid Sam
Deep Sea Arcade
As with most big music festivals, a lot of the best things at BluesFest 2010 were happening away from the main stage, and in particular on the Caba Caba Ray Stage. Saturday’s highlight is undoubtedly Poor Man’s Whiskey covering Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon in a bluegrass-style (with the original Money having it’s name changed to Whiskey, along with a new set of lyrics and with the cash till registers being replaced by the sound of cans of beer being opened and beer bottles knocked together. If it can be done in a dub style, why not do it bluegrass? Not only that, but it’s done with the band dressed up as the characters from The Wizard of Oz (including a very bearded Dorothy), the band’s nod to Darkside Of The Rainbow probably being lost on all but the most nerdy of music fans watching. The only downside is that they play in near darkness.
Other highlights at the smallest stage at the festival include Mojo Juju & The Snake Oil Merchants and the Kaos Kreepshow freakshow. It’s certainly a lot more enjoyable and entertaining compared to the snoozefest that is Jack Johnson‘s main stage headlining set.
The Mojo Stage’s line-up does little to excite today; I feel conflicted watching Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club as as far as I can work out, the Buena Vista Social Club name has just become essentially a brand name with the association to the original “club” diminishing as the years go by and the players pass on and get replaced by younger musicians. I do learn a couple of things looking them up on Wikipedia in writing this post though;
- Ry Cooder was prosecuted and fined $25,000 by U.S. authorities for his work on the Buena Vista Social Club album, having broken the Trading with the Enemy Act, a clause that forms part of the ongoing United States embargo; and
- That when touring the U.S., the Cubans are only entitled to their per diem (transportation and lodging) and are not permitted performance fees due to the embargo.
It’s ridiculous, unbelievable, shocking and insulting.
Donavon Frankenreiter makes it easy by not allowing photographers in the photo pit, meaning that at least I don’t have to feel conflicted by being anywhere near him and Old Crow Medicine Show are a lot more traditional than I had expected, coming nowhere near being as good as The Avett Brothers had been on the Friday. The main surprise is actually finding Newton Faulkner to be pretty good, especially as I make a difficult decision to to photograph him over John Mayall who is playing at the same time but who I’m planning on photographing on Monday. He impresses me further by still being at the signing tent hours after he was due to have finished signing and by being in the crowd at the Mojo Stage on Monday, happy to do photos and shake hands with all and sundry. Whilst it’s all part of the business, even more so in the modern age, it’s impressive to see one of the festival’s main players more than happy to go the extra mile and looking really comfortable doing so.
More Saturday BluesFest 2010 photos on Flickr.
Jack Johnson
Tijuana Cartel
Lyle Lovett
Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club
Poor Man’s Whiskey
Donavon Frankenreiter
Kaos Kreepshow
Newton Faulkner
Mojo Juju & The Snake Oil Merchants
Old Crow Medicine Show
What I Learnt From BluesFest 2010:
- Photography and camping don’t mix;
- 2010 is the year when anyone with a camera can get accreditation to the big music festivals. When they’re having to split the photographers into two groups in order to make it manageable and it’s not even the main stage headliners you’ve given out too many passes. Apparently there were 46 photographers in the pit for Crowded House. Plus security. Plus two platforms with video cameras on them. It took the best part of the three songs to squeeze my way from one side to the other. Not really much fun;
- Having a rule where you have to meet in the backstage media tent 15 minutes before the performances on the main three stages in order to be escorted in the relevant photo pits isn’t much fun and means you spend even more time waiting around instead of being out the front experiencing the festival and seeing as much as the music as possible. But it gives PR people a reason to justify their existence;
- The proportion of older people was a lot smaller than I had expected given the type of music, the age of a lot of the performers, as well as the fact that it’s just about the most expensive festival going;
- Following on from No. 5, there was a surprisingly higher proportion of drunk/shirtless/Southern Cross tattooed/Australian Flag adorned bogans than I would have expected; and
- Despite there not being as many older folk than I expected, of all the Australian festivals I’ve been to, it’s the one with the highest quotient of Crocs.
The long weekend didn’t get off to the best of starts with my car dying on the way out of Brisbane. Despite getting it serviced last week and being told that it was in pretty good shape, there was a massive oil leak under the bonnet and the engine died (seems a bit dodgy to me that it happened on the first journey after the service if you ask me). So had to get a tow truck to take us to the nearest service centre (which was almost opposite where the car had broken down but required a 6km trip round trip in order down to the next junction to get over to the over side of the road and back up again), where they told me what I already knew, that the car was going nowhere ever again. Phoned the wrecker’s yard to come and pick up the car, transferred everything from my car into a taxi which then took us to Avis to pick up a hire car so we could get on our way. Had some good times with the car; it got me from Sydney to Exmouth in Western Australia and back again, as well as several Sydney to Brisbane trips, but living so close to the city and with a combination of public transport, cycling and walking, it didn’t really get used much and so I don’t think I’m going to really miss not having a car now.
After taking the scenic route via Stanthorpe on the Thursday and setting up camp in Ballina on Friday, I managed to get to the site too late for Dr John and The Lower 911, a real shame as he was one of the acts I really wanted to see, having already missed his first set of the festival on the Thursday, so The Swell Season was the first band of the day, at a leisurely festival start time of 17:30 and on the second day of the festival at that.
I’m probably not going to write a whole lot about the bands as it just didn’t feel that I really got to actually “see” much. Refer to Points 2 and 3 above; so much time seemed to be spent waiting backstage in the media tent and it was such a physical challenge to photograph so many of the bands that it just became a really unpleasant experience.
Friday was a good day though; The Swell Season were good, The Avett Brothers excellent. The thrill of seeing Buddy Guy was dampened by the struggle to get photos in a rammed photo pit and it was a similar experience for Jeff Beck even though they split the photographers into two groups, each getting two songs to photograph. Despite everything I’m happy with the photos, especially the Jeff Beck ones as I was really disappointed with the photos I got when he played at the BCC last year. And I also got the benefit of seeing most of his set this time around, instead of the three songs at the BCC before being escorted out of the venue.
Photos from the rest of the festival are on their way and more photos from the Friday are on Flickr.
John Butler Trio
Jeff Beck
Blue King Brown
Buddy Guy
The Avett Brothers
The Swell Season
Soundwave 2010 Quick Round Up Part 2. A gallery of my photos from the day is on The Vine.
Eagles Of Death Metal
Taking Back Sunday
HIM
Escape The Fate
Reel Big Fish
Set Your Goals
Anthrax
I photographed Soundwave in Brisbane last weekend. It was very much a last minute thing and at the start of the week I wasn’t expecting to be photographing, as much as I wanted to do it. I will probably get around to blogging in a bit more detail sometime but it was a bit of a blur, what with photographing 23 bands over the course of the day.
A gallery of my photos from the day is on The Vine.
Faith No More
Jimmy Eat World
Jane’s Addiction
AFI
Placebo
Paramore
Alexisonfire
One gig that has always been scribbled in my diary for the last couple of years has been the annual Brisbane Sounds gig at The Zoo. The night is a showcase of local bands used as a fundraiser to raise money for a promotional CD sampler of Brisbane bands. You can read more about it and buy the CDs here. My blog posts from the 2008 and 2009 gigs are here and here and I also broke out a roll of film at last year’s gig.
The Brisbane Sounds 2010 CD was launched last Wednesday at a media night at The Zoo and I had a vested interest in attending as I was exhibiting a dozen photographs of local Brisbane bands, a number of whom are on this year’s CD, as part of a joint exhibition. The photos will also be on display at the gig night on Saturday 27 February.
In addition to the exhibition, the launch night also had live performances from Tara Simmons and Grand Atlantic, an interview between the Courier Mail’s Noel Mengel and Brisbane Sounds’ Blair Hughes and a really interesting panel discussion, chaired by Andrew McMillen and including a number of Brisbane musicians and music industry stalwarts, talking about some of the issues affecting the local scene at the moment. There are a few more photos from the launch night on Flickr.
The Brisbane Sounds 2010 gig night is on Saturday 27 February 2010 and promises to be another great night of local music, with the bill featuring The Gin Club, The Cairos, Grand Atlantic, The Coalition Crew, Lion Island and Dirtybird. Photos and a blog post from the night as and when.
Tara Simmons
Noel Mengel and Blair Hughes
Discussion Panel
Grand Atlantic
