Another year, another Splendour. 

It’s been a hard few weeks, what with a combination of work, working weekends to make up for the days I’m having off to go to Splendour, gigs, next day photo deadlines and The Ashes, so instead of feeling well rested and full of energy for a hard weekend’s photographing I already feel exhausted.  And I wish people around me would stop being ill with flu; this sore throat I’ve been developing over the last couple of days is an ominous sign.

I’ve worked out my plan for the weekend, a combination of things I really want to see/photograph (Jane’s Addiction, Gutter Twins, Specials. Flaming Lips) things that I’ll go and check out (i.e. Doves, White Lies, Friendly Fires) and things that as I’m there I might as well photograph to fill in time and for something to do (i.e. Hilltop Hoods, Little Birdy, Bluejuice, Yves Klein Blue.  Actually, to be quite honest, about  half the bands I’ve put in my plan…). 

Saturday

Sunday

If there’s one upside it’s that my plan looks a lot less manic than last year’s Splendour, when I seemed to spend most of the weekend walking between the Big Top and the GW McLennan stage and ended up shooting 31 bands in total.  This year it looks like being 22 bands, although no doubt this will change by the time the weekend is over, with bands starting on time (or not) and ease of movement between stages playing a major role in what gets photographed.

Unlike last year, when I was stressing slightly about a poorly camera that was having exposure meter issues and using my old film camera as back-up, I’ve actually got my old digital camera as back up, so hopefully I won’t be worrying too much about my camera dying on me.

As last year, I will be tweeting from the site, something that was very useful last year as an aide memoire for when it came to writing the more detailed blogs, and I’ll also be trying to upload a few photos from the day before on Sunday and Monday mornings to my Flick account. 

I had planned to clear my backlog of blog posts and photos before this weekend but it wasn’t to be.  Actually it ended up being nowhere near close to happening, so posts about The Middle East, Ladytron, Flipper, Deerhunter, Wolf & Cub, Washington, the Incremental Records Launch, the Plus One Records Showcase, Philadelphia Grand Jury and Timothy Carroll will have to wait a few more weeks.

Excerpts from an email I received a few days ago.

Dear Justin

Request for permission to archive: This Is Not A Photo Opportunity http://www.notaphoto.com/

The State Library of Queensland would like to archive your website to preserve it for future generations.

PANDORA, Australia’s Web Archive, was set up by the National Library of Australia in 1996 to enable the archiving and provision of long-term access to online Australian publications. The State Library of Queensland cooperates with the National Library in order to build and preserve a comprehensive collection of Australian online publications. State Library’s brief is to enhance the Queensland presence in this national archive.

We would like to include the above website in the PANDORA Archive, and I would be grateful if you would let me know whether you are willing to permit us to do so. That is, grant us a licence under the Copyright Act 1968 to copy your publication in to the Archive and to provide public access to it via the Internet. This means that you would grant the Library permission to retain your publication in the Archive and to provide public access to it in perpetuity.

Specific information about the State Library’s role in the PANDORA Archive is available at http://www.slq.qld.gov.au/find/sites/pandora. Further information about PANDORA can be found on the National Library’s website at http://pandora.nla.gov.au/index.html

Yes, dear reader, future generations will get to explore my inner most feelings regarding the lighting at The Troubadour, photographing in venues without a photo pit and get to see some pretty pictures from the Brisbane music scene in the early part of the 21st century at the same time.

Note: The title of this blog comes from an interview with Steve Gullick, one of my most favourite music photographers, I read recently.

The first time I photographed Josh Pearson when he was doing Lift To Experience, he asked me, ‘Do you feel like you’re making history?’ Well, I’m certainly recording a very important aspect of it. I think it’s going to be difficult to forget much of the music many of these artists have produced. All I can do is show you what they look like.

I loved the question/statement and had it scribbled down for a future reference and possible use should I ever get around to staring up the new blog (more musing, less photos) I’ve promising myself to set-up over the last couple of years. So nobody steal it in the meantime, right?

2008 was another hectic year, which in photographic terms looked something like this:

1. Girl Talk
2. Buck 65
3. The National
4. Enter Shikari
5. The Police
6. Battles
7. Scul Hazards
8. Brisbane Sounds
9. Died Pretty
10. Soundwave
11. Broken Social Scene
12. Toto
13. Coco Rosie
14. The Brisbane Sound
15. Buffalo Tom
16. The Bellrays
17. Sinead O’Connor
18. Whitesnake
19. QOTSA
20. Jesus & Mary Chain
21. Spectrum
22. Wolfmother
23. Gin Club
24. Mess Hall
25. My Disco
26. Biffy Clyro
27. Rocket Science
28. Kate Miller-Heidke
29. The Audreys
30. Story of The Year
31. Powderfinger
32. Cut Copy
33. 4ZZZ Tater Stomp
34. redsunband
35. Mr Rascal
36. Splendour In The Grass
37. Robert Forster
38. Kim Salmon + The Surrealists
39. X
40. Sixfthick
41. Gentle Ben & His Sensitive Side
42. New Pornogarphers
43. We Are Scientists
44. Joan As Policewoman
45. Tim Finn
46. Def Leppard
47. Steve Earle
48. Texas Tea
49. John Mellencamp
50. Jeremy Jay
51. Pivot
52. Global Gathering
53. Saul Williams
54. MGMT
55. The Datsuns
56. MereNoise Xmas Party

At least that’s the bands/singers/festivals I turned up for and tried to photograph; I probably should have removed QOTSA from the list due to walking away from the contract they wanted me to sign and not making it into the venue, and also The National, whose tour manager decided that although I’d been cleared by the promoter, it should have referred it to him to approve, and so he wouldn’t let me photograph them. But even without those two gigs in the list I still managed to meet my target for the year of 52 gigs (i.e. an average of one a week), a not bad return considering the combination of working away and holidays meant that I was out of the city for about 8 weeks.   Interestingly, 21 of those gigs were at The Zoo, which, as last year, remains my venue of choice by a long way (The Tivoli was in 2nd place with 8 gigs).

On top of the gigs I photographed (or tried to) there’s another 14 gigs I went to as a non-photographing punter. Most of those were at Ric’s but also included Sufjan Stevens at the Tivoli, Iron Maiden at the BEC and Big Day Out, which I seem destined to never photograph and so will be there as a punter in 2009.  I guess there’s always 2010, right?

Photographic highlights of the year were (in no particular order):

• Photographing The Police, a band who were one of my earliest musical memories and my first stadium shoot;
• Being let loose on Splendour In The Grass, and the whole buzz of photographing a major 2-day festival (even if the line-up wasn’t that good this year compared to some of the previous years…); and
• Soundwave, which despite the woeful organisation and extreme 40+ degree heat was fun, although possibly more in retrospect…

Gig of the year was probably the non-photographing Iron Maiden gig at the BEC. I only decided very late on that I should go and managed to get a $50 ticket off eBay on the day of the gig. Even though the seat was in the very back row, as far from the stage as you could get it was still amazing. Hopefully I will get to photograph them some day… Other highlights were Def Leppard, Toto and Whitesnake; 2008 was obviously all about 1980s rock.

Musical lows of the year were probably all the mediocre-at-best bands at Splendour playing to full tents whilst all the good stuff went largely unoticed in the GW McLennan stage and the train-wreck that was Spectrum at The Step Inn. Photographic lows? Any gig with rubbish/no lighting, which was probably most of them…

And finally, personal favourite photos from the year include some of these:

It all kicks off again in the new year, with gigs by Stars, Black Keys/Gomez, All Tomorrow’s Parties at Mt Buller, Dead Meadow/Fuck Buttons and Bon Iver already in my diary to photograph in the first half of January.  So, there will be blogs, there will be tweets, and there will be photos.

All packed and all set for the weekend. At least I hope I am…

Worked out my plan for the weekend earlier in the week and it looks like this.

Saturday

Sunday

That’s the plan anyway, although not sure if it will happen; it largely depends on bands starting on time and ease of movement between stages. Most of what I want to photo is either on at the Supertop Stage or the GW McLennan Stage, the two most far apart stages, so there’s going to be a lot of running involved.

Hopefully everything will go the plan; my camera was a bit poorly a couple of weeks ago when I was up in Cooktown, and it’s still not 100%, with the exposure meter in both Shutter and Aperture Priority modes not working. Manual is still ok, and as long as it’s ok for another few days everything will be alright. Just in case of emergencies I bought some b+w film for my backup film SLR… Fingers crossed it won’t come to that (although I am tempted to shoot a few rolls for fun).

Wish me luck!

Although I have some albums with Gered Mankowitz covers, including Kate Bush’s ‘Lionheart’ and he is probably best know for his cover for the Rolling Stones album ‘Between the Buttons’, his live work was something that I was largely introduced to when he had an exhibition of his Rolling Stones photos at the Proud Gallery in Camden in 2002, which coincided with the launch of his Rolling Stones 65 – 67 book. Much of the book is taken with his nine-week, 48 city tour of the USA in 1965.

Whilst musically I’ll always take The Beatles over the Stones, photographically I’ve always found The Stones to have been generally better photographed than The Beatles. There are several things I really like about Mankowitz’s Stones photos during this period.

As a photographer you can’t help but be envious at the size of the tour and also the access that he was allowed, something you’d almost never get in this day with a band of the Stones’s fame, even back in 1965 when they were just beginning to break in the US. Even if you did get a tour photographer job these days it’s unlikely to be as long as 48 dates, and its not going to be without a whole load of restrictions, nothing like the real ‘Access All Areas’ freedom that music photographers in the 1960s and 1970s seem to have got.

It could be argued that technically the photos are nothing to write home about – even shooting mainly at ISO 3200 there are a lot of focus images due to slow shutter speeds in the dark venues – but I think this only adds to the charm of the photos and helps place them at a time in history. I have previously written in my blog and argued in photography forums on the internet, I have no issues with blurriness or images that aren’t pin sharp. If you’re photographing something like car racing, the advice is usually to pan the camera to add movement, as photos of cars racing at high speed but frozen at high shutter speeds in photos make for a dull set of photos. So I see no difference when capturing the energy and movement of a band on stage or a highly excited crowd; blur from movement adds so much more to the overall effect.

Finally, there’s such a sense of history looking at the photos; the fresh faced Stones, the fashion of the band and the audience and, most importantly, the sense of being in the right time at the right place to capture the madness as the Stones suddenly hit the big time in the US. It’s quite a unique situation and it’s what every music photographer dreams about.

There’s a video podcast of Gered talking about his work at The Morrison Hotel Gallery here.

Wikipedia tells us that the latest Queens Of The Stone Age album, Era Vulgaris refers to the Latin term for Common Era.  The entry continues by saying that the title was chosen by Josh Homme because he thought “it sounds like ‘the Vulgar Era’, which I like, because that sounds like something that I would like to be part of…”.

After last Thursday experiences I can confirm that Mr Homme is definitely part of ‘the Vulgar Era’ he so wants to belong to…

 My Thursday went as follows:

1. Promoter rings me up at about 3pm and says be there at 9:15pm;
2. Get there at 9:15pm and notice the signs saying that their set starts at 10pm;
3. The box office call through to the tour manager/promoter rep/whoever, who tells them to tell me to come back at 9:30pm;
4. Come back at 9:30pm, guy turns up, hands me a one page contract with very little white space on it;
5. Start reading. Guy tells me it’s non-negotiable;
6. Get to Clause 2; it says I transfer copyright to them for use throughout the universe for whatever use they want etc;
7. I tell the guy this. He smugly tells me that I can use the photo once in the named publication but ‘they’ (whoever they is; I couldn’t actually find it on the contract…) own the photos;
8. Guy tells me sign or I’m not coming in;
9. I tell him I that I don’t think I’m going to come in;
10. Whilst in the process of folding up the contract to put in my pocket he rips it out my hands, passes it over to the box office girl;
11. I ask can I keep the contract;
12. He tells me to get out.

In part I felt empowered doing it, but at the same time I was very seething, although I think was mainly to do with how this guy treated me and spoke down to me.

The only other photographer there, a woman photographing for a music website, didn’t even read the contract, signed away and told me it was just a standard contract. I told her it wasn’t as you were giving them copyright. She shrugged her shoulders and walked in…  it’s kind of sad that photographers are willing to sign contracts without reading them and without caring for the rights that they have signed away.

I emailed my Editor first thing Friday morning to explain what had happened and why I wasn’t sending though any photos.  Not only did she agree with me 100%, but she sent an email of complaint to the promoter; a big deal considering it’s a major promoter. 

I don’t feel it’s a missed opportunity as the guy had already told us the pit was too small and we’d have to shoot from the staircase towards the back of the room…  but no photos, not even rubbish ones from miles from the stage to show you.  But, most importantly, no regrets whatsoever. 

Remember kids, just say no…

See a slightly bigger/more readable version here or the full contract text and discussion from the ‘Concert Photography’ Flickr group here.

Tonight I was supposed to be photographing Carol King, which I had been looking forward to doing. It’s not every day you get to photograph one of the 20th century’s most renowned songwriters.

But I ended up turning it down when they sent me the contract to sign. The contract said that the photos could only be used once, for the publication I was doing them for. So I couldn’t include them on my website, show them here, upload them to flickr etc. I have ended up signing similar contracts before, even though I probably shouldn’t as I don’t agree with them, and as I’m not getting paid to do the photos there’s nothing in it for me, other than bragging rights; to be able to say to people that I photographed a certain band/singer.

However, the clincher was this:

Her album ‘Tapestry’ is estimated to have sold 22m copies.

Her songwriting credits (with Gerry Goffin) include:
Will You Love Me Tomorrow;
Up On The Roof;
The Locomotion;
(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman; and
He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss).

So you’d think that if Carol King wanted to use a photographer’s photos that she wouldn’t be short of a few bob to pay them for using them…

A shame, but I know I did the right thing.