From X at The Ding Dong Lounge, it was a bit of a magical mystery tour to Roxanne Parlour, despite the venue only being just down the road. Eventually, after a walk around the block, going into a somewhat random building with no sign outside saying that this was the place and getting the lift up to the second floor, we were there.

Sixfthick became my most seen live band a long time ago (beating the previous record held by Spiritualized), but this was the first time that I’d seen them away from Brisbane. The most noticeable difference between most Brisbane shows and tonight’s Melbourne show was the crowd, who were just wild. As well as mosh pit collapsing onto the front of the low stage throughout the gig, Gentle Ben returned from one of his forays into the crowd with his underwear pulled up above his jeans and looking ragged. At which point he decided he would deprive the audience of their fun and just rip them off through his jeans… As you do…

They played a similar set to the ones they’ve played recently in Brisbane, including their cover of X’s ‘The Feel’, but even having seen them play so many times, you just can’t get tired of seeing them.  They have the songs and they have the show.  It’s heartening to see them get a sizeable crowd in the Melbourne, something of a graveyard for Brisbane bands.  In a fair world they should be being booked to play every major festival in Australia and hopefully that time isn’t too far around the corner.

A few more photos on flickr, with maybe a few more to come when I have a bit more time.

Work has taken me down to Victoria for a few weeks, but there’s always time to fit in a gig or two, especially when I had a couple of nights in Melbourne. First up was X supported by Rollerball at The Ding Dong Lounge. After a few years of only knowing Richard Sharman of Black Shadow Photography via various music and music photography forums and through emails we finally got to meet up and go for a few drinks and he got me into the gig as his +1.

I had checked with Richard about the camera friendliness of the venues in the city and he had let me know that the Ding Dong Lounge and Roxanne’s Parlour, our next port of call were fine with cameras but the lighting was pretty crappy. The lighting at the Ding Dong Lounge was similar to an average to good night at The Zoo. So that’s better than pretty much all the smaller venues in Brisbane…  A lot of red light, but you can’t have everything…

Rollerball were a blast from the past, having not heard anything from them in a long while. I photographed them at The Rev in Brisbane back in October 2005, when they were supporting The Original Angels Band. It was the last gig I photographed solely on film, a week before buying a digital camera, the same digital camera I still use and really should think about upgrading… I would post a link to the photos but I did them for a low quality music website that has stuffed up all their old galleries somehow, so they don’t actually contain the photos they should, having both different sets of photos and photos from completely different photographers.

After hearing so much about X over the last few years, especially on much-missed high quality Australian music forums, it was good to finally get to check them out. Really enjoyed their set, although we ducked out just before the end, just after their intense cover of John Lennon’s ‘Mother’. Although they’re a very old school Oz Rock sounding band, they reminded me, in parts, of a more punk version of Slade, mostly due to Steve Lucas’s vocals.

A few more photos on flickr, with maybe a few more to come when I have a bit more time.

X

Rollerball

I managed to fit in Kim Salmon And The Surrealists’ gig at the Step Inn whilst back in Brisbane for a few days, in between being in Far North Queensland and being down in Victoria. Although I have seen Kim Salmon with Darling Downs, his acoustic country/folk duo with Died Pretty’s Ron Peno, this was the first time that I’d seen him play electric. Stupidly I missed The Scientists show at The Columbian a couple of years ago and disappointingly they didn’t play in Brisbane earlier in 2008 as part of the Don’t Look Back series, when they played their Blood Red River album in its entirety.

I’ve photographed a few gigs at The Step Inn before but it’s not my favourite of venues. I don’t like the layout – it’s a pub with a small stage in the corner as opposed to being what I would consider a bona fide live music venue – and the lighting is really poor, easily rivalling that of the Troubadour. Apparently the capacity is 380, but I think only about a third of that number have any chance of getting into the room where the stage is. Somewhat surprisingly, The Bronx are playing there in December and whilst I’d love to photograph them, the thought of photographing them there just isn’t doing it for me. It would be great to see them up close in such an intimate venue so maybe I’ll just have to leave the camera at home…

A few more photos on flickr.

Got another of those last minute requests, this time to cover Robert Forster’s gig at the Brisbane Powerhouse, which I couldn’t say no to.  Unfortunately it was a 3 songs and escorted out of the venue job, which was a shame as I always enjoy seeing him play.  In addition, it was a bit of a frustrating shoot as we were only allowed to photograph from way out to the side of the stage, the high positioned lighting meant dark shadows under his brow so it was hard to get a shot of his eyes, and he played the first three songs (at least) solo on an acoustic guitar with the rest of his band no where in sight.  Not the greatest shots ever.  Although the colour of the lighting was fine, as usual, I prefer the monotone shots.

Better Robert Forster photos can be seen in my blogs for The Brisbane Sound and the 4 Ages of Robert Forster residency at the Powerhouse last year.

The night before I went up to Cooktown back in July I was commissioned by Mr Rascal to photograph their album launch at the Cremorne Theatre at QPAC, with Carry Nation and Granite Lakes supporting. Nice little venue, with excellent sound and some pretty good lights; a nice change from the usual venue fare in the Valley. Was a really great night, with the band really making the effort to make it a special event and swelling their ranks with a host of additional musicians, including a horn section and backing singers.

Photos are up on Mr Rascal’s myspace site.

Carry Nation

 
Granite Lakes

Mr Rascal

I saw The Vines on their first UK tour at ULU in April 2002 (for bragging rights it was a shame I didn’t go see them a month earlier at the Camden Barfly…) and watched a really boring show in amongst an mostly arms-folded, unexcited crowd who were not being convinced that they were worth the column inches they were garnering in the UK music press, even less so after their tepid cover of ‘Ms Jackson’. Roll on six and half years and other than the fact that too many Australian festival promoters seem to think that they are deserving of high billing and they’re playing to a larger crowd, nothing much has changed. Take the spirit and passion from rock ‘n’ roll and you’re left with The Vines; predictable and pointless rock by numbers. The NME’s apology was long overdue…  4 albums and seven years down the track, they still aren’t as good as Brisbane’s Violent Soho.

It was a hard enough job photographing whirling dervish, Tahita Bulmer in daylight when New Young Pony Club played at V Festival. It is near impossible when they’re playing in a tent at night with low lighting, what lighting there is is red, and there’s an abundance of smoke. Most of the three songs allocation is spent hoping that she’ll stop still for a second or two so that my camera can focus. The other downside with energetic performers playing in the dark is that you spend so much of your time trying to photograph them you don’t get any of the rest of the band (although they were mostly lurking in the dark as well, a shame as the drummer and keyboard player are quite photogenic young ladies…)

Sigur Ros were another of the ‘know the name, heard about them, never heard them’ bands, which is probably something of a music fan faux pas in the modern world when a significant chunk of the recorded musical history of the world is available at your fingertips every time you sit at a computer. And largely for free if you don’t have any morals concerning downloading for free… When you see nothing but superlative plaudits for a band you end up with really high expectations, but I find them disappointing based on my expectations. Instead of the usual 3 song allocation we are given songs 2 and 3 to photograph in. Listening to the 1st song from the very side of the photo pit it does sound immense, and the use of violin bows on guitars make it look like it’s going to be a good photographic experience. But when we allowed to move into the front of the stage the violin bow disappears and the second song just doesn’t have the power of the first song. The lighting is very low and the stage very cluttered, making photographing tricky. The two songs seemed to be fairly short, although I’m not sure if it was just 2 parts of the same song. Either way it’s not really happening for me musically or photographically, so I duck out of the pit. Walking around the back of the Supertop tent towards the Mix Up tent the overall view is more impressive, and you get a much better sense of the stage set-up as opposed to the limited view you get from the photo pit with its very high stage. The reviews I have seen of their Splendour set and the shows they played in Sydney and Melbourne have been nothing but overwhelming acclaim and so I can’t help but feel that I’m missing out on something really special here, which is a source of real frustration.

Over in the Mix Up tent the final act for the weekend is The Presets. We get there with plenty of time to spare so I spend a bit of time taking a few photos of the crowd.

Having first seen The Presets at The Hopetoun in December 2004 (supported by Expatriate) when I was living in Sydney, they are a band that I always enjoy seeing play live. Live they are a much better prospect than on CD, with their recently released album ‘Apocalypso’ being a real disappointment to me, with so many of the songs on it seeming half-baked ideas that needed a lot more work on them to properly realise them as songs.

Things have changed a fair bit for them in those 3½ years. Back then they looked like this:

Now, with all the worldwide success, Julian can afford to buy really nasty pink fluoro jackets like this.

After the first three songs we’ve got no chance of getting out of the photo pit through the crowd, so we end up being escorted through the back of the tent and past the proper, chandelier-adorned, VIP tent.

One band to go and its Wolfmother. You can only assume that when they were booked as the headline act there was some assumption by the festival’s organisers that they might have some new songs to play or, heavens forbid, a whole new album to promote. Boy, did they get that wrong…

Despite playing some new songs when they played at the closing night of the Andy Warhol exhibition at GoMA they manage to play just about the same set, in the same order as they’d been playing for most of the last 4 years, with nothing new on offer this time.

Whilst their set probably isn’t as ragged as the GoMA set was, the main difference between their 2008 Splendour set and previous festival sets that I’ve seen them at is the total lack of chemistry between the 3 band members and the absence of any real sense of joy at playing a large show emanating from the stage. Seeing them up close from the photo pit it’s no surprise that the band’s split is announced a few days later and even less of surprise when it turns out that they split prior to the festival and only reconvened for one last time to play. Whilst they didn’t sink to the levels that The Stone Roses sank to when I saw their last gig at Reading in 1996 (nothing could be that bad…), and whilst they are a band that consistently failed to impress me, it is a set, like the Stone Roses Show at Reading, that will probably be talked about for some time to come in a combination of hushed voices and “I was there at the bitter end’ bragging rights from those that witnessed their final show.  Final until the big money reunion in a few years time that is.  Remember them as they were…

It’s been a long day of a long weekend so we don’t stick around to see the rest of their set after we get out of the photo pit. It’s straight back to Ballina, where the day’s photos are downloaded and the alarm is again set for 6am for pre-deadline editing…

Plenty of Sunday Splendour photos at Yahoo Music.

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.

Thanks to the blog I wrote about Everett True vs The Australian Music Press I’ve had my blog mentioned and linked to on his Guardian and Plan B.

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/08/im_front-page_news_down_under_but_for_all_the_wrong_reasons.html

http://planbmag.com/blogs/staff/2008/08/16/news-from-brisbane-2/

Bit strange to thinking about it really. 

I didn’t have any great plans for it; the lack of critical discourse in Australian music press is just something that interests me and a subject I’m passionate about, so it was just an excuse for getting some stuff off my chest.

It hasn’t been lost on me that my most newsworthy and commented on blog is one that doesn’t have any photos on it…

The alarm goes off at 6am, although feeling pretty tired and in a world of pain, much like I did when I climbed Mount Warning earlier in the year, I don’t manage to get out of bed until 6:30am. It’s straight into editing and I manage to get the ones I’m sending off for consideration for print finsihed off quickly and so start on the web photos. I upload some photos to flickr, write a quick blog, do a quick bit of music forum photo/blog whoring and it’s time to get back up to the site and photograph another day’s worth of bands.

It may be another day but they’ve still got the same Coldplay CD that they played between bands for the whole of yesterday. Someone, quite possibly Guy Hands himself, has obviously paid a lot of money to ensure that the Supertop crowd are the test subjects in some kind of musical Pavlovian experiment. It doesn’t work for me though. I end up hearing those Coldplay songs so many times over the weekend, that by the end of the Sunday, not only am I so over their new album that I have no need or desire to go and buy it, but I think that hearing it again might make me go on some Coldplay CD smashing rampage…

My plan has me photographing Newcastle band and UncharTED winners, Here Come The Birds first up, but our easy start to the day means that we don’t actually get to site until after the have played. My plan then has me photographing Little Red at the GW McLennan stage but we’re running so late that suddenly there isn’t enough time to get over there as Yves Klein Blue, starting at the same time as Little Red, have suddenyl started their set on the Supertop stage. So I end up seeing and photographing Yves Klein Blue yet again and yet again they fail to impress.

British India are next on up the Supertop. Looking and listening to them play it’s pretty obvious that they’ve been listening to a lot of AC/DC, and it’s no surprise that they have been produced by Harry Vanda. Their recent album’ ‘Thieves’ managed to get to #5 in the Aria Album chart (based on a tiny amount of sales if you believe everything you read), and whilst its an energetic performance and fun to photograph, musically it’s just the usual derivative Oz Rock that Australians can’t seem to get enough of, but which means little outside of these shores.

Next it’s time for the first walk of the day over to the GW McLennan stage for Even. Having seen the name before, recently seen that their debut album Less Is More was voted in at number 36 in The Age’s 2008 poll of the greatest Australian albums ever, but having never heard them I was looking forward to seeing what they were like. But they are disappointing, very pedestrian and seemingly playing largely on autopilot. It doesn’t make for the greatest photographic experience either. It’s another small crowd in the tent to see them, although I guess they are playing to a slightly bigger audience than the 5 paying punters they got recently at a show in Coolangatta.

Although not on my plan, as I’m in the vicinity I end up at Van She in the Mix Up tent. Next time Everett True derides the Australian music press for being too soft on Australian bands there should be a little photo of Van She. They are horrible. Despite being about to launch their debut album and despite playing a sizeable stage at a big festival, it’s a half-hearted, dull, passionless, going–through-the-motions display of a half-hearted, dull, passionless, going–through-the-motions set of songs. Having see them a few times previously when they played a mini SE Queensland tour with Mean Streaks, The Valentinos and Faker in early 2006 they haven’t progressed or improved much in the last two years, only fuelling the argument that the Australian music press constantly celebrates mediocrity.

Splendour’s love affair with mediocrity continues in the form of Vampire Weekend on the Supertop. It’s just so…so…bland…and…so…so fake. They truly have all then authenticity of a bunch of rich, privileged, white kids, who have got copies of Paul Simon’s ‘Graceland’, playing African-influenced music. The fact that the band have even described their music as ‘Upper West Side Soweto’ makes we want to do very bad things to them. But the crowd go wild, and sing all the words. I expect that if, god forbid, an actual African musician, was playing over in the GW McLennan stage at the same time as Vampire Weekend, that they’d still largely be playing to an empty tent like most of the other bands playing the GW McLennan stage over the weekend.