Saturday was probably an even better day than Friday. Here’s a quick round-up. Time to start going through all the photos in a bit more detail now and to try to remember all the things that happened over the weekend, a tall order all things considered. I probably should have taken some notes as I went but will see how much I can piece together from my own memory and the various message boards.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

Spiritualized

Laughing Clowns

Rowland S Howard

Harmonia

Robert Forster

Michael Gira

Afrirampo

Small Knives

Bridezilla

The Stabs

Hunter Dienna

Back in Brisbane after an amazing weekend at Mt Buller. I had planned on doing a quick round-up of Friday yesterday but the internet place on the mountain wasn’t letting me upload. So here’s some stuff from Friday and hopefully I’ll be able to do a quick round up of Saturday’s events tomorrow, before I get started on going through all the photos and writing some more detailed blogs.

The Saints

Dirty Three

Silver Apples

Fuck Buttons

The Necks

Grinderman

James Blood Ulmer

Primitive Calculators

Beaches

Bill Callahan

Dead Meadow

Hoss

The Holy Sea

It’s always about the sex, the drugs, the glamour, the romance. It’s never about getting up at 4:15am to get to the airport to get the plane down to Melbourne. The taxi comes at 4:45am and it’s a quiet ride, everyone in a state of still being half-asleep combined with early morning grumpiness. But gradually after some food and coffee and with the onset of daylight everyone begins to wake up, although this is then followed up by more sleep on the plane.

Everything goes better than expected when we get to Melbourne; baggage is first out on the conveyor, car hire is speedily sorted and within no time at all we’re on our way. Stop for a quick unhealthy breakfast at Hungry Jacks and then a mix of ATP-related CDs accompanies us all the way to Mansfield, where we make a final stop for lunch and to pick up last minute food and drink supplies for the weekend.

The road wind its way up the mountain until the first checkpoint, where tickets are exchanged for wristbands and festival programs are dispensed. In theory we are supposed to stop and park at the second checkpoint and get a shuttle bus to the village, but as we are there so early and as I’m only dropping Michael and Annie at their accommodation for the weekend before coming back down the mountain for tonight before returning tomorrow to stay Friday and Saturday nights, I’m waved through. Once your above the treeline and can appreciate the unrestricted views, you really get to see what a spectacular location this is, certainly better than Butlins in Minehead, one of the venues ATP uses in the UK, and a more impressive locality than the Riverstage, where the main Brisbane leg of the Australian ATP is being held.

Although the excitement of the festival has been building over the week, actually seeing the site takes it to a whole new level. And It’s not just the physical location, it’s also the realisation that it’s going to be a 2-day festival without the usual camping ‘experience’; one without tents, mud and portaloos, where you can sleep in a decent bed and pop back to you room at anytime for food, drink, sleep, all the luxuries that you don’t get in a tent at a festival. In addition, having the accommodation inside the venue, a couple minutes walk from the stages means that I don’t have to pack everything and then carry it all around for the day and I can set up my laptop with some degree of safety and download photos and edit as I go in relative comfort. Whilst ATP’s demographic is undoubtedly a more affluent, older and call it musically-elitist, call it musically-refined crowd, and there are probably people who would say that not camping would take away a major part of the vibe of a music festival experience, it just seems a more civilised way of seeing some bands over two days, rather than the endurance test you get living under canvas. And having experienced the rain, mud and general carnage of Glastonbury in 1997, 1998 and 2005 it can’t be a bad thing.

After the exhilaration of the top of the mountain, it’s a reflective and meandering drive back down the mountain to the Merrijig Motor Inn, my home for the night.

I can’t wait to get back up the mountain tomorrow and until the music actually starts. More words and photos over the next few days.

Mt Buller, proudly brought to you by Holden

Main Stage

2nd Stage

Ironic billboard. Chris Bailey pictured right…

The drive up the mountain

Festival With A View

Censored ATP poster in Country Victoria

 

The law of diminishing returns in the music industry shows, especially in more recent years when the record companies have demanded immediate success and have been less likely to allow a band to develop over a number of albums, that however well your debut album is received, the follow up is unlikely to match the sales and positive reviews of your debut, with column inches for further releases decreasing, no matter how good the album might be, until reviews are largely token 200 word efforts, with an obligatory 3-star rating, and you’re only really playing to the already converted. Now onto their fourth album, ‘HeadStunts‘, The Datsuns seem to be well entrenched in this territory, with a quarter full Zoo showing a notable reduction in numbers from their last show at the venue back in 2006. It’s a real shame as they remain a really great, little live band, playing a style of garage rock that never quite goes out of fashion, but just gets done by younger bands who hog the attentions of the music press for their turn of 15 minutes in the limelight.

This was the third time I’ve photographed the band.  The November 2006 show at The Zoo resulted in this not particularly good photo ending up as my first photo published in Rave.

 

And their Camden Buzzard show back in London in June 2005, when I was still photographing with film, resulted in one of my own personal favourite photos from the year.

In keeping with recent experience at The Zoo the lighting was particularly poor, with none of the cans at the front of the stage being turned on during their set and all the lighting coming from the back and side, so it was another disappointing and frustrating photographic experience at the venue.

Black Diamond Heavies, another blues-rock two-piece but with drums and keys, supported but although they played with a lot of passion it was a largely unremarkable set and the band just aren’t in the same league as other similar two pieces that are around, such as The Black Keys, who still remain the leading proponents of the whole drums+guitar genre, and The Mess Hall.

Some more photos on flickr.

The Datsuns

 

Black Diamond Heavies

I finally took the plunge and bought a new camera.  I’ve had my Minolta 5D for 3¼ years and it always was my intention to look to upgrade after 3 years. Originally there was some talk that Sony’s recently released full-frame camera, the a900, would come in at under US$2,000 so I was waiting to see what happened with that. In the end it came in at about US$2,700, and the price hasn’t been helped by the weakening of the Australian Dollar in recent months, meaning that it I want to buy one now it’s in the AU$3,800 – AU$4,000 range.

There is a difference between being about to afford to buy a AU$4,000 camera and being able to justify spending that much and I just couldn’t justify the spend. If you spent $4,000 on a camera in the pre-digital days you would not only have ended up with an amazing camera, but one that would probably last the rest of your life (with a little bit of love and care and the odd bit of refurb). If you spend $4,000 on a DSLR you’ll more than likely be replacing it within 4 or 5 years. And on top of the cost of the actual camera you’ll probably have to buy a whole lot more memory cards to cope with the larger, higher resolution files as well as computer upgrades for more RAM, more hard disk space, more back-up storage and possibly software upgrades to be compatible with the new camera firmware. Whilst digital has made it quicker and less messy, sometimes I’m not convinced if there are any real money savings to be had when compared against the good old days of using film and Sunday morning hangovers spent in the darkroom developing negatives.

So in the end I plumped for the Sony a700. Whilst it’s a year old model, and likely to be replaced during 2009, a recent firmware upgrade has by all accounts made it into a new camera and ultimately I was finding the limitations of a more than 3 year old camera increasingly frustrating, not to mention the recent issues with metering not working in some modes making it feel that it was on its last legs. A further advantage of a new digital camera is that it means that my second/spare camera isn’t a film camera now. I was always nervous when photographing big shows, and especially festivals, that my camera would suddenly die on me and I’d have to photograph with the film camera, which meant carrying around a load of film just in case. I regret not buying it a few months ago when the exchange rates made it more like $1,200, as opposed to the $1,500 I paid for it, but I expect this to keep me going for another few years.

Initial things I like about the a700
IQ looks to be infinitely better
Much larger range of ISOs available
ISO looks usable at much higher values than the Minolta 5D
Auto focus is much faster
LCD monitor is far superior
Flash Sync socket

Initial things I don’t like about the a700
Larger and heavier body
Although aluminium body, feels a bit plastic-y
Controls are laid out very differently
Shutter sound is quieter but doesn’t sound right
Autofocus sound is… different
Being such a big upgrade it all seems a bit complicated…
Takes different sized batteries (so more expense required)

So although there are a number of things that I’m not liking on first impressions, they’re generally the more cosmetic features and the differences that you might expect after having used the same camera for over 3 years.

I have taken it out and used it in anger for the first time since I listed those initial impressions and have been really impressed by the image quality and ISO usability. It’s probably not going to be up there with the new Canon 5D mkII, but so far it’s looking more than good enough.  Blog and photos are on their way.

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.

Whilst the line-up for Global Gathering 2009 doesn’t have the same weight of performers as Parklife back in October, there is just enough on the bill to make requesting to cover it worthwhile, although in fairness if it isn’t for Kraftwerk playing I wouldn’t have been interested.

The days preceding the festival had an ominous feel to them, with black clouds and heavy storms a-plenty, and forecasts of more to come during the day. A heavy storm passes over the city just as I am about to leave, which delays my departure, but worse is to come with me just missing a train and then managing to miss the next train thanks to not noticing a late change in platform. Spending over an hour waiting for a train at Fortitude Valley train station is not the best way to start the day… The other downside to this was that it also means that I manage to miss two of the five bands that I want to photograph – The Potbelleez and The Orb.

Potbelleez were one of the few advertised ‘live’ bands, although the reviews have said that there was only two of them so I guess I don’t miss much. I haven’t seen The Orb since Glastonbury in 1992 and 1993 and am disappointed to have managed to miss them, although them playing mid-afternoon just seems a bit wrong and probably wouldn’t have been anywhere near the experience of their sunset headline shows at those Glastonburys.

Thanks to the storm and the wet weather in the lead up to the festival, there is the expected mud, but with a familiar déjà vu of this year’s V Festival from the accompanying effluent smell. And much like V Festival the punters aren’t being put off from diving and jumping in the mud, thanks to which I’m splattered in the stuff within minutes of wandering around to the main stage…

After the train debacle, the next problem is the timetable that I’d cut out from one of Brisbane’s street press publications (not the best one obviously…) which is completely wrong. The front gate has run out of timetables so have to memorise the times, not too hard considering there are only three bands left that I want to photo. 6pm rolls around and so it’s time for Gorillaz Sound System, a seemingly cynical money making-scheme trading under the Gorillaz name but seemingly having little to do with the actual band or their albums.

But in keeping with the day I haven’t got the right wristband to get into the photo pit, so it’s another trip back through the mud to the front gate to get a different coloured wristband. Only this second one isn’t the right one either… Third time lucky, but it’s now way after the first three songs and, as the tent is surprisingly full, I can’t be bothered pushing down to the front to take photos from the crowd. The running tally at this point is bands photographed = 0, bands missed = 3…

7pm comes around and finally I manage to get into a photo pit and photograph a band – Mark Ronson and The Version Players. He’s obviously got some talent as an arranger and producer and can play a bit of guitar, but even with a substantial and impressive band on stage it’s still just a glorified wedding band playing some covers.

With well over an hour to fill before Kraftwerk I have a walk around and take some social pics to pass the time. I’m always amazed at how much people want you to take their photo and also want to know where and when they’re going to be published. Gen Y are a vain lot… I should probably lay off the slow shutter sync set-up a bit and maybe take some normal portraits… It’s a bit of a hit and miss effect as well, but when it works it works well and the randomness of it does keep me entertained.

The evil money making schemes that modern day music festivals have become manifests itself further at the bar, when I find out you need to pre-purchase vouchers.  Despite just wanting a bottle of water (a rip off at $5) the lowest priced ticket is $10. Still, at least I get through my $10 of drinks vouchers during the evening, unlike the girl on the train back to the city at the end of the night who still had $70 worth of vouchers in her purse…

Much to my surprise Kraftwerk aren’t playing the main outdoor stage but are in a fairly small tent instead. What’s even more surprising is that 15 minutes before they are due to start, during Fischerspooner’s DJ set, you could probably squeeze the crowd there to see them into The Zoo.

However, there is an upside to the lack of crowd. I’m told that I can’t photograph from the photo pit and have to do it from the mixing desk at the back of the tent. Of course the laws of festival organisation mean that the mixing desk know nothing about this so I end up shoot from the crowd, with the fairly sparse numbers meaning that moving around is a painless exercise and it’s easy to get a clear view.

This is the second time I’ve seen Kraftwerk so the impact of seeing their show in the flesh isn’t quite as great as the first time. It probably also doesn’t help that the last time I saw them (back in 1998) they were supported by Mezzanine-era Massive Attack. And it was in Rio…

But it was still a really special show, one that will stay in the memeory, and not having to shoot from the pit, combined with the ease of photographing from the crowd, means that I can keep shooting for the whole of their set, a blessing in disguise as it means getting photos of the robots in the ‘The Robots’ and Kraftwerk back on stage in their UV suits for ‘Music Non-Stop’ during the encore. There is still time for one last disappointment from the day though, with Ralf Hütter doing a ‘Brian Wilson at Splendour’ and checking the time on his watch before he leaves his keyboard terminal and walks off the stage at the end of the set.

Although numbers swelled a bit by the time they started their set, by the encores it is back to a crowd size that could fit into The Zoo. It is disappointing to see such an important and seminal electronic music band play to such a small audience but apparently there’s some guy called Sasha playing some records on another stage somewhere and he’s a lot more down with the kids…

Some more photos on flickr.

Kraftwerk

Mark Ronson & The Version Players

Social Pics!!!

Love is like a bomb, baby, c’mon get it on
Livin’ like a lover with a radar phone
Lookin’ like a tramp, like a video vamp
Demolition woman, can I be your man?
Razzle ‘n’ a dazzle ‘n’ a flash a little light
Television lover, baby, go all night
Sometime, anytime, sugar me sweet
Little miss ah innocent sugar me, yeah

I did think about leaving it there for my review of the night, it’s all you really need to know.  Sure it ain’t Dylan but then Dylan isn’t as much fun.  Although I have Pyromania and Hysteria I was never that big Def Leppard fan back in my obligatory teenage metal years, much preferring Iron Maiden and Van Halen.  I would say it’s safe to say that I haven’t listened to them since the 1980s.  But despite the 20 year gap between listens, it’s amazing how rock music so unashamedly stupid (all things considered) can suddenly unlock the door to long lost memories and provide flashbacks to the summer of 1987, memories of six weeks in France, drinking cider with school mates and when life was a lot simpler.  Memory recall is made somewhat easier by the fact that Def Leppard look pretty much the same as they did in the late 1980s, in scarily good looking shape for a bunch of guys in their late 40s – early 50s.  There is obviously some sort of Def Leppard intensive fitness regime going on…  

Contracts reared their ugly heads once again, with the Def Leppard contract restricting usage to the named publication (with some conflict between saying portfolio usage was allowed but specifying that the photos couldn’t be anywhere on the internet other than the named publication.  Don’t they know that portfolio books are so 20th century…).  But at least the Def Leppard contract didn’t plumb the depths of the Cheap Trick contract, which was so bad that it resulted in the promoter not allowing photographers to sign it.

Thanks to the photo contract restrictions, the photos are up on Rave’s website.

And thanks to Stephen for the spare ticket, which was greatly appreciated and meant that I got to see Cheap Trick (although they weren’t that good) and the whole Def Leppard set, instead of being kicked out of the venue after the two songs I was allowed to photograph for.

Last time Tim Finn played in Brisbane it was with the reformed Split Enz at the 13,500-capcaity Entertainment Centre, so it was a real thrill to get the opportunity to see him play at 200-capcaity The Troubadour this week.  His 75 minute set included songs from his new album, ‘The Conversation‘, plus crowd-pleasing Split Enz favourites (‘I See Red‘, ‘Shark Attack‘, ‘My Mistake‘) and Crowded House Woodface-era classics (‘Chocolate Cake‘, ‘It’s Only Natural‘, ‘Weather With You‘).  If there was one disappointment it was that he didn’t play anything from either of the Finn Brothers’ albums (the first one, ‘Finn‘, is patchy but the second one, ‘Everyone Is Here‘ is fantastic).

It amused me that when SBS started doing their Classic Australian Albums series, they included ‘Woodface‘.  Looking at the bands that they covered in the first season of the program it seemed that they had chosen the records based on a New South Wales/Victoria/Queensland/Western Australia split.  So while Queensland and Western Australia were represented by The Saints‘ ‘(I’m) Stranded‘ and The Triffids‘ ‘Born Sand Devotional‘ respectively, the program makers couldn’t find a classic Sydney album and had to go to Newcastle to get the very dubious classic album choice of Silverchair‘s ‘Diorama‘ and they had get a New Zealand band to get classic Victorian album.

 As we all know, Australians are a bit on the precious side when it comes to its bands and music, so when it comes to justifying Crowded House as an Australian band the argument seems to go that they formed in Australia, had some Australian members and recorded albums in Australia.  Which is all well and good but becomes amusing when you point out that using similar logic makes Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds a British band!  And don’t get me started on AC/DC.  No one thinks of Fleetwood Mac as an English band, so the campaign to stop having AC/DC called an Australian band starts here…