I think my favourite description of Joanna Newsom (maybe from Mess+Noise, maybe from Drowned In Sound, maybe somewhere else, I can’t exactly remember) described her as “singing like a recently smacked child”.  It’s a description that always brings a wry smile as I’ve always thought there is an element of truth in the description and it’s been the main sticking point that stops me really loving her songs; the arrangements are glorious but her voice is very much an acquired taste.

However, it was very much evident straight from the start that voice has changed a lot in the last few years’ it’s undeniably more mature sounding and she sounds a lot more like the teenage Kate Bush when she sings.  There’s still the fragility and emotion but it feels more mellow and restrained, without that slightly awkward timbre.

Tonight’s set is made up almost entirely of new songs from her forthcoming third album, and a triple album none the less, ‘Have One On Me‘.  Whereas this so often a recipe for disaster for so many artists, with crowds baying for the ‘hits’ to be played, tonight it makes it into a much more special event.  The audience is so captivated that you could hear a pin drop during the songs, something that’s more than noticeable every time I take a photo and am more than aware of with the sound of the shutter opening and closing.

The set list from the evening (from a Live Journal review) was:

1. Jack Rabbits
2. Bridges and Balloons
3. Have one on me
4. Ribbon bows
5. In California
6. Easy
7. Inflammatory Writ
8. Soft as chalk
9. Autumn
10. Emily
11. On a good day/81
12. Esme            
13. Colleen          
14. Sadie

Throughout the show she kept apologising for being jet-lagged and not playing well but it was a completely enthralling performance and if she was making mistakes it didn’t show or detract in anyway from the songs, which were just exquisite.  Based on tonight’s show, the album should easily be amongst the best released during the year when the movers and shakers come up with their Best of 2010 lists in December.  A taster of the album has just been released in the form of the song ‘81, with the album due out on 23 February. 

I managed to arrive after she had started and in finding that it was all seated and with no photo pit, ended up photographing crouched in the aisle.  It was nowhere near the best vantage point, with her microphone being across her face at all times but the best I could do given the time restrictions.  Given the position of the microphone, I’m not sure where the best position would have been; maybe from the right hand balcony.

A few more photos on Flickr (although obviously they all look pretty much the same). 

The Tivoli is surprisingly full for tonight’s Stranglers show; there wasn’t much in the way of advertising for either the original date (in December, but cancelled with the GFC being blamed) or tonight’s show, and at $90 a ticket it’s a fairly pricey mid-week night out

It’s been a long time I last saw Wind & Brackets, supporting Expatriate with Operator Please at The Globe if I remember correctly.  Even though they’ve got the same personnel, they’ve changed a fair bit since then; they at least look like they’re in the same band and have similar musical interests now, compared to the varied looks they had back in 2007 and there’s a lot more keyboard than I remember (if they had a keyboard at all back then), with the (possible) introduction of said keyboard giving them a sound that makes them a suitable choice for the Stranglers support slot.  Musically they’re solid if a bit unspectacular but go down pretty well with the crowd.  Tommy seems quite nervous or maybe just out of breath when delivering inbetween song banter.  He needs to get rid of the hair flicks he keeps doing though; it’s really off-putting and makes him look like a walking Timotei advert, it’s like he wants to lose himself in the music but is a bit too scared to let go in case it messes his hair up.

Waiting in the photo pit for The Stranglers to start I have a glance at the set list that’s been gaffa-taped to the stage and it’s an impressive list; even I know most of the songs that they are going to play tonight and I’m not a huge fan, with only a copy of ‘No More Heroes‘ representing the band in my record collection.  It’s surprising, being perennially ‘uncool’, just how many hit singles they’ve had.

There’s no Jet Black tonight (unless he’s lost 10 stone and 40 years somewhere…), with post-gig research discovering that Ian Barnard, his drum tech, has temporary taken his place on the drum stool.  The post-gig research also reveals that in addition to illness over the last few years, Jet Black is going to be 71 in August, which explains why he’s not playing many live shows with the band.  With no Jet Black, and with singer/guitarist Hugh Cornwell having left (somewhat scarily) almost 2 decades ago, bassist/singer Jean-Jacques Burnel and keyboard player Dave Greenfield are the only original band members on show. With Greenfield hidden behind a wall of keyboards at the back I spend most of my three songs photographing JJ as he struts around the stage, looking in really good shape for his 57 years.  His bass sound, the driving force behind the band, is immense, sounding best on ‘Nice ‘N’ Sleazy‘, ‘Peaches‘ and the ‘No More Heroes‘ encore.  Singer/guitarist is Baz Warne has been with the band long enough (since 2000) to make the position his own and there’s a definite on stage band dynamic, as well as appreciation from the audience, even though for the most part of the night he’s singing Cornwell’s classic songs.  Still, there is a strangeness in Warne’s broad Sunderland accent delivery compared to Cornwell’s familiar, menacing snarl on those songs, so tonight we get the likes of ’Gullden Brewn‘, ‘Ellweys The Soon‘, but it doesn’t take away from a fun night of nostalgia and reminiscence and an entertaining and enjoyable mid-week night out.

Some more photos on flickr.

One of my very early musical memories was this on Top Of The Pops.  So when Gary Numan rolls into town to play at the Tivoli, how can I refuse.

The trouble is that I only really know the very early stuff, and whilst these songs (‘Cars’, ‘Down In The Park‘, ‘We Are So Fragile‘, ‘Are ‘Friends’ Electric?‘) sound great tonight (although he does have me worried having changed the intro of ‘Are ‘Friends’ Electric’, so for an instance I have that blood-from-face-draining experience that he’s made it into a jazz-lite solo piano version, before the all too familiar synth riff kicks in), my unfamiliarity with the later stuff (i.e. anything after the early 1980s) means that the ‘newer’, harder, more industrial songs sound too samey and make him come over like a lightweight Nine Inch Nails. Having influenced bands like NIN he’s definitely borrowed something back from those bands, visually as well as musically, although I’m sure there’s some irony that he’s now regarded as a godfather of industrial music when he seemed to spend most of the 80s being looked down upon as a poor man’s David Bowie.

From a photographic point of view it’s surprising how hard it is tonight and how sluggish and unsure I feel after a month away in on holiday in New Zealand.   I don’t even move much from my original position in the pit.  For tonight’s gig I start with my 28-70, change in the second song to the 70-200, and back to the 28-70 for the third song. The lights seemed to be all over the place, so although I start in manual mode, I end up changing to shutter priority to make life easier for myself and give myself something less to think about whilst trying to get up to speed with the photographing again.

It’s often hard trying to get the right balance when doing music photography, a balance between having too many gigs to photograph, which leaves you exhausted and not wanting to photograph, and not having enough, which leaves you feeling a yard off the pace, like tonight. At the moment I’m trying to do a maximum of two gigs/week. When you add in time for processing and blogging, photographing two gigs ends up taking up most of the week as it is, not helped by possibly my greatest weakness, playing around in Photoshop.  Some photos go through up to 6 different versions as I play with toning and different processes, even then still ending up unsure of which is the best version, which should be uploaded to flickr or shown on this blog and which should be hidden away from public gaze on my hard drive.  I have included an example below and included a few more on flickr.  And I still can’t work out which of those three photos below is the best; probably the last one, the second one is too dark, but then again the darkness gives it something, and the original colour version isn’t too bad either… 

More photos from the night on flickr.

The whole Alt Country/Alt Folk scene has been flirting with the mainstream for a number of years, near enough since the start of this decade, but with Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver battling for supremacy in most of the music media’s end of year polls, 2008 definitely seems to be The Year That Folk Broke.

From one man in a Wisconsin cabin, the live Bon Iver experience is augmented to bring it up to a four-piece band and, depending on the song, two drummers, two guitarists, keyboards, bass and all four providing vocals. Starting with ‘Flume‘,  the quieter and more introspective sound of the album ‘For Emma, Forever Ago‘ is completely and instantly transformed into a folk Wall-of-Sound. This effect is used throughout and this is best heard on ‘The Wolves (Acts I and II)‘ where the ever-building song crescendo reaches a sparkling and startling cacophony, further enhanced by the audience supplying the “what might have been lost” refrain.

And it’s good, it’s very good, sometimes it’s sublime, sometimes it’s breathtaking. But it’s maybe not quite as good as the audience reaction would let you believe. The crowd reaction maintains a fervent level throughout, but to the point where it’s too frenzied, too hysterical, over-zealous to the extreme and to the point of uncomfortableness. Yes, it’s good, yes it’s very good but it’s not THAT good. It’s not standing ovation good, which the audience provides at the end of the encore.  It is still one guy with one 9-song album that clocks in at less than 38 minutes and a just-released four song EP. It’s a promising start, a very promising start, but it’s not the Second Coming.

Mckisko supported and whilst her use of multi-track good looping of vocals, piano and melodica and the use of drums in some of her songs is used to good effect and provides some depth to the sound, some of her solo piano songs are just too dry, overwrought and not that memorable.

Bon Iver

McKisko

One of the most obvious signs of the onset of old age in your average music fan appears to be the annual comparison of albums bought versus album included in the music media’s end of year polls.  Whereas through your late-teens and throughout your twenties a ’score’ of ten, twelve or maybe even a fifteen from a typical top 50 albums of the year list can be consistently achieved in any year, terminal decline sets in through your thirties until you are struggling to get more than one or two albums on any publication’s list that you have added to your collection during the year. 

MGMT have been a constant fixture on most of the 2008 end of year album polls I’ve seen, and whilst I haven’t gotten around to buying ‘Oracular Spectacular‘, it feels like I don’t even have to as it’s been an omnipresent soundtrack to the year, inescapable any time you turned on the radio, switched on the TV or went out to the shops.

Whilst the album has been garnering the rave reviews and end of year accolades, the live experience seems to be a lot more of a mixed bag, with as many, if not more, bad reviews as good reviews, and their Brisbane show at The Tivoli was no exception. Whilst I only got to see the first three songs before I was escorted out (I also disappointingly didn’t get to photograph the support acts – Tame Impala and Luke Steele) it was three songs of extreme soporific tendencies, with all the electro-psychedelic-pop charm of the album sucked out and replaced by a dirge of self-indulgent, bad prog-rock guitar noodling. And for once I know that it’s just not me: the reviews and comments from other shows they have recently played in Sydney and at Meredith, together with the reviews from the Brisbane show, all seem to be somewhat less than flattering, and it’s a rare occasion when me and the Courier Mail agree on something…

A few more photos on flickr.

Footnote: BTW, the only album I’ve bought this year that most publications have included in the upper echelons of their respective best album polls is ‘Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!’ by Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds. Feel free to suggest anything from 2008 that I might like, a thankless task I’m sure… So long as no one recommends Vampire Weekend we’ll probably be ok…  Or at least off to a good start…

 

Last week saw Steve Earle roll into town to play at The Tivoli, the last night of his Australian tour in support of his ‘Washington Square Serenade’ album.  For most of the set it was just him and his guitar.  However, later on in the set he was backed by a DJ, playing beats on a couple of turnstiles. Whilst it was hardly a Dylan-Judas type moment, it was startling how much the power of one man and a guitar can be diminished by something as innocuous as a simple drum track.  But like Dylan so much of the power is in the words, with the backing drum tracks causing the lyrics to be lost in mix to some extent, and the overall impression coming over as a lazy, gimmicky add-on; a musical no-man’s land between stripped-down guitar and vocals and a properly fleshed-out arrangement for a full band. 

Allison Moorer was the main support act, a pleasant enough voice, although her cover-heavy six song set didn’t provide much of real substance to mull over.  Based on her performance tonight, there are better female singer-songwriters in Brisbane, but being the seventh Mrs Steve Earle has its obvious advantages.

Krista Polvere opened the night, although again with only a really short set, this time only four songs, it was hard to form any real opinion. 

A few more photos on flickr.

Steve Earle

Allison Moorer

Krista Polvere

It was a night that had it all: drinks, drugs, fighting, guys mopping up their own blood, girls mopping up their own blood, police cars and ambulances outside at the end of the night… And somewhere in the midst of all that Cut Copy played a gig to a sell out Tivoli crowd.

The night started early with NZ band Shocking Pinks playing to a tiny and mostly disinterested crowd. The room was more than empty enough for ironic, theatrical dancing from a small group to their very 1990 shoegazing sound. The band also played in near darkness, with only a couple of spot lights at the back of the stage.

It’s annoying when you turn up early to check out support bands and you end up with the feeling that they’re not being given much of chance to impress. Whilst people are generally playing for the headline act and, as a result, they are rightly given more time to soundcheck and generally have better sound and a more impressive light show, you sometimes get the feeling that there is almost an element of sabotage to ensure that there is no way that the support acts could ever upstage the headliners.

Whilst the ever increasing price of drinking at gigs is probably taking away from people wanting to get to venues early (for example, the obscene $11 that The Tivoli is now charging for a bottle of Smirnoff Black), I always try to get there to check out the support bands – you never when you might discover something really good or where they might end up a few years down the line. Down the years, support bands I’ve seen have included Radiohead (twice), Tool, Soundgarden, Faith No More, You Am I, Travis, Wolfmother, Primus, and Mercury Rev to name a few.

“The” Juan Maclean were the main support band. For a band playing “happy house” dance music with Theremin and cowbell they were distinctly motionless and seemingly uninterested in trying to engage with the audience. They also played in near darkness, with my photos being so rubbish that there’s nothing I’d really want to put up for public viewing.

I saw Cut Copy at the V Festival earlier in the year, albeit from a distance, and thought they sounded like New Order. Seeing them close up they still sound like New Order. Their latest album, In Ghost Colours, has been garnering rave reviews from the likes of DiS and Pitchfork, although having heard a number of songs I can’t work out why; it’s OK and fairly harmless stuff but just not THAT good.

Live, they put on a really good show. The sound and lights were great (although I ended up disappointed with the shots I got of them overall; lots of back light, not enough from the front) and they really connected with the audience. As such, it was strange that the night ended up with all the aggro and bloodshed.

Some more photos on Flickr.

May was a bit of a lean month for photographing gigs, not helped by Cosmic Psychos cancelling their tour and Rave not being able to get a reviewer for Don Letts, both of which I was down to cover.

And things haven’t improved much in June, with Barry Adamson, who I was really looking forward to seeing, cancelling his show at The Zoo due to “unavoidable promotional commitments”, my emailed requests for the first week of the month – The Thrills at The Zoo and I Killed The Prom Queen – being missed when the gigs were assigned, and no one wanting to review Angus and Julia Stone. However, no one requested to photograph Powderfinger at The Tivoli and so having been offered it and having never seen Powderfinger before thought “what the hell, why not?”

So, I get to The Tivoli and find out that I’m only down to photograph support act Whitley… So I photograph Whitley for my allotted three songs (one of which lasts about a minute) and he plays solo, sat on a stool, singing with his eyes shut…

The lovely Tivoli desk staff try to find someone to ok it for me to photograph Powderfinger, and about 2 minutes before they come up I get a call from the PR to say that as long as I signed the contract then I’m good to photograph. So yay for that.

The downside of photographing tonight is that they’re filming it for live broadcast to Big Pond mobile phones, with the full gig also being available for download the following day (for the bargain price of $2.95 I believe….). As such, the photo pit and the stairs are off limits to allow camera men to move around and so we get to photograph from a tiny bit of space at the bottom of the stairs, right against the stage. Although it’s a very side-on view, and means that there’s not the variety in angles that you would normally get from photographing from a photo pit, the worst thing is that the view of singer Bernard Fanning is largely blocked by guitarist Darren Middleton’s mic stand… The gig has been split up into an “acoustic” and an “electric” section (note to Powderfinger: acoustic generally doesn’t mean electric bass and electric guitars…), with an interlude in the middle. Our three songs to photograph in were from the “acoustic” part of the set, meaning three songs of “stool rock” (amazingly there isn’t a wikipedia entry for Stool Rock…).

Much is made of Powderfinger in Australia; arguably they’ve been one of its biggest bands for much of the last 10 years. Being fairly new here, I’m not quite sure why. They’ve got that earnest, down to earth thing going on, they’re pretty competent musicians and seem like nice guys, but in trying to compare them to something from the UK I keep coming back to Del Amitri… or a less edgy Travis… whatever that is…

The recent Drowned In Sound review for Coldplay’s ‘Viva La Vida Or Death and All His Friends’ makes the comment that “…Coldplay remain resolutely no-brow, a rock band version of Jack Vettriano; art for people who don’t like art; crowd-pleasers for people who don’t like crowds; music for people who don’t like music”.

If that’s the case I’m not sure where it leaves bands like Powderfinger….

And on a related note, you can enjoy DiS’s review of Bernard Fanning’s ‘Wish You Well’, the Number 1 song in last year’s Triple J’s Hottest 100 (as voted by the Australian people as their favourite song of the year…), here.

Some more photos on flickr.

 

Last Friday I had a very last minute request to photograph Story Of The Year supported by The Audition at The Tivoli.  Whilst not being overly familiar with the band I know from having seen photos that they love their jumping.  Having had such a good time at Soundwave photographing jumping bands I couldn’t turn it down and was looking forward to the gig. So it was a real disappointment when both bands (I missed the first band who started at 7:15pm only 15 minutes after the doors opened…) played in very poor lighting, akin to somewhere between a night of poor lighting at The Zoo and a typical night’s lighting at The Troubadour.  So in the end I didn’t really end up with anything good, let alone any good jump shots.

It wasn’t just the low shutter speeds I was having to use, it was also the fact that so much of what was happening was happening inches away from my face and I couldn’t fit it all into frame.  Using my widest lens at 28mm with a 1.5x multiplier is 42mm in the real world, nowhere near wide enough, so I also ended up with loads of shots where I missed complete body parts…

After last week’s pleasant surprise of good lighting at The Zoo, when my camera coped well with the conditions, after this experience I can’t wait to get a full frame camera and hopefully one that’ll be able to manage over ISO 800 without looking like sludge…

Tax return time is almost upon us; hopefully they’ll be some additional funds this year to help finance some new toys…

There was no three song rule, although after probably 6 or so songs they did chuck us out of the photo pit.  It was occasionally hard work, as the pit was quite narrow and with four of five burly security guards standing in front of the stage made it a bit of a tight squeeze and also sometimes made it difficult to get the angle you wanted without getting a security guard in frame.  Additionally, with it being a narrow pit, crowd surfers coming over the barrier tended to mean that in the mêlée you ended up pinned against the stage.

Musically the bands were pretty forgettable. It’s not even that old age is kicking in and all these bands sound the same but more like they just sound like some weak, unadventurous 1980s bog standard rock band; so much for the angry youth of today…  Somewhat strangely there were ongoing chants of ‘Aussie, Aussie, Aussie’ throughout the night; you’d think that teenage emo kids and Australian nationalistic tendencies would be mutually exclusive but it’s obviously not the case.  You wouldn’t have put them down for secret Daily Mail reading types…

More photos on flickr.

The Audition

 

Story Of The Year