Sweden: home to many fine exports – IKEA, Julmust, Volvo and, of course, some of the finest, most sincere and beautiful music in the world. Maybe it’s the climate there, the lack of real pretension and the artistic impulse that seems inherant in every Swedish person I’ve ever met, but there’s a level of quality in their music that you just don’t get elsewhere.
So this week I’ve had The Forest and The Trees staying with me in London. Stockholm residents and husband and wife Joel and Linnea Edin were in the UK to play two shows at The Social and The Rest is Noise and introduce the UK to their swimmingly lovely folksy pop sound. They make music with a sublime heart and soul that sounds like it was recorded in a dusky field sometime in late summer. Totally transcendental and it even sounded great while there was a snow storm raging outside.
Their myspace has some good stuff and there are two great videos on Vimeo that you can watch here and here. Hopefully they’ll be back next year with an album to promote and we’ll get to see them play some more.
Kudos to Joel and Linnea (and to fellow live band members, the brothers David and Robin Lindvall) for being the perfect houseguests and making us wish we’d had more time with them to drink wine and talk music.
Another fine band from Portland Oregon, Horse Feathers are headed up by the mellow-voiced Justin Ringle – think My Morning Jacket’s Jim James but more lush – with arrangements by the multi-talented Peter Broderick.
They play very fine Americana and in the song ‘Cascades’ – out on 7″ right now – have released one of the more sublime efforts to hit my record player in recent days. ‘Curs in the Weeds’ – also on their myspace – is a pretty amazing song too. Check them out – they’ve just finished a short tour of the UK but should be back next year.
Ahead of the Pavement reunion next year, Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks payed a quick visit to London for a one-off show at the Electric Ballroom in Camden. I like the way his hand looks big in my 12mm lens – like a giant claw
The twenty-year old Tristram Bawtree is troubadour with a voice that could melt moving cars and a folksome storyteller’s knack for songwriting and performing. Commencing with the melancholic “Somebody Told Me a Poem” (which I’m still singing, in my head, hours later) he runs through a four song set that is as resplendent with humour and literacy as it is with craft and poignancy.
He simply makes very beautiful songs about very simple things.
Despite confessing to a friend earlier in the evening that she was a little nervous, the luminous Caitlin Rose tore through a sweet n wonderful set of songs with humour, confidence and that stunning voice last night at The Big Chill House . She straddles that bright space between the Nashville sound and alt.country that Neko Case first used as an entry point into the music scene. Incredible stuff.
“Little” Dan, apparently, as there are two – the other being a good way over six feet (and thus, “Big” Dan). These guys managed to follow a strong set from Anna Calvi last night at The Fly Bar on New Oxford Street with a compact and entertaining set showcasing tracks from their Follies in Great Cities album. Really interesting sound – mixing a range of world music influences (a little klezmer, a little albanian gypsy) along with the personalities of the two Dans. It’s rousing, singalong stuff. Apparently the Thin White Duke has heard them and approves. Is there any greater honour?
Only discovered this photograph the other day, doing some picture clean up on my macbook – I’m loving how the festival crowd is reflected in his helmet (although helmet actually understates what that thing on Bob Log III’s head is, which also incorporates a weird telephone/mic thing).
Taking their name from a penny arcade in San Francisco, Musee Mechanique play a sobering and understated brand of twinkly sophistiscated pop – think The Postal Service but, y’know, more organic and less bleepy.
Currently on a two-hander tour of the UK and Europe as both support and backing band to Laura Gibson, they’re back next year with a full band and an album. Check out Two Friends Like Us on their myspace for some truly lovely sping-tingly moments and ace couplets like “Stained glass and telephones trace the edges of these creaking bones”.
For my money, David Thomas Broughton is a national treasure in waiting. Combining a very English, black humour and a love of loops and experimentation, his music challenges audience perceptions of what makes a song a song. Like the best experimental music, it only works when the reception is fed back to the performer and a dialogue is created.
I love this portrait – lit by a rare moment of decent onstage lighting in The Scala, it’s one of my favourite shots of recent months.
So to last Friday and Wetdog’s album launch show at The Lexington which came as a result of your humble London Music Photographer being left of the guestlist for another gig a mile down the road. It didn’t matter; Wetdog were a more than adequate alternative. Despite shitty sound, bad wiring and the resulting , the girls threw out pretty decent set. The album’s called Frauhaus and is out now on Angular.
As usual, sub-par lighting in the Lexington meant some strobe and I got some pretty nice motion shots playing around with first curtain and long shutter speeds. Lots of fun.
I love taking pictures of people with guitars, tambourines and – when possible – drummers peeking from behind the crash cymbol.
But when the big guns come out – the bassoons, the tuba, the cellos and so on – I gasp every so audibly. With a guitar, there are only so many effective ways of framing the photograph, finding a nice jutting angle to make a shot come to life. When you’re dealing with something much bigger, it’s a chance to experiment. The performer becomes secondary to the instrument and a world of possibilities open up. I didn’t get too many good shots of The Low Anthem from this festival performance. It was the first tryout of a new long lens and I was finding my feet – but this one I really love.
One of the more interesting support bands I’ve seen in recent months is Audio.Video.Disco: their songs show oodles of potential, there’s a very surprising soft vocal pitched against hard guitars and a memorable personality onstage.
“No Man’s Land” sounds great live, is underproduced on their Myspace but could probably be massive given the right producer. Anyway, I kinda liked them; there’s a healthy looking embryo there. I’m assuming by the order of name rank on their Myspace that the above portrait is head boy of the band Richard Berkshire but if I’m wrong, please let me know and I will duly correct.
One of the best live bands I’ve seen play in the last twelve months, Australia’s Little Red offer up a compact hybrid of garage and old school RnB with a sincerity and workmanship that’s gonna win them a lot of fans in the UK.
They play a Pure Groove instore this coming Friday lunchtime followed by an album launch gig at the Lexington that very same evening and they’re at Proud Camden on Saturday. Get along to one of these if you can – they’re really that good.
I loved what Jarvis did in Paris earlier this year and when it was announced last month that similar shenanigans would be hitting Shoreditch, I made sure to put some diary time aside to go along.
And who should I encounter before even stepping through the door? Why Jarvis himself, having a shifty fag during a quiet part of the improvised jam that had been taking place for the last few hours. A perfect gent and a chatty soul too, he was obliging when I asked to take a photograph before heading back inside to rejoin the improvisations. The whole thing concludes with a concert tomorrow evening.
The Watershed in Wimbledon is a bit of a hellhole: potentially okay venue spoilt by shitty sound and a truly weird selection of in-house DJ choices. Felt like school disco at Hollyoaks comp or something. But some great photos of Chapman Family from last night, who are now nearing the end of their first big tour of the UK, including several of bassist Pop who strikes some wonderful shapes and is an absolute pleasure to photograph. So here’s another.
It had been two years between my first Loney Dear show and this one. The change was incredible – Emil had grown more confident, developed more presence and didn’t seem afraid to act more as a frontman. It was a marked contrast to the quite, whispering bedroom boy of two years earlier.
Anyway, I’m a real sucker for shots ’shaped’ like this – the L shape flushed bottom left. Sometimes they work out and sometimes they don’t. I like this one a lot.
During her latest London show – an intimate afterthought to the previous evening’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire – Annie announced that, since her album was out in few days, this was probably her launch party.
Strange news to me as I’d been listening to what I thought was her second album for the last twelve months. Some later research revealed that what I’d actually been plugged in to was a leaked version and apparently an entirely different record to the release that’s just come out. Presumably due to record company problems? Who knows….she played Chewing Gum and The Breakfast Song so that made me happy.
Anyway, she’s still something of a star – the Norweigen indie queen with ‘one eye on the dancefloor’ as Pitchfork famously described her. I approached her a few moments after she came offstage and she was incredibly happy to pose for a post-show portrait.
My second time at Bandstand Busking and two impressive performances. First from Sleeping States, who I know little about other than discovering that they recently released an album on cassette. And The Twilight Sad, who have been on and off my ipod for the last month. Looking like the kind of Caledonian hardmen you wouldn’t want to mess with down a dark alley, it seemed like the entire Clerkenwell area came to standstill when James Graham started to sing – how lovely it is to hear a north-of-the-border accent so pronounced and lilting, especially on such a severely autumnal day.
The other stars of the afternoon were the leaves, which suddenly appeared to have taken on the most magnificant shades of brown and green. It was a truly awesome spectable to behold and demanded much leaf-running-through.
I’ve always had a thing for musicians who write on their guitars. It probably goes back to Woody Guthrie’s “This Machine Kills Facists” slogan on his battered old acoustic. Thus, I spent most of the time at this gig trying to get some good shots that included Robert Cole’s guitar. Little Comets hail from Newcastle and have a single out yesterday on Colombia called Adultery. They put on an incredible live show and sound even better in the flesh than they do on record.
I’ve been digging around the photographs I haven’t quite got round to sorting out; trying to free up some disk space by culling as best I can. I discovered a small selection of Paloma Faith shots – taken from a support she did to Josh Weller at Madame JoJo’s back in April or May. I’d completely forgotten about the pictures as I was there to see Weller and, as it happens, I’m off tonight to see Faith along with Mumford and Sons and the godawful Mr Hudson at the Kentish Town Forum.
The picture reminded me how difficult it was to shoot on the night – the stage was over-adorned with balloons. I ended up, as you can see from this shot, trying to work them into the pictures and develop some sort of composition of circles and line shapes. Did it work? I’m not sure but I kinda like this shot – the camera capturing Faith, peering from behind the balloon onto her face.
When the light isn’t quite right and there’s an over-active smoke machine, a rolling lighthouse-strobe and the air is almost solid, there’s great opportunity to play around with the shapes, shadows and luminescence available. I Like Trains have sadly replaced the filmic backdrops of their previous live set but still manage to fill the stage with an epic, intellectual post-rock sound.
He likes a cup of tea apparently but was met with jeers at this gig for committing the unforgiveable sin of drinking with the teabag still in the cup. God bless British audiences for having the gall (or decorum?) to point that out.
I covered a show at the Garage in Highbury recently where unsigned singer-songwriter Joe McAdam took on the difficult third-on-the-bill slot and won over a sluggish early-evening crowd.
Nice set of acoustic numbers delivered with confidence, a casual cockiness and a voice that dips between a radio-friendly, almost Bono-esque familiarity and a tender, ravaged Laurel Canyone tone.
Great looking guy too – he’s a tall dude and he’s got a great head of hair and a nice beard going on.
An old shot this and one of my favourites. Taken at The Windmill in Brixton (truly one of the last great London music venues in an age of HMV buyouts and energy drink sponsorship).
I recall this as a three men and a dog in the audience kinda gig and seem to remember the power failed half way through. It didn’t visibly faze the band, which is why they’re probably vying (and rather successfully) for the title of the ‘most exciting live band around right now’.
Anway, tiny venue, no light, lots of flash and some great black and white shots. And this one is all lines and angles and cabley squiggles – it’s exactly the shot I was going after, capturing the stickyness of the floor, the mess of cabling and the feel of rock n roll in the tiniest of venues. Perfect.
Look everybody, it’s Casey Holden Wisenbaker from The Whispertown 2000! Isn’t he awesome! He has a Crass T-Shirt! He plays bass! He has a cool tattoo! He has the greatest moustache in the entire world! He wears a neckerchief!
Just some of the reasons to love Casey Holden Wisenbaker and The Whispertown 2000.
At some point, I may very well just abandon the variety I’m trying to infuse into this blog/website and simply publish a different picture of Dan Sartain every day.
I have at least two more in addition to this one and a previous posting that I want to add.
A combination of good lighting, great performer, classic microphone/guitar and those cheekbones/ profile – it doesn’t happen very often.
I’m immensely happy with this photograph and the way the lighting worked out – Neko’s lustrous auburn mane is glowing against the halo effect of the light behind her head.
It was the best of the bunch from this set too – the lighting from the front of the stage wasn’t very flattering to her face, unfortunately.
I have been quite vocal in the last three months to those in my near vicinity – and almost on a daily basis – about my love for The Dirty Projectors‘ recent album Bitte Orca.
The Rise Above album in 2007 was pretty awesome to begin with (and showed them really moving forward in giant steps as a band) but Bitte Orca was a revelation.
It’s an album that, like the band, is hard to pin down. Just what would you describe them as, musically speaking? Surely the words ‘fractured’, ‘art’, ‘experimental’ and ‘disharmony’ would provide useful metadata were we writing an entry for Wikipedia or Allmusic…and yet that doesn’t capture it at all.
I love the album in the same way I love Bjork’s Debut or Byrne and Eno’s My Life In The Bush of Ghosts. Someone once said they were like Radiohead in a parallel universe, which is a much better approximation of where I think they’re at.
As a live act, they’re musically perfect – tight as you’d hope and fascinating to watch; the vocal instrumentation that comes from Amber Coffman, Angel Deradoorian and Haley Dekle is a most entertaining visual spectacle.
And then there’s the frowning, browsome Longstreth and his awesome cardigan. I considered throwing my camera to the ground, juping on stage and wrestling the cardigan off his back but I think the burly security guy to my right saw the look and my eye and knew exactly what I had in mind. He gave me a hard stare that left me whimpering like a frightened dog. Damn him. I think he wanted the cardigan too.
Tony Hadley from Spandau Ballet used to hold it by the base, like he was about to chew on a baby carrot.
Roddy Woomble favours the two handed approach and there’s something fascinating, something very textural about the way his knuckles all line up along the microphone, er, shaft.
Anyway, Idlewild: still a great, reliable band after nearly fifteen years together.
Sweet and short set from The Raveonettes at Rough Trade East tonight. The endearing pair effortlessly toss off an handful of acoustic loveliness to a swooning crowd of Sharin and Sune worshippers. Nothing spectacular but Sharin’s hair is always interesting and I get a couple of good shoe shots I’ll post later….
Of course the first thing I think about when discovering this rather wonderful doorway is the song by The Clash (which is then stuck in my head for the whole day).
I think this was some way up the hillside, towards Sopacachi. I was on my way to visit the house of Marina Núñez del Prado, which turned out to be closed – which was fine as most of her pieces were currently on display in the art museum on the other side of the Prado and I’d seem them the previous day. Núñez is a sensational sculptor and one of Bolivia’s greatest artists.
So 1977 is flying round my head and then I start remembering bits of Sandanista that I really like and then I curse myself that there’s no Clash on my ipod. Bah.
Still mining my 2ks of shots from The End of the Road Festival but I have no idea whose these belong to. Could it be Loney Dear? Motel Motel? Vetiver? I really need to go back and work out the sequence of shot to place it.
This falls under my funny little fetish for shooting the ‘ephemera’ of stage performance, especially all the detritus that litters the floor around a performer – water bottles, can of Red Stripe, wires, guitar pedals, setlists. In Josh Weller’s case, I seem to recall taking photographs of assorted fruit.
I love how an isolated body shot can show a whole new aspect of performance; reveal an element of performer identity.
I guess I’m also remembering that as I grew up, I became acutely aware of how shoes really do maketh the man. Watching kids older than me, learning the music they were into and noting the careful attention to footwear: Adam Cocoran, the Morrissey fan in the year above at college who wore a beautiful pair of leather winkle pickers; the guy who worked in the second hand vinyl place at the top of the hight street with his dirty converse sneakers peeking out from under stonewashed denim jeans. Footwear always at two extremes – the most simple, cheapest, shittiest low grade trainers or hand crafted, leather-soled and buffed up to a shine.
That’s why shoes are so important. They make a statement that says, “I am too cool to give a shit” or “I am so cool and I give a shit”. The space between is what disappoints: where there has been a half-hearted effort and the result is some shiny Nikes or something. That why I don’t take pictures of the feet of rappers. I like the dirt.
The concept of Bandstand Busking is to reclaim and reuse the many overlooked – and much neglected – bandstands that are hidden around London. It’s a brilliant concept and one that might just play a key part in saving many of these wonderful constructions from deteriorating even further.
Player Piano closed the most recent busking afternoon, in my old haunt of Clerkenwell. I worked here for five years – in a building overlooking the bandstand, as it happens.
It’s very strange to walk past something every day and see it out of context – and then suddenly have it reclaimed and used as originally intended. Weird, spectacular and lovely, all at once. The ethos behind Bandstand Busking is admirable and makes me proud to be an (adopted) Londoner.
The Moulettes are a Brighton-based collective driven by twin female lead vocals and the mighty sound of a bassoon and cello. Onstage they’re charming and, reduced to a three piece at The Luminaire earlier this week, they put on a splendid performance – equal parts charm, guts and an inspired collection of dark, folky and (in their own words) apocalypic songs.
Co-fronter Ruth Skipper sports a style pitched somewhere between The Torture Garden and the country barn (the torture barn? the country garden?) – all corsetty, lace and undulating folds. While I’m shooting this gig, I become distracted – and then fascinated – by the way the lace straps fall over her arms. The way that the light catches it. It is an almost perfect shape.
I saw these guys play a set last night at The Luminaire in Kilburn. Judd Palmer has a wonderful beard; it reminds me of a cross between Fidel Castro and a character from a seventies Woody Allen movie. It looks like it’s always been there. He also hides a wonderfully lustrous head of hair under his leather cap.
If you haven’t heard The Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir then do so right now: their live set up includes two bass drums, a set of military helmets used for percussion and some lovely slide guitar as well as an pained howl of a vocal from Mr Palmer.
A band that I rate and yet I think that the reason they’re so compellingly wonderful live is also the reason they’re unable to translate that onto record. Wildbirds and Peacedrums put on some of the most progressive live shows I’ve ever seen, where the audience is both witness and participant in something extrordinary and magical. No record can live up to it: it’s the spectacle that’s the thing (as Guy Debord would say).
As a husband and wife team, there’s this amazing interplay between Mariam Wallentin and Andreas Werliin. Something sexual in the way they establish a tempo, a mood, an attitude in the early part of the show and then crank it up – slow at first – to a steady, rhythmic beat towards the end, climaxing accordingly.
The best shots from this show weren’t during the outstanding (and poorly lit) performance but while observing the duo set up stage beforehand. Always pays to get to the pit early!
There was a tender playfulness between them as they placed equipment, tightened screws and tested sound levels. I love the shot of Mariam, glancing across admiringly to hubby as he beats out each drum and cymbal for the tech guys. And a few moments later, the fingers-in-ears of Andreas as he reacts to the feedback from his wife’s vocal.
During my time in Cusco, I stayed high up the hill, not too far from the Cristo and the ruins of Sacsayhuaman. Passing through the artisan-laden district of San Blas, the views were phenomonal – a large grid of terracotta and deep green. spread out below. From directly above, the city is the shape of a jaguar’s head.
I fell in love with Cusco in a big way. Most who visit use it as no more than a stopping off point – they rappel in the Valle Sagrado, take the Inca Trail to Macchu Picchu or move on quickly to the coast to surf.
For me, there was magic in Cusco. Behind the tourist facade – guides dressed as Inca warriers and children in colourful dress carrying baby llamas, posing for photographs – there’s a real city in.
Wander through the backstreets, away from the commercial centre, the museums and the shops and you’ll discover the most beauful buildings, gardens and doorways.
Most of the pictures I took in Cusco are doorways. It just kinda happened that way: I’d been dotting sessions in towns up until that point with doorway photgraphs but it all came to a logical conclusion in Cusco (and continued in Cartagena) where I went crazy and ran up and down backstreets, boking my camera into every crevice. The best pictures demonstrate this amazing use of colour that characterises the beaten down house of South America. Perhaps it’s a logical extension of Andean heritage – the colour seems to get more luminous the close you get to the Andes.
There’s something cute, adorable, naive, innocent, coy, coquettish and alluring about Beth Jeans Houghton. She’s too damn young for one producing such perfect pop music and her penchant for a variety of large blonde wigs and outfits that look like they were knocked up by Molly Ringwald’s character from Pretty in Pink is just the icing on the cake.
For a recent appearance at Rough Trade East in London, Houghton abandoned the peroxide curlyness of the wig she wore a few days earlier at The End of the Road Festival and chose a more unwieldy exaggerated Amy Winehouse construction which gave her an extra three feet and made her look even tinier than she already is.
And to be fair, it’s among the most interesting arms you’re ever likely to see on a performer. The stories espoused in Whitmore’s songs are disseminated in illustrative form over his body – and as he plays, the audience get a few glimpses of a life of experience and colour.
This is made all the more compelling due to the facial adornments that Whitmore favours – usually a fedora and large sunglasses. Giving nothing away, we’re left to piece together the life of this man through between-song banter, his lyrics and those wonderful tattoos.
Now in its fourth year The End of the Road Festival – which began life as a Green Man-inspired experiment in putting on a truly organic musical experience – has established itself as a unique event of character, authenticity and, above all, good music.
For the punter it’s a rare and refreshing experience to set foot on a festival site free from advertising, overpriced/stodgy food and the kind of atmosphere that has made Glastobury so unattractive in the last decade.
The whole shebang is a credit to organisers Sofia and Simon. Beginning with an ethos about music and festivals (indeed, about life itself), they have distilled that ethos into three days of the glorious Larmer Tree Gardens – an idyll no more than a short drive from Salisbury and just down the road from Stonehenge.
And in the spirit of “if you book them, they will come,” both the audience and the bands arrive with empathy for the ethos and a proactive, participatory spirit that endures through the weekend. There are few boundaries here: musicians mingle with the hoi poloi and impromptu musicalities are an almost hourly occurrence. On Saturday night, I lounge in the forest at midnight with The Low Anthem who play ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’ on an out-of-tune piano. A day later I stumble upon 89-year old T Model Ford who plays to around fifty white faces (regaling in detail, his story of killing a man and spending time on a chain gan) while the rest of the festival watch Steve Earle’s tender tribute to Townes Van Zandt on the main stage.
The festival’s inaugural performance this year is by brave Canadians Ohbijou – epochal indie rock fronted by the Sundays-esque vocal of Casey Mecija perhaps the tiniest member of any band playing this weekend. They draw a relatively huge crowd considering that very few people have actually arrived yet and put up their tents. Later in the day, Felice brother Simone’s new project The Duke and The King graces the same stage, providing one of the first surprises of the weekend – think The E Street Band fronted by Cat Stevens with the showmanship of Jagger and you’re half-way there.
Elsewhere on site, peacocks wander freely (as does Jarvis Cocker) around the place while the legendary Charlie Parr – almost a fixture here, along with The Brakes and Darren Hayman who have played every year – grizzles his way from beer tent to stage.
Scandinavia is well represented as usual – Loney Dear put in a sweaty show (noisier and more energetic than I’ve ever seen them) and over in the Big Top tent, Wildbirds and Peacedrums prove why they are one of the best live bands around and why they simply can’t do themselves justice on record because of this.
Ultimately, this is a festival grounded in Americana and indie – and the crossover point between those generes. So it’s Fleet Foxes who are the highlight for many. They manage an extended set that sags a little in the middle but fails to disappoint. They even have time for a Fleetwood Mac cover – reclaiming it firmly from The Corrs.
It’s David Longstreth’s Dirty Projectors – perhaps the biggest zeitgiest coup of the weekend – who are my personal highlight and play the most impressive, technically outstanding set of the festival, converting many who didn’t really ‘get’ them on record. Beth Jeans Houghton, youngster of the burgeoning indie-folk scene – also represented this weekend by Mumford and Sons – gets some new fans too by saving the day when a much anticipated set (by me, at least) from The Horrors is cancelled due to ‘illness’
Sunday sees Jarvis Cocker and Richard Hawley – who played a baffling DJ set the night before – taking on guitar duties for lost sixties legend Bob Lind (he of ‘Elusive Butterfly’ fame). Lind’s a real surprise, charming those who have skipped the intensely sober guitar and gurning visage of The Tallest Man on Earth (also brilliant).
Sunday evening’s penultimate main stager is Neko Case, who tosses off a high quality set, marred only by her pre-exit cry of ‘Thank you Salisbury Festival’ earning her a few eye-rolls and a place in the book of Spinal Tapesque vocal slips.
Her mistake is soon forgotten when the The Hold Steady appear – at which point, the entire throng of fortysomething men down at the front begin singing in unison and punching the air. Everyone is smiling like there’s no tomorrow while Craig Finn – looking like an IT Manager on ketamine – gives the most energetic performance of the weekend. Never standing still for one moment, Finn makes the entire crowd believe this is the greatest gig The Hold Steady have ever played. He could be right.
The honours of being the last “official” performance of the weekend go to Brooklyn duo She Keeps Bees, who mesh their PJ Harvey/Howlin Wolf hybrid brilliantly to the expecting mood of the crowd, who pack The Local Tent to the brim. It’s damn hot in here and singer/guitarist Jessica Larribee is visibly buoyed by the applause and gratitude in the room. Songs from mini-album ‘Nests’ – well worth getting hold of – are mined for the guts of their set and there’s even an encore of sorts before everyone files out to see yet more ’secret’ performances from Hold Steady keyboard player Franz Nicolay and The Brakes in the tent next door..
It’s a joyful weekend for yours truly, topped off by a chance encounter with members of Richmond Fontaine at Stonehenge on Monday morning. Later in the week, I also catch a post-gig Simone Felice in Highbury, who mutters to me that this was the ‘greatest festival we every played’ before complimenting my jacket. Damn right on both counts! Roll on September 2010!
Now in its fourth year The End of the Road Festival – which began life as a Green Man-inspired experiment in putting on a truly organic musical experience – has established itself as a unique event of character, authenticity and, above all, good music.
The Tipi Tent at The End of the Road Festival 2009
For the punter it’s a rare and refreshing experience to set foot on a festival site free from advertising, overpriced/stodgy food and the kind of atmosphere that has made Glastobury so unattractive in the last decade.
The whole shebang is a credit to organisers Sofia and Simon. Beginning with an ethos about music and festivals (indeed, about life itself), they have distilled that ethos into three days of the glorious Larmer Tree Gardens – an idyll no more than a short drive from Salisbury and just down the road from Stonehenge.
T Model Ford at The End of the Road Festival 2009
And in the spirit of “if you book them, they will come,” both the audience and the bands arrive with empathy for the ethos and a proactive, participatory spirit that endures through the weekend. There are few boundaries here: musicians mingle with the hoi poloi and impromptu musicalities are an almost hourly occurrence. On Saturday night, I lounge in the forest at midnight with The Low Anthem who play ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’ on an out-of-tune piano. A day later I stumble upon 89-year old T Model Ford who plays to around fifty white faces (regaling in detail, his story of killing a man and spending time on a chain gang) while the rest of the festival watch Steve Earle’s tender tribute to Townes Van Zandt on the main stage.
The festival’s inaugural performance this year is by brave Canadians Ohbijou - epochal indie rock fronted by the Sundays-esque vocal of Casey Mecija perhaps the tiniest member of any band playing this weekend. They draw a relatively huge crowd considering that very few people have actually arrived yet and put up their tents. Later in the day, Felice brother Simone’s new project The Duke and The King graces the same stage, providing one of the first surprises of the weekend – think The E Street Band fronted by Cat Stevens with the showmanship of Jagger and you’re half-way there.
Simone Felice from The Duke and the King at The End of the Road Festival 2009
Elsewhere on site, peacocks wander freely (as does Jarvis Cocker) around the place while the legendary Charlie Parr - almost a fixture here, along with The Brakes and Darren Hayman who have played every year – grizzles his way from beer tent to stage.
Scandinavia is well represented as usual – Loney Dear put in a sweaty show (noisier and more energetic than I’ve ever seen them) and over in the Big Top tent, Wildbirds and Peacedrums prove why they are one of the best live bands around and why they simply can’t do themselves justice on record because of this.
Ultimately, this is a festival grounded in Americana and indie – and the crossover point between those generes. So it’s Fleet Foxes who are the highlight for many. They manage an extended set that sags a little in the middle but fails to disappoint. They even have time for a Fleetwood Mac cover – reclaiming it firmly from The Corrs.
David Longstreth from The Dirty Projectors at The End of the Road Festival 2009
It’s David Longstreth’s Dirty Projectors – perhaps the biggest zeitgiest coup of the weekend – who are my personal highlight and play the most impressive, technically outstanding set of the festival, converting many who didn’t really ‘get’ them on record. Beth Jeans Houghton, youngster of the burgeoning indie-folk scene – also represented this weekend by Mumford and Sons – gets some new fans too by saving the day when a much anticipated set (by me, at least) from The Horrors is cancelled due to ‘illness’.
Sunday sees Jarvis Cocker and Richard Hawley – who played a baffling DJ set the night before – taking on guitar duties for lost sixties legend Bob Lind (he of ‘Elusive Butterfly’ fame). Lind’s a real surprise, charming those who have skipped the intensely sober guitar and gurning visage of The Tallest Man on Earth (also brilliant). Over in The Local Tent, Laura Gibson plays a truly lovely set to a packed crowd – a lovely brand of Americana with a rootsy twist goes down like warm honey.
Neko Case at The End of the Road Festival 2009
Sunday evening’s penultimate main stager is Neko Case, who tosses off a high quality set, marred only by her pre-exit cry of ‘Thank you Salisbury Festival’ earning her a few eye-rolls and a place in the book of Spinal Tapesque vocal slips.
Craig Finn from The Hold Steady at The End of the Road Festival 2009
Her mistake is soon forgotten when The Hold Steady appear – at which point, the entire throng of fortysomething men down at the front begin singing in unison and punching the air. Everyone is smiling like there’s no tomorrow while Craig Finn – looking like an IT Manager on ketamine – gives the most energetic performance of the weekend. Never standing still for one moment, Finn makes the entire crowd believe this is the greatest gig The Hold Steady have ever played. He could be right.
Jessica Larribee from She Keeps Bees at The End of the Road Festival 2009
The honour of being the last “official” performance of the weekend go to Brooklyn duo She Keeps Bees, who mesh their PJ Harvey/Howlin Wolf hybrid brilliantly to the expecting mood of the crowd, who pack The Local Tent to the brim. It’s damn hot in here and singer/guitarist Jessica Larribee is visibly buoyed by the applause and gratitude in the room. Songs from mini-album ‘Nests’ – well worth getting hold of – are mined for the guts of their set and there’s even an encore of sorts before everyone files out to see yet more ’secret’ performances from Hold Steady keyboard player Franz Nicolay and The Brakes in the tent next door.
It’s a joyful weekend for yours truly, topped off by a chance encounter with members of Richmond Fontaine at Stonehenge on Monday morning. Later in the week, I also catch a post-gig Simone Felice in Highbury, who mutters to me that this was the ‘greatest festival we every played’ before complimenting my jacket. Damn right on both counts! Roll on September 2010!
Just outside of Aguas Calientes – the tourist trap ‘town’ attached to Macchu Picchu – lies Ollantaytambo. It’s a pretty-as-hell village with a classy tourist trade and a couple of Inca ruins nearby. Parts of the town look pretty much the same as they did in the days of the Incas – the backstreets show signs of the classic Inca brickwork with cobbled streets and large stones.
Walter Salles used parts of Ollantaytambo as Cusco when he filmed The Motorcycle Diaires, retracing the part of the trip when the young Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara visited Macchu Picchu.
The people of the town are largely very welcoming to the non-Peruvian. Old women chat as the first sign of a foreigner trying to speak Spanish, kids tug at your sleeve and ask to be played with. There’s a nice atmosphere about the place.
I’d forgotten about this particular photograph until somebody flagged it up on my flickr site. I remember taking it – moments earlier a father and son had sped past on a bike. The father wore a football Jersey and the son was laughing and screaming. I looked to my right and sat the magnificant arrangement of the air vent and plant pot. Those tonal variations on the same colour. Love it.
I learnt about making panoramas at Iguazu. Faced with the overwhelming size of the falls – which just won’t fit into any normal sized camera lens without looking kinda squashed, I took about thirty or forty sets of panorama shots and stitched them together on Photoshop over the following months.
It was a dull, tedious process and with a low success rate was low…but what worked looked really good and this one is among the best.
Later on, during my time in South America, I had to make panoramas out of necessity. My prime lens (fixed 30mm/1.4) died somewhere along the way and I was left with a 50-150mm kit lens. Good for what it was/is but not great in low light or for landscapes. So I returned from South America with over a thousand panoramas, waiting to be stitched together. Some worked. Some didn’t. I’m still learning.
I’m still no wiser as to how one should pronounce Cartagena. While down in Peru, people would tell me the n was more like the Spanish ‘ñ’ – which sounds like an ‘ny’ like in ‘tenure’. As I moved closer to the great city, the sound changed and it was a softer sound – like ‘car-teh-hey-ner’.
Anyway, I’m still utterly bowled over when I look through images of the Cartagena streets – such is their decaying, battered splendour. The city was built as a fortress to repel invasion and the houses look like they’ve withstood an absolute pummeling from the elements and years of neglect. The beauty of this is undeniable – in the near-Caribbean sun, the colours become vibrant and luminous.
The Oso Antiojos – Andean Spectacled Bear – is by some estimates the rarest bear in the world, more so than the Panda, with numbers betwe 1,000 and 2,000. During my time in Bolivia, I spent a day in the cloud forest way above the Yungas. What transpired was extraordinary and will remain with me for the rest of my life.
I walked with a bear.
Actually, that’s not true. I trundled closely to the ass of the bear while his carer – the erstwhile campanero Jorge – ensured nobody was maimed or eaten. Ocassionally, the bear would come close, grapple my leg with his jaws or stand at full height and make motions of play. Somehow, I coped, trusting entirely in Jorge’s handling skills. I remained still at all times and the worst I got was a tiny bruise on my calf from the pressure of the bear’s jaws.
We wandered through the forest trail, past colonies of miraculous ants that could heal small cuts on human bodies, past stunning birds and dragonflies the size of rats. There was no other person for miles around. The bear, accustomed to humans after being taken as a newborn and sold on the Bolivian black market in rare animals for a couple of hundred dollars, seemed completely at peace with this unatural state of affairs – which was much better than the alternative: most wild animals sold in Bolivia end up as pets. Loved and cared for at first, it’s not uncommon fot them to end their days chained to a tree in a back garden or stuck in a cage in a high-rise flat.
One of Jorge’s dogs – which had two different coloured eyes like David Bowie – had not been with him long. The wild cats – cougars – would come early in the morning and kill his dogs so he always kept a handful of them to protect his land.
I didn’t get too many good pictures of the bear. I was concerned my camera would be an obstrusion to the environment and I wanted to remember this experience as one I saw primarily through my eyes and not the camera, so I restrained taking photos to the beginning and end of the day. The best ones, like above, highlight the texture and colour of the bear. It’s truly impossible to get a handle on how these creatures move, how they are composed and how powerful and amazing they are until you interact around them and they are free to move about themselves, without restraint.
The bear is now in a new home – Jorge’s care was temporary while an enclosure was being constructed to house him. He now lives on acres of land along the side of a hill in the lower Yungas. He has his own natural stream, mountains of trees and all the pineapples he could ever wish for. More importantly, he’s finally developing more natural behavior and return to his bearish roots. He won’t be released back into the wild – the risks are too great. There is already some debate – and local fear – about wild Andean Bears wandering into human territory and killing cattle. A bear that has no fear of humans wouldn’t last very long.
I spent a blissful four days in the Bolivian Amazon basin last year, as a guest at the Chalalan Ecolodge, run by the people of the San José de Uchupiamonas community in the Madidi National Park.
It is, I have been reliably informed, one of the most successful eco-projects in the world, recipient of many awards and central to the revitilisation of the San José people, who have made significant advances in welfare, hygiene and education as a result of the income.
I took this shot early in the morning – 6 or 7 maybe – above the canopy on observation deck that had been constructed a few weeks previous. It was my last day in the jungle. I remember the smell of the air as I watched the early morning macaw swoops. In the distance, howler monkeys called out to one another and peccarries stamped out a path to the mudholes, leaving a peppery odour in their wake.
Madidi truly is a beautiful place to visit. Threatened by Bolivian President Evo Morales’ policies, it might not be there too much longer in its current form. It’s a bed of natural resources – mineral and gas deposits. Go visit while you can; it’s about the cheapest possible way to do the amazon and the easiest way to get there (relatively speaking) too.
The Tallest Man on Earth – the ironic handle of one Kristian Matsson from Dalarna, Sweden – produced what I feel is one of the best albums of recent years, 2008’s Shallow Grave.
On stage, he’s a fascinating prescence, writhing and gurning his way through a catalogue of tender, introspective ballads. Looking like a little boy lost, clinging for dear life onto his guitar, he strikes poses that are a gift to the photographer.
James Lewis Carter Ford – better known as T-Model Ford – was, they say, born in Mississippi in 1920. Depending on who you believe, he might have 26 children and he served two years on a chain gang in the 1930s for killing a man. He says that he was released due to his excellent behaviour.
A staple of the wonderful Fat Possum Records, he’s been recording since the seventies, playing a rickety old melange of Delta and Chicago Blues.
Word filtered through The End of the Road Festival site that Ford would be playing a ’secret’ set in the woods. When he finally emerged (he doesn’t move too fast these days) he was all smiles and gratitude – happy that 40 or so had eschewed Steve Earle to see him play.
Over an extended set, he recounted his story, weaving a little myth alongside fact, no doubt, and offering his whisky bottle up to the audience. When I made motions to take pictures, he grinned at me and shuffled himself into my line of view, trying not to seem like an 89 year-old prima donna – and yet it was clear he loved the attention and the applause.
I knew the very moment I saw Dan Sartain’s cheekbones betwixt the (web)pages of Pitchfork, some years ago, that it would be very difficult to take a bad photo of this fine-looking chiselled chap. Perfect skin tone – a warm alabastor – and coiffeured to within an inch of his life, he looks every inch the star – equal parts James Dean, Chet Baker and embodying the spirit of rockabilly in his liberal use of pomade.
Helluva contrast too – amongst the hairy straggle of Fleet Foxes, Steve Earle and the throng of beards and guts in the audience – Sartain’s something of a skinny bitch – almost paper thin from the side. Sometimes it was hard to tell the performer from the microphone stand…
That adoring, studious glance in Jarvis’s eyes? It’s aimed at Bob Lind, sixties one hit wonder, immortalized on Pulp’s last album and now revitalized and touring again thanks to the efforts of Cocker and partner-in-crime Richard Hawley. As Lind played, Cocker accompanied and seemed to be having a field day, visibly in awe of the semi-legendary Lind.
As for me, I’d been lost in music for the previous half-hour – somewhat in awe myself of the (diminutive) Swede Kristian Matsson, aka The Tallest Man on Earth…I’d thought about eschewing Lind’s performance but at the last minute ran over to catch a few songs and was very happy to find Messrs Cocker and Hawley playing wingmen. Lind himself was charming and affable.
Cocker’s aging well too, donchathink? The beard works….
James Lewis Carter Ford aka Model T-Ford – 89 years old, depending on who you believe, and ex-chain gang, convicted murderer and father to 26 children – played a secret set in the woods during this year’s End of the Road Festival. I was there, along with forty or so other lucky souls, to hear this remarkable man perform and talk.
A pretty standard portrait shot but one that I like because of the way the hair cuts across the face, creating this great swooping black shape.
Romy’s an interesting-looking girl too – hard to take your eyes off her, especially when she sings. Fashion-wise, I wouldn’t be surprised if she was all over the style columns in the next twelve months (along with her XX co-fronter Oliver Simm). They have eked out an aesthetic that appears to be a rudeboyish/more attainable version of what La Roux’s Elly Jackson has done.
Great album too – it’s barely left my ears for weeks.
‘Always the same’, according to my now rusty Spanish – and one of the more memorable slogans I saw during my time in the Argentinian capital. I particularly like the sign-off – a bank face (two dots and a straight line) above a dollar sign and doubling up, no doubt, as the initials TS – presumably the dauber’s.
There was an interesting creative tension in Buenos Aires – which manifested itself through the various magazines, flyers and media I encountered – between sloganeering, traditional spray-can graffiti and stencilling. Stencilling seemed to be on the way out – considered a fad from last year, not really the true habitation of real artists and a pale imitation of what graffiti should be about. Much more snobbish than London really, where Banksy is held up in an excess of esteem and the who tagging/spraycan thing sometimes seems a little dated.
But then Buenos Aires is way cooler than London in many ways. It has the urban squalor, desperation and disorganisation that London tamed long ago. Plus it’s still so close to the atrocities of the Guerra Sucia and there’s still a lot of anger about that and the handling of the peso devaluation at the start of the decade.
Something else nice about this – the texture of the brick. I’ve just looked at the full size image and it’s interesting how the slogan becomes more poignant against this rugged and hard wearing wall.
Some of my earliest memories are of graffiti on walls – in particular I remember a dark and narrow passageway between two streets in my home town where the legend “Ian Brown is God” remained, daubed in paint, for around ten years.
The universal symbol for anarchism – the circled A – is probably present in every single town in Britain, if not Europe. I saw a few of them dotted around Chile and Argentina too when I was there last year.
The origins of the circled A, a symbol of unity and determination might actually go back beyond the 1970s punk movement. According to Peter Marshall, in his book Demanding the Impossible, a French group – Jeunesse Libertaire – created the circled-A a symbol around the mid-sixties, although the Alliance Ouvriere Anarchiste (AOA) may also have used this symbol as early as 1964. There’s even evidence that it was used during the Spanish Civil war too according to archive footage – but ultimately, no-one really knows why the letter ended up in a circle.
The symbol has, I think, long since lost any power or impact it might have had. Now, it’s a parochial reminder of the enduring spirit of the punk scene in small towns everywhere and as essential to any provincial output as the working man’s social club and council estate block pub.
Madame JoJo’s is a pain in the ass for two reasons – not only is the lighting annoyingly biased towards the colour red but the ceiling rig hangs way too low over the stage for someone as tall as me. No chance to try and bounce flashlight off the above, with a serious danger of hitting the lights with the camera too. It’s not a pleasant experience to shoot there. This is a shame as it’s one of the best venues in London – along with The Luminaire, The Borderline and The Windmill, a brilliant place to see and hear music.
To add insult to injury, the remarkable Josh Weller’s hair – black as the night – needs a third of the frame to do it justice but isn’t a friend of any automatic exposure setting. So everything on manual for this gig – which is slowly becomes the norm as I feel my way around shooting in such varying light situations.
Obviously, I wanted a definitive shot for this show that showed the magnificantly-dressed and coiffeured troubadour in his fully glory. I got two in the end – this one and another, which I’ll post later. I’m a sucker for the angles, as many of my pictures on this blog probably show, so the shapes in this picture make me feel all warm, gooey and accomplished indside…
Getsemani – the walled island at the centre of Cartagena is one of the most interesting city centres you’re ever likely to visit. Most tourists seems to prefer the relative safety of Bocagrande, the Americanised resort district a mile or so away which offers a multitude of shopping centres, chain coffee bars and white, english-speaking faces.
It’s not that Cartagena is particularly hostile or dangerous – although the curious Colombianism of ‘dar papaya’ (“giving the papaya”) is noticeably something that freaks out a few – but if Colombia is your first stop in South America, getting acclimatised to Getsemani might offer something of a challenge.
Thankfully it was the culmination of a long trip all the way from Santiago, down to Ushuaia and then back up again through Argentine, Bolivia, Peru…and after dealing with, coping with and learning to love La Paz, Getsemani was a breeze.
It’s a relatively poor area. Aside from the commercial part of the town – where the museums and boutiques reside – much of Getsemani is a beautiful mesh of rust, dereliction and decay, all wound up with a typography and colour pallette that beckons the camera. I’m not at all interested in the tourist-friendly side of Getsemani – it’s those backstreets, colourful doorways and graffiti-strewn tenements that I wanted to see.
‘God Loves You.’ I had seen this a million times – in car windows mainly, usually next to the sticker saying ‘Jesus es mi jefe’ (Jesus is my boss) – but never in such a tender shade of blue and such an interesting hand-scrawled font.
The open graves at Chauchilla aren’t as macabre as one might expect. There’s something that feels wholly natural about the way that the bones are laid; bleached white in the sun, some still with hair (preserved by the mud used to create dreadlocks) and naturally mummified. The cemetery dates from as early as 200BC, all the way up to AD800. Shards of pottery and bone litter the earth, eventually becoming the fine dusty sand that shrouds the area.
The early morning journey to Chauchilla took about an hour – down the Pan-American Highway and then onto dirt track for most of the journey. It was a quiet morning – the day after New Year’s Day – and the entire area was still in recovery from the previous day’s celebration and excess. Our guide was a sterling example of how the inheritors of the original peoples of South America – the Incans in particular – are embracing tourism and bringing history into focus after so many years of neglect (Peru might have Macchu Picchu but there are a thousand other sites of interest, some of which are still in decay with only minor efforts to clean up, preserve and share with the world). He talked with passion about the Nasca civilisation – they were, after all, his very distant ancestors – and we were treated to a much more involved and stimulating experience than the previous day’s trip over the Nasca Lines – fun, but touristy and with little depth.
Bone is such a wonderful texture to photograph – it’s a feature that really benefits from the post-production process too. I really only tweaked a few tones and played with the contrast in this picture. In reality, the skull was much whiter, like all those in Chauchilla.
I wanted to actually create something more macabre – and so this is very much a departure from the reality of Chauchilla – and I like the idea of the skull emerging from the darkness. There’s something of a cliché about the shot in many ways – it seems more suited to a computer desktop background than a picture frame – but I consider it a key part of the photographic learning process.
Strange gig to shoot, this one…ran out to catch a train, had no idea if I was on the guest list or not and subsequently didn’t bring my flash, forgetting that this tiny venue – which isn’t really suited to live bands in any way, form or manner – wouldn’t be kind in the lighting area.
After struggling for ten minutes with the terrible low light – almost half the band, including the singer, were shrouded in darkness for most of the gig – I submitted to using what I had on me – my nice 30mm/1.4 and the pop-up flash (which I used for probably the first time on my current camera).
What I’ve come to hate is using a flash at such close range – any kind of flash – it bugs the performers and it’s too damn big – you stand out a mile away, half the audience get blinded…it’s just not nice to have in a gig as photographer, performer or punter. The only bonus is that small venues without lighting look a million times better with a properly dialed down flash.
But this was not a properly dialed-down flash. This was the shittiest little pop-up thing that should probably be removed from all SLR cameras. No use to anyone 99 per cent of the time….but it saved my life this very night.
The results were mixed, true. I kept having to dial it down and up according to what I was shooting. My success rate was probably about 20 percent or so – which isn’t too bad considering. The best shots came from blindly pointing the camera into the audience when singer Emmanuel Lundgren went crowdsurfing and I’m very, very happy with this one: in focus, fine colours, good composition and totally captures what it was like to be there.
The lesson has been learned too: I shall never leave home without my flash again.
Valparaiso – the home of Neruda and probably one of the most colourful cities on earth – is inhabited by some of the most well behaved stray cats and dogs I’ve ever encountered. Most of them seem to live in packs, near the port – probably the best place for a free supper. They move amongst the citizens and tourists of the city relatively ignored. They cross roads with decorum and according to the traffic lights and the ones that are aggressive can be silenced simply by picking up a stone and motioning to throw it.
After a morning walking up the hill – bad idea, by the way – that leads to Neruda’s house – the journey back down revealed that the cats of Valpa seem to prefer the higher climes away from all those pesky dogs, it seems. Most have homes though and can be seen peeking through elaborate metal balconiess or doorways.
I really like the composition of this picture although I think I could have pulled back a little further for better effect. I am, however, perfectly happy with the colour pallete and contrast, which in my memory is synonymous with Valparaiso.
Among my expanding image girth, there are several sets of entrance pictures – it’s something I started taking a lot of in South America when I realised just how beautiful they could be.
I’m sure there’s a deeper mechanism at work too. I can remember being a child and sitting in the back seat of a car, nose pressed up against the window, travelling through strange new towns and studying ever doorway – garages, front doors, shopfronts – wondering what lay behind, some kind of escape or magic?
The picture I’m posting wasn’t one of my favourites at first – I’ve had good feedback about it on flickr and several friends and trusted advisors have singled it out as noteworthy. Again, as with the best pictures I’ve taken, there wasn’t any elaborate set up or massive though process behind it. Just kinda happened.
Argentinian Patagonia is beautiful – it excelled my wildest perceptions in both beauty and wildlife. The environment – hundreds and hundreds of miles of flat land, for the most part – concluded in the city of Ushuaia and the Tierra Del Fuego National Park. Ushuaia felt like some weird Lynchean mixture of a Russian prison town and a Scottish fishing village and I could happily have spent a year there.
For me, the most interesting thing about Patagonia, which becomes amplified the further south you travel, is the state of mind it elicits and refines: one of contemplation, raw study and a cleansing zen. It’s very difficult to describe but very conducive to the act of photography.
I have hundreds of photographs from my months in Patagonia and have recently been looking through several taken around Playa Larga, a stretch of beach and coastal road along the Beagle Channel. Much of the day there was spending climbing up a steep cliff from the beach, through a forest where hundreds of birds had made their homes, desperately trying to get a shot of them in flight. When I take pictures of birds, I’m interested in their shape and form more than, say colour or environment – thus, I tend to get a lot of shots against the sky.
This is one of maybe a handful of photographs I’m genuinely proud of taking. Everything just worked – I was going for an experiment in angles and contrasts and that’s exactly what I got. It couldn’t have turned out better: the colours of the macaw’s feathers against the dusty earth and the wonderfully patchy shadow-like stain on the floor that appears to be moving threateningly towards the colourful plumage as the bird hides his head away.
On hot days during my five months at the La Senda Verde animal refuge in Bolivia, the monkeys would laze under the sun and become increasingly affectionate and playful.
I had a special relationship with Wara. She used to greet me after nighttime rainstorms, early in the morning around 5.30 when I went to the kitchen to prepare some mate de coca. She would nuzzle inside my coat, soaking and sniveling and dig in there until it got warmer.
I spent an hour, on one of the hottest days during February of this year, taking some wonderful shots of Wara. She was always great in front of the camera and this time the light caught her fur against the brilliant green of the land.
Villa De Leyva – one of the most beautiful whitewashed towns in the whole of South America – and for some reason all I wanted to shoot was dirty rooftops, derelict brick walls and rusty old motors.
I’m crazy about the angles going on here – the different triangles and lines. Only after looking at this today did I realise how happy I am with it – at the time, it was just another shot, taken without much thought. The colours have come out exactly as I remember them too, without too much post-.
I have mixed feelings about Michael Jackson. Like all good celebrities, who he is and what he is are a world a way from what he really is and did. Two very good albums as a solo artist by my count and then….nothing….for more than twenty – nearing thirty years – nothing.
And yet he is revered without bounds – that skinny, squeaky, asexual and undoubtedly mentally damaged little man, now no longer with us. And this is what fascinates me more than Billie Jean or Thriller or the damn moonwalk.
I stumbled upon the MJ memorial a week ago and came back with a camera. The shrine is growing by the day and guarded by a hardcore fanbase who are camped out on the pavement, seemingly never to leave. Most of them weren’t even born when MJ had his last big hit (whatever that was…anyone?), which again is a strange and unusual thing to me.
I wish I’d had more time at Recoleta Cemetery, the final resting place of Eva Peron and a host of political figures from Argentinian History. I also wish I’d spent more time trying to capture just how impressive, imposing and downright strange the place is, sitting as it does flush with early twentieth century Porteño flatblocks.
Of the photographs I took, I’m genuinely happy with about four or five from maybe three hundred or so. This one I like in particular – the figure’s pose is so naturalistic that the environment in which it lives – the rooftops of the cemetery’s mausoleums – is like some strange new world, beyond human understanding. Either that or I watched this episode of Doctor Who too many times.
1) He – the father – was a true gent, despite an obvious, shall we say ‘chequered past’ and deep suspiscion of me and my camera. Words from host Fabio assured him I was not a narco and he posed without any reservations.
2) He – the kid – was like my shadow while I was at Corazon de Jesus, the comedor (soup kitchen) where this photo was taken. His face lit up when I let him take some pictures too.
3) The colour pallete at work here is totally spot on – an accurate representation of the colours of that terrible and wonderful place.
4) That said, I’ve blown the detail in the background, but hey, nothing’s perfect!
I’m going through the last batch of photos I’d taken over the last 12 months on the road in South America. It’s mainly some more Boliva shots from the Yungas, about a hundred from Minas Gerais in Brasil and a couple from Salta, where I briefly returned to for a few days only to experience steak one last time (and it was worth it).
I got to spend more time on the backstreets of Salta this time, taking in the dusty old buildings and decaying walls. Found some magnificent illustration and graffiti amongst the rubble – and this particular advertisement – and I have no idea what it was for – stood out. It was the blue lines that drew me to it, hidden behind a tree on Calle Entre Rios, just down the road from the bus station.
From my first trip to Dungeness, about four years back. It’s a place that eats up pictures – a goldmine of material. One the beach stands a shack; a rusty iron-clad shed. I’ve spent hours there, taking pictures of it. The solitary, compact building offers a myriad of angles, textures and colours. It’s truly a beautiful object – a perfect creation of both man and nature.
One of the reasons I started to take pictures at gigs was from sheer bewilderment at lighting and how to manipulate it in such a confusing situation to make a photograph work.
I’m still learning – I think I always will be….I still forget to do some things right and my success rate is about 10 percent for any gig, which I would imagine is normal in most cases (and the reason digital is such fun – and probably the reason the learning curve is steeper too – less care needs to be taken and you learner slower rather than faster).
The Chapman Family played at the ICA last night. It’s a great place for taking pictures – good lighting and nothing too irregular (although too many blues and reds, as usual) to worry about.
[The techie bit] I’m struggling with lenses at the moment, having my beloved 30mm/1.4 Sigma in for repair after it took a fall in Bolivia, and still waiting for the 80-200mm/2.8 to arrive. So I’m using the 105mm, which works to a point, and an old Zuiko 50mm/1.8 (which loses a stop so is really only a 2.8). The Zuiko is pain to focus in lowlight and suffers from the tiny Olympus viewfinder – but I’m getting better each time I use it. My E510 is also in for repair and I’m eying the E3 – or more likely the E30 – as the next big purchase.
Anyway, this photograph captures the elements I’ve always like best in live music photography, namely:
- black and white
- the halo effect
- angles
- noses, lips and chins
- a ratio of two thirds black to one third white
- sepia
When I first started using sepia, I overdid it, as I think many do. Now I’m finding it works best when there’s clean light and minimal detail.
I’ve been a fan of Simon Armitage since the early 90’s and remember his poem Kid fondly. His performance at Rough Trade tonight included a poem about The Kaiser Chief’s Ricky Wilson eating an orange and encountering an Albanian girl whose deported father had given her the orange.
Wandering off the main street in the tiny northern Argentinian town of Malargue, I found a derelict orphanage ready for demolition behind some scaffolding and wooden boards.
Photographic gold, especially the walls with these wonderful water stains.
An incredibly poignant image taken a few years back on a trip to the relatively unknown West Norwood Cemetery.
The cemetery is one of the best in London – moreso because very few know it – but there’s usually at least one photographer lurking round the Greek Orthodox section on a Saturday afternoon.
I have yet to return since this trip and will be doing so in the next few months as I’m now living a stone’s throw away.
An early morning shot of the hills that skirt the boundaires of the Madidi National Park, near Rurrenabaque in Bolivia.
A five hour boat trip upriver to camp took us to the most isolated place I’ve ever been. Two hours in, the park entrance begins with moss-covered hills and a macaw lick. I was – obviously – experimenting with filters and light here and I’m not sure what I was going for. When I look at this photograph it sometimes seems too neat and meaningless – and at other times, I love that about it. It’s all very confusing, which is a pretty good reason to post it here.
Spending nearly a year travelling South America and taking over 5,000 photographs, I found myself attracted to a seemingly arbitrary list of subjects, amongst them crosses, doorways, paving stones and walls. I’m still grappling with why this happened and what these things represent: chances are I’m about ten steps away from a mass murder rampage or I’m simply just a sucker for those things that made up the background of the places I visited. Concrete and faith and wood and iron. Not much else to most of those towns.
This wall – located in the town where Herzog shot some of Cobra Verde, was something of an anomoly in that place (largely a colonial whitewashed treasure – one of the prettiest places I’ve ever visited).
Union Chapel is the most beautiful and the most uncomfortable venue you’ll ever set foot in. It’s a penance, sitting on those cold, hard pews and you gotta pray to god that the gig is good or you’re gonna feel real bad by the end of the night.
Unfortunately, it’s also a pain to shoot in there too. Such a big space, it’s always underlit and the stage isn’t the most friendly in terms of size, level and arrangement either. I didn’t get a decent colour shot from this gig – a show comprised of various artist from the Brighton-based Wilkommen Records roster. Sweet Billy Pilgrim weren’t my favourite that night but they did have a remarkably photogenic bass player who seemed to be swathed in the only decent light in the whole place.
One of the very best festival gigs I’ve ever been to and one of the rare occasions when Jens performed with a full band and brass section. Incredible stuff. The lighting in the tent wasn’t the best and I was struggling with a duff camera but it all came out nice in the end.
Being 6 foot 3 or so, I’m often striding ahead on walks while my relatively dwarfish companions lag behind. It’s a fault I’m trying to correct but it doesn’t come easy when you’ve spent most of your life walking at a certain pace. After a day in Acaime National Park, I was back at the entrance to the park a good 15 minutes before my compadres. Found this nice old beer can lying on a rock and snapped away.
Because Tobias himself was poorly lit while his unassuming bass player stood sweltering under the light, his shots came out much better. I found this going through some early gig shots I’d taken about four years ago and I really like it. Nice face, hint of instrument, studied noncholance….
The national tree of Colombia, or so I was told, these are the tallest palms in the world and it’s illegal to cut them down by Colombian law. They certainly stand out in an environment which isn’t dissimilar to the British Lake District. A nightmare to photograph up close, I had to take several shots and composite them on Photoshop.
Taganga, is a gringo town half a day east of Cartagena on the north coast of Colombia. Architecturally, it’s a dive – shanty housing and prefabs loom large. Aside from the graveyard and bay, there’s not much of aesthetic value around. As usual in South America towns, the graffiti was among the more interesting decorations – the standard ballot paper propaganda reproduced here with much more colour and luminescence than elsewhere on the continent.
After an early morning visit to the open graves at Chauchilla, just a few miles down the road from Nasca in Peru, we passed a local cemetery – awash with colour and vibrant, flowery graves. Most of the graves were marked by home made crossed – some simpler and cheaper than other – but all constructed out of the same mix of materials – barbed wire, discarded wood and corrugated iron (many of the shanty houses are made from the same materials which is somewhat poetic).
One particular cross stood out – rusty, thorny and rather sombre amongst the colourful paper and plastic flowers adorning much of the cemetery.
A bit naughty this one – usually I’d ask for permission to take shots of kids – but here, it was the curiosity of the kid that made the shot interesting. I was on one side of the road, high on the walls of the city. The child was below, on the other side, in one of Cartagena’s poorer zonas.
He seemed transfixed by me – this tall white dude – and my camera, especially when I raised it to shoot. Soon his friend got in on the action and they posed awhile for me before running in doors to tell their mother…and I bolted, quicksharp.
The climb up through Acaime National Park in the zona cafatera of Colombia isn’t too strenuous – perhaps two hours through relatively safe humid forest takes you to the cloud forest where a grizzly old couple tend to a makeshift hummingbird sanctuary. The light was terrible and I had no flash and my best lens had died two months back….nevertheless, a few decent shots came out of the experience – mainly of this particular bird, who looks more like something from a Disney cartoon than real life. I also got a couple of frozen shots which weren’t that great in composition – so I’m posting this one instead.
All in all, I spent over five months in Bolivia and much of that time working with capuchin monkeys near a (barely) village called Yolosa. Kimbo – a capuchin who was more Mogwai than monkey – became a firm favourite and was christened my ’son’ by the sanctuary cook.
It wasn’t hard to photograph or to pick the best shot of Kimbo. He adored the camera, seeming to know what it represented – a chance to be centre stage and get attention. This shot was taken after feeding when he was full and happy, picture strands of beetroot from the feeding table. Thanks to my 30mm/1.4 lens – before it rolled off my bed and cracked apart – I was able to get in close and create the illusion of a studio shot.
There’s something slightly unsettling about this shot though – Kimbo comes across as too human….
Hugui’s story has a sad beginning and a sad end. She came to the La Senda Verde animal refuge near Yolosa in Bolivia having never encountered another monkey since birth. Kept as a pet, she didn’t take to the situation and found herself now thrust into an alien environment with other capuchins who terrified her. She was jumpy, nervous and underweight. The other capuchins would steal her food and she only trusted a few select humans.
Despite best efforts to introduce her succesfully to the captive pack, she disappeared overnight little more than a month after arriving and never returned – was she stolen? It’s possible and likely – she might have headed for the road and been taken from there to market and sold back as a pet at the La Paz market.
During the festival of St Rosario in Tilcara, Argentina, the entire population of this small town parade through the streets carrying effigies and playing a variety of instruments (including the ubiquitous pan pipes). It’s a chance for the well-dressed gents of the town to put on their best Sunday hats and walk proudly amongst their fellow citizens.
What struck me most about this guy was that his skin tone seems to be intentionally complimented by the colours of both his hat and his jumper. He’s chewing the coca too.
Despite the number of photos on flickr of the famous salt desert in Bolivia – a staple of the gringo trail – few are interesting. It’s hard to make something so white really stand out in photographic form – the place has to be seen to be believed and only really works best when you shoot close up or completely wide.
With this in mind, I’m only really happy with a loose handful from more than five hundred pictures I shot in the Salar. This one has been tweaked a little to bring out the dramatic tones that are lost in the bright sun of the Salar. It would be wonderful to spend a night there but is almost impossible due to the low temperatures.
I think this guy was a deacon or some kind of lay person involved in the church. Many grassroots NGOs in South America have church involvement and this comedor in Santa Fe feeds the kids and holds services with songs and prayer.
As I mingled with the kids and adults, this quiet gentleman strummed a guitar with his wife by his side as they prepared songs for later. He had the aspect of one totally at peace with the world.
I will forever remember this wonderful, happy and incredibly beautiful child with the best haircut in Argentina. While I sat, looking through pictures I’d just taken at the Maria Teresa de Calcuta comedor, he wandered up and forced himself between me and the camera, wanting to see what I was doing. I let him take a few pictures and then we kicked a ball round for a while.
I have no idea why the kid in this shot decided to hold up the plastic bag when I took this photograph. I think he was perhaps embarrassed or a little confused about why this tall blonde gringo would want his shot. No-one in the Santa Fe favelas really knew why we was there or what we were doing and the general consensus appeared to be that we were either police, narcotraffickers or buyers. Everyone seemed to view us with suspicion – from the kids on the corners selling to the cartaneros patrolling the streets for card to sell.
Every week, the “mothers of the disappeared” – those who were taken during the Guerra Sucia in Argentina – take over the Plaza de Mayo in central Buenos Aires and march in solidarity to demand a full and open investigation into the events that transpired during the 70’s and early 80s. Some of the women have been doing this since before the dictatorship fell. In their early days, they were vilified, spat on, some were imprisoned, others disappeared and are presumed dead. Now they stand as a national institution and symbol of Argentinean democracy.
It felt slightly invasive to photograph these women when all I wanted to do was hug them and offer my sympathies. With such people, and such images, you start to wonder how much history is projected onto the image by the onlooker – the eyes, the wrinkles, the hair – everything seems to carry the history of loss with it.
Roberto walks miles each day to get to the Corazon de Jesus comedor, where he has lunch and picks up a few leftovers to take with him for the evening. He’s survived two heart attacks. He lives on charity and on the streets. He was a joy to talk to and didn’t mind being photographed; just as well considering I wasn’t going to let anyone with such amazing eyes escape my camera….
Cute-as-a-button, it broke my heart to see this girl, playing amongst the dirty water, broken syringes and raw sewage that litters the floors of the favelas of Santa Fe – basically landfills with shanty housing built on top.
She wielded a broken coke bottle (thankfully made of plastic, not glass) and looked at me with such blank eyes, my heart nearly snapped in two. We pulled the car over and smiled – no response…so I snapped a few frames and we left quickly.
To me, Billy Bragg is a legend – undervalued for his stance, lyrics and sheer durability as a singer-songwriter – and on a par with Steve Earle or Joan Baez for his contribution to music. Songs like ‘There is Power in a Union’ can still put a lump in my throat.
Age hasn’t mellowed him, but has given his face and skin something of an interesting texture – in fact, he’s starting to look more and more like Paul McCartney as time passes….
Another love of mine during gig shoots are these seemingly mundane waist/foot/kit shots. Not much to say about this one – I just like the pose, the shirt, the colours.
A footnote: I own this very shirt now. Thanks Jim White.
Phil Chapman, drummer with The Chapman Family, ranks up there with Stephen Morris as one of those – ahem – skin-beaters who you could easily mistake for a machine, such is his precision. It’s genuinely a joy to watch him play, gurn and strike terrifying poses, occasionally jabbing a stick in the direction of the audience in an accusatory manner.
Not a great shot really but I like it because it captures what I like about watching this guy and watching The Chapman Family.
A close up of The Undercut’s bass player. Not a particularly exciting band – but then it’s not my kind of music. Only posting this one because I love the profile and the lighting. All totally accidental, of course.
A band that I rate and yet I think that the reason they’re so compellingly wonderful live is also the reason they’re unable to translate that onto record. 
