Morning Glory, People on Boats and ME

I get home from work. It's Friday. I've eaten. Judge Judy is on. I am fighting the urge to just email the guys at the Dwarf and tell 'em my camera broke and I can't shoot gigs this weekend.

So I'm on the tram now, heading towards The Workers Club in the city. I don't take the publick transport much so it's a novelty (that wears off in about 5 minutes unless there are a couple of junkies fighting or similar).

The Workers Club is pretty cool - a smallish room out the back that looks half completed, but I think it's finished - it's located very close to where I used to live in Carlton but I never checked it out when I was living there.
The bands I'm there to photograph are The Hello Morning, ME and The Boat People (it's their single launch of "Soporific").

The Hello Morning were cool - kinda Wilco-ey.. it was the 2nd time I had seen ME in a week - they had a violinist this time and were on form - I think I actually like this band.. The Boat People were ok.. yep.. ok.. I'm not a reviewer so I don't really have an opinion worth opinionating but ME seemed like the strongest band tonight.

I'm kinda over shooting gigs at the moment - I think 4 in two weekends was abit too much, it's always a drag getting to gigs, but once you are there it's all good (usually)

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And now for the cum face of the gig award, this week the keys player from the Boat People takes the award with his Saturday-morning-lying-in-bed-thanks-for-that-that-really-hit-the-spot look.

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I have never been surrounded by so many hipster kids in a long while, I felt like I was the oldest person in the crowd by about 15 years (I just said to myself: "it must be an all ages gig Mike... yea.. that's it) maybe I just felt old because I was at the Espy last night till 1am (did I mention that ME didn't come on till 12.30am at all?)

I had already put Yves Klein Blue in a box before I even heard them - I saw a photo and knew they were supporting Franz Ferdinand so I automatically though "Franz Ferdinand rip-off" I was excellently wrong and was treated to a great show - I had been told the album has had bad reviews but I didn't mind the music and it's hard to tell what the songs are really like when you are trying to get photos. Cloud Control were pretty good too, as was Last Dinosaurs but they lacked stage presence so.. NO PHOTO FOR YOU!


now to the bizness...


































I am pleased to announce a BRAND NEW SECTION to my blog!

It's well documented that musicians pull faces and / or make noises while they are playing.
I used to know a drummer who would make a growling noise whenever he did a drum roll, it was so bad that I people had problems taking it out of recordings and on one occasion he scared the guitarist he was playing with - I make noises when I play - I'm not sure about my cum face.. but each gig I'll try and find the best cum face and add it to the pics - if not just so we can have a laugh (and I can generate more hits from males ages 17 - 50) todays award goes to the bass player from Yves Klein Blue - it looks like it's been a long time between face...


but I bet it hasn't..

ME, Myself and I

So I'm going to start this blog entry with a simple question.

Why the fuck.... on a week night... would you have the main act... start at 12.30am.

The audience was deaf and tired by he time ME came on (or maybe that was just me, not them as in ME but me me, as in me, not ME) they (ME) shoulda been on at 10.30 (then it wouldn't cost me a $25 taxi ride home for payment of going and shooting a gig for free) anyway, i still have all my arms and legs so I'll move on.

I was shooting ME, with support from Redcoats, Porcelain and a band from Brisbane (sorry guys, I have searched the other myspace pages and can't find your name) ME and Redcoats were great, two very different acts but both kinda made the late night (did I mention that the main act came on at 12.30am?) worth it..

ME were a mix of the Beatles, Queen and Split Enz (Not that I have really heard that much Queen) while Redcoats were a mix of a stoner rock / metal band I have never heard of and another band i have never heard. Porcelain were cool, a great bunch of musos but the highlight of the band was an excellent singer.


anyhoo...

Dubgasm

Where have I been?!

I've been here...

Where?

Here!

I had a shit time photographing a gig last month (Mama Kin) the band was awesome but the light was shit - I pulled a very few half decent shots out - sent them to the Dwarf, I don't even think they published them, I didn't blog them or add them to Flickr, so I guess they just don't exist - which is fine by me!

I have been busy.. I saw three very good bands in the last 2 weeks: Faith No More, Calexico and the Black Seeds.

Faith No More.. If you don't know who they are you can kindly leave..

Calexico: Awesome, just awesome, one of my favorite bands. Alt-country with a twist of everything else - you really need to check them out if you don't know them.

One of my all-time favourite bands from New Zealand is a band called The Black Seeds.
I first saw them one New Years Eve when I was in Christchurch to see another NZ dub band called Salmonella Dub. What's this? I thought.. a bunch of (mostly) white boys from Wellington making kick-ass reggae / dub??!! sweet as bro! I have seen them in NZ, Sydney and Melbourne - it's always great to catch a show. Clever little bastards. I got my photo pass through a friend this time, and because they are Kiwis making awesome music, the Aussies get annoyed and didn't seem to want to cover the gig - so I had the photo pit to myself!

I have alot of shows to photograph in the next month: ME, Yves Klein Blue, The Boat People, Seabellies and Otouto. The band I play in, Audiac is getting everything ready for the release of El Toroloco - our 2nd album.. so it's busy busy busy

onwards and upwards

me!

My music photography passions comes from the fact that I play bass in a local band Audiac. I designed the artwork for their first album No Come Down and when they were about to play a couple of shows in Sydney, their bass player quit - I was asked to learn the album and fill in for them. It was quite a fun show and the guys were pretty happy with my efforts, leaving an open invitation to join the band if I moved to Melbourne.
In 2009 we recorded El Toroloco and are now set to release it, which is pretty cool - hopefully some people will be taking photos of me playing some gigs this year!

You can hear snippets of both albums on the website... speaking of website...

I designed the Audiac webite using a online programe thing called WIX. So far so good with the site, it is very basic and is pretty much drag and drop design, no code, code bores me shitless and even though I do graphic design, I have never wanted to get into web design.

It would be great to know what you think of the site, anything I missed? is it easy to navigate?

insert wanky art statement here

One reason why I moved from Timaru New Zealand to Melbourne New Zealand was due to a serious lack in stimulation: eyeal, oral and earol.

While Timaru has the.. um.. err..
.
.
.

Melbourne has the bands, the occasional nice beach and art galleries - speaking of art galleries, I went to an exhibition on Monday of Ron Mueck - if I could sum it up in one word, it would be this: FUCKING AWESOME.

I am now going to pilfer words and sentences from the interthing as I know nothing about this guy....

On loan from Wikipedia:

"Ron Mueck (born 1958) is an Australian hyperrealist sculptor working in Great Britain. Mueck's early career was as a model maker and puppeteer for children's television and films, notably the film Labyrinth. Mueck established his own company in London, making photo-realistic props for the advertising industry. Although highly detailed, these props were usually designed to be photographed from one specific angle hiding the mess of construction seen from the other side.

Mueck increasingly wanted to produce realistic sculptures which looked perfect from all angles. In 1996 Mueck transitioned to fine art, collaborating with his mother-in-law, Paula Rego, to produce small figures as part of a tableau she was showing at the Hayward Gallery. Rego introduced him to Charles Saatchi who was immediately impressed and started to collect and commission work. This led to the piece which made Mueck's name, Dead Dad, being included in the Sensation show at the Royal Academy the following year. Dead Dad is a rather haunting silicone and mixed media sculpture of the corpse of Mueck's father reduced to about two thirds of its natural scale. It is the only work of Mueck's that uses his own hair for the finished product. Mueck's sculptures faithfully reproduce the minute detail of the human body, but play with scale to produce disconcertingly jarring visual images."

END LOAN

This guy is great, as I was walking around I was just in awe of how long it would have taken to make these pieces... It was cool that we were allowed to take pics, I really enjoyed trying to capture some sort of interaction between the people and the pieces, do you dig it?

Check out this site too. I have sent in my pics to them and there will be something about it in their blog.

Now... look at these awesome pics!

mittens made from a homeless dog

It's a Wednesday.
I'm on a tram.
It's 8.45pm.
The girl opposite me is eating fush and chups and wiping her fingers on the seat.
I'm drinking a V.

This can only mean one thing...

I am on my way to the Prince Bandroom, St Kilda to photograph The Handsome Family!

I used to work in a little indie record store in New Zealand called Rhino Records (which changed it's name to Radiant Records after Warner Music USA brought the Rhino Label and told my boss to stop using the name) My boss, Warren loved Elvis and country music, not that gay country music like Billy Ray - cool country, like Cash and Hank Williams. He used to listen to The Handsome family abit, so when the opportunity came up to photograph, I thought I'd give it a go. After photographing a couple of 'singer songwriters' and
A) being bored shitless and
B) being bored shitless of taking photos of one person

I was hoping they had a band, but they didn't - and it wasn't bad! they really knew how to interact with the audience, cute (strange) stories between songs broke the night up and it really was a great gig. It was one of those moments that you were watching a seasoned performer compared to someone who is young in their journey - and there is a huge difference. Ned Collette was the support, who I pretty much missed due arriving late, I got one cool pic of him though.