As usual I am starting my blog with a promise to actually put some effort in and keep it up to date......  Believe that when you see it!

I, somewhat unexpectedly, popped along to see Midge Ure last night.  Not unexpected in so much as this wouldn't be a gig I would like to have gone to, more from a had no plan but ended up going anyway.  I am writing a review for one of the magazines I occasionally do bits for so won't go into the whole gig here.  Instead I wanted to cover the topic of heckling.....

I quite often have pub debates about acoustic gigs.  The argument usually goes along the lines of me saying 'you can tell a great song if you strip it down' and everyone else saying 'That's utter £$£%'.  Anyway, I am sticking to my guns.  Midge Ure has been involved in an amazing body of work over the last 35 years-ish.  If you go to see Ultravox, you don't really get how good his collection is.  If you go to see him solo then you get a sense of just how prolific and fine his back catalogue is.  The songs absolutely stand the test of time. 

The acoustic shows are also enhanced with entertaining tales in between songs. The insights serve to make a great connection between artist and audience and add some colour to the evening.

The most famous of all of these songs, 'Vienna', is particularly awe inspiring to see played on nothing but an acoustic guitar.  Midge delivers the tune with all the passion it deserves and strains his vocal chords in the process. The crowd listen and hang on every word with rapt attention and explode into applause as the song comes to an end.  Midge inclines his head to acknowledge the appreciative audience and the crowd and artist are in perfect harmony. As the applause drifts though, from the back of the room, comes a very well oiled heckle in a Glaswegian accent. The words are those that must haunt Midge Ure where-ever he goes.....  

'Joe Dolce', a dramatic pause.....  

Midge looks into the darkness of the crowd, not believing what he has heard.  The applause faded now into nothing.  It is high noon now between artist and heckler.  The pause is broken by the second ill aimed shot from the drunkard at the back,

'Joe Dolce!'.  

Midge takes a deep breath, one full of the the weariness that only 30 odd years of hearing the same thing can bring.  He clears his throat,

'In some parallel universe, Joe Dolce is standing on this stage.  Some sad bugger just shouted 'Midge Ure' at him......'  

His aim straight and true, as only a seasoned gun slinger could manage brings down the drunken heckler, but as if he needed to make sure no further shots were fired....

'...but I doubt it'

I can't imagine how hard it is to be up on a stage presenting your life's work for an audience.  Harder still, to imagine facing the same tired tale, inarticulately delivered as it was, for 30 odd years. It was great to see a immensely talented performer deal with heckler with all the aplomb of a seasoned stand up comedian with years of experience on the club circuit.  

I do not know what possesses people to make loads of noise or heckle performers at acoustic gigs. It is an all too frequent occurrence and always sets my teeth on edge. These are fabulous opportunities to get closer to an artist and their music.... so when they are playing and putting it out there, is it really too difficult to just keep quiet and appreciate?

Been a bit busy recently and not blogged much.  Of course this doesn't mean I haven't been busy, just the opposite. I have been too busy to get around to writing about it. So this is one of three catch up blogs, that picks on the three big gigs in my calendar and misses out on a load of stuff that would be interesting enough to write about if only I could find the time to do it.  The gigs that I had planned my calendar around were The Fields of the Nephilim, Carter USM and The Levellers. There is an awful lot of planning goes into gig photography. Access to take photos at these gigs takes a ton of arranging and it is getting tougher and tougher. So I take each one pretty seriously....

First up, The Fields of the Nephilim. If ever there were a band that deserve respect when it comes to gig photos then it is The Fields. Notoriously difficult to shoot due to dark conditions and huge clouds of smoke/dry ice (last time they played Leeds the airport was closed for three days afterwards).

So I thought I would get some practice at low light shooting.  Two bands who I really like where playing together in The Stereo in York.  Berlin Black and the Shades of Grey and O. Children should be great to take pics of, but the Stereo is a pub back room with really tough lighting. The big issue with The Stereo is that the front lighting that should hit the band is actually too close too the stage to really help.  As soon as anyone steps slightly forward of the light then they disappear into darkness. Even if they stand in the perfect spot they tend to get a 'floating head' effect as the light hits the head hard and nothing else.  So Berlin Black's Shades of Grey all came out black and I really didn't get a shot that I thought would be worth sharing. From a gig perspective, the band seem to just go from strength to strength and put in a great gig. O. Children are a band I have been really keen to see again. I loved the first album, and the follow-up Apnea is something that has seen a fair amount of time on the car stereo. There are particular problems with taking pictures of O. Children in venues like this. Tobi, the lead singer, is one of the tallest folks I have ever seen. So the lighting at The Stereo, even if he stood on the perfect spot, hit his chest. The lighting was so dark that the auto-focus steadfastly refuse to connect with anything. I left the gig empty handed, a great wake-up call for a man a week away from a Neffs gig.

The debacle in York meant I needed to head out to my favourite place of practice. The Library in Leeds hosts The Flock club-night on the first Saturday of each month. It is usually defiantly dark and smokey. Zeitgeist Zero and Last July were playing in a nice looking double bill. Both bands put in a great set, but the lighting was really nice! This was clearly not was needed for a man on his last practise!

So, it was with much trepidation, that I turned up to take pics at the Fields of the Nephilim gig. The last time I saw them was at the Mission XXV gig in Brixton and the lighting was really tough. The gig had a similar 'event' feel with folks meeting up in pre-determined pubs in a celebration of a bands rare appearance. The line-up for this gig was simply brilliant, with Salvation and the newly renamed Skeletal Family appearing.

Salvation have played a few gigs since their reappearance at the Mission XXV gig in Leeds last year. They have always pulled in a crowd of devout maniacs who just throw themselves into the gigs. I am really lucky to have seen all of the gigs they have played and can see why the group gets a bit bigger each time. Despite the technical difficulties with bass amplification the set is a cracker and significantly sharper then the Mish support slot a year before. Unfortunately, the lighting was tough and had me feeling really nervous about the upcoming headliners.

The Skeletal Family eased my fears a little as the ripped though a Skeletal Family, Ghost Dance and Anne-Marie Hurst mash-up under the new/old banner. Lighting was great, smoke machine smokey, wind machine windy and was really nice to see them on the bigger stage.

Of course, all the practise and preparation for a gig can go out of the window pretty quickly. Fields of the Nephilim appear in the expected darkness and smoke combination, but without the main subject of Carl McCoy. Of course, venues should make allowances for Shroud, but they don't. One of the three songs gone without a lead singer to snap out.  With one third of the photo opportunity vanished in a puff of smoke my nerves were jangling. McCoy finally appears and it is time to put all that practise into effect.

There are some bands where you need to get a shot of each member of the band, but there is really a 'must have' feel to shots of McCoy.  He is the figurehead of the band and you really need to nail that shot.  This one comes during 'Straight To The Light'.  I usually struggle to remember the song when I am doing pics, but this was a song with some significance for the photographers. The reasons are still a little unclear, either crowd surfers or production decision, but the photo pit was cleared 3/4 through song two! Planning and practise go to hell in a hand-basket when this kind of thing happens. There was effectively less then two minutes to get a shot of the main subject.  Tricky lighting, loads of smoke, security guards, jostling togs and loads of other things conspire against getting the one shot you need. Having a radically shortened window of opportunity did not help. 

It is moments like this that I start interpreting the rules of photography. The three song rule at the O2 Academy usually means you get three songs and then you put the camera away and take no more shots.  These are usually taken from the photo-pit.  In the heat of the moment when the security guys are clearing you out there is little time to ask clarifying questions. So I made a decision to attach the long lens (70-200mm F2.8 L USM IS II) and drifted to the back of the crowd for a song (or two). It is really tough to take a good photo from distance, really, really, tough! I was not convince I had the shot I wanted so had a crack.  

Carl McCoy of Fields of the Nephilim at O2 Academy Leeds

The pic (above) was taken from the side of the venue (by the door between the two bar on the right of the venue). It is a long way away. It doesn't look a lot like this on the camera when I took it. I had a point of reference for Neffs pictures from when I was a kid. This comes from Sounds/Melody Maker/NME pics back in the day where photography and printing techniques combined to create quite a specific grainy/newpaper feel. This is not an easy effect to recreate, but I feel like it was worth the effort to create a pic that felt like something I aspired to when I used to devour live reviews.

I didn't really appreaciate just how good the Neffs were during the Mish support slot. I think this is mainly down to my adverse reaction to the 'Neffs where better then the Mish' attitude. I hope that this doesn't colour my judgement if they should ever play together again, as if that could happen next December!

I have spent a load of time trying to help out with a couple of video projects for The March Violets recently. I am pretty new to video and spending as much time working out how to get the best out of the Canon EOS 5D Mk II and Canon EOS 7d as I can. The capability of both cameras looks pretty good when filming from a static position with a fairly fixed subject.  The autofocus system of both cameras is not up to much more though without loads of manual wrangling.

Of course the one thing that a learner video maker should never do is start making videos with folks with wild imaginations. This would  mean never making a March Violets video, so that particular rule book has been chucked well and truly out of the window. Si Denbigh is not short of creative and interesting ideas when it comes to the music he crafts with the rest of the band, or the imagery surrounding it.

I am not going to share anything about the first video, other then to say that I am fairly convinced that it captures something never seen before on either video or still photography.

The second song involved a video and photo shoot at the fabulous Club Lash in Manchester. I could write the longest blog in history about this particular event and the mistakes I made, but the more I try promo work the more I realised how important the experience of the subject/model is. The willing volunteers for the video and photo shoot all asked for direction, and that is a really tricky thing to give to an inexperienced model (no matter how fabulous they looked). It took a while to get into the swing of it and give the right level of direction. Each of the volunteers did brilliantly and I think we came away with some really interesting footage.

The last person to step onto the backdrop was Rosie Garland herself. In her guise of Rosie Lugosi, vampire queen of Club Lash, she had to feature in the shoot. The difference when working with a seasoned performer is noticeable.  The only direction needed here was 'Be Rosie' and fabulous shapes and poses appeared from nowhere....

Huge thanks go out to the amazingly undiscovered talents of the folks of Club Lash. They were gloriously fabulous!