Bloody ‘ell doesn’t time fly when you having fun. It is only a few months until London’s premier boutique festival, Offset comes around again. Last year’s line-up opened my eyes, blew my eardrums and destroyed my liver and 2010 doesn’t look like it’s going to be going lightly on me either. This year Offset is providing my senses with appearances from Atari Teenage Riot, Rolo Tomassi, Lavotchkin, Chromehoof and Eighties Matchbox B-line Disaster to name just a pinch of the line-up. Offset provides something special with vintage clothes stalls, 5 stages and gorilla noise performances. You’d be mad to miss it for £65 for a weekend camping ticket….seriously mad.
Sometimes there is a bill so good you’ll clamber over the corpse of your dead grandmother to go to it. This was one such gig with appearances by the over amped doom of Pombagira, time signature bending Black Cobra, groove ridden hardcore gods Saviours and deep south cliché shotgun totting Jack Daniel’s guzzling Weedeater. Lips were pouting, heads were nodding and a inordinate amount of skinheads were ripping up the mosh pit around me.
Remember those teenage days of staying up late to watch banned music videos on MTV? With music tv becoming increasingly defunct due to on-demand videos from YouTube, I honestly never thought I’d see the day when a video was banned again. It seems that Brooklyn disco noiseniks HEALTH have joined the ranks of Prodigy, Motley Crue and Marilyn Mason with their latest single “USA Boys” taken from HEALTH//DISCO2 HEALTH’s second remix album. Video rebels Vimeo however can take the heat so sneak downstairs, turn off the lights, grab the remote and turn the sound down…
I’m pretty damn excited due to the large amount of Entombed worship going on right now, bands like Trap Them and Doomriders are bring back the Swedish Death’n'Roll sound. Southern Lord’s Black Breath are the most potent of the lot. Throwing extreme metal, crushing riffage and hardcore punk together Black breath are surprisingly a breath of fresh air. http://www.myspace.com/blackbreath
I found myself on this Friday afternoon shooting a portrait for a greek newspaper in the Birkberk office of Costas Douzinas, a law professor and Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. Costas’s office was a library of books and papers which made them a natural backdrop for such a learned man. Costas was pleasure to work with and a huge personality, which for a photographer is nothing short of a pleasure to shoot.
Right that is it, I’m done with electro noise bands and their amazing strobe-tastic showmanship(personship?). Over the last 2 weeks I’ve had the pleasure to have my ears melted off by both Atari Teenage Riot and Crystal Castles. Strobe lighting isn’t a photographers friend though I’ll tell you that!
I’ve been digging around again in the Paul Caudell Archives and come up trumps with this environmental portrait I did in 2007 of MMSoraya. MMSoraya is a London based sculptor, doll maker and mixed media artist. Her work is striking, textured and dark. She is available for commission and exhibition. Please contact me and I will put you in touch.
Between listening to Deicide and Emperor this week I’ve been going mental for The National’s new album High Violet. I’ve had 4 favourite tracks already from this slow burning masterpiece! Last week I was lucky enough to see them twice, both at Camden’s Electric Ballroom and Royal Albert Hall. Both were spine tingling, tear duct inducing performances that will no doubt be in grained into my memory next to Tool at Brixton. The below video is from some lucky bugger that got so close to the baritone god and experienced one of the biggest crowd walks I’ve ever seen…
I’ve been digging through some of my old work and I found this from late last year. After starting a facebook group campaigning to get the Whisper Gold back Ollie Emery got his dream and ended up not only championing the re-launch but becoming a main part of it. As part of that he asked me to produce some portraits for the whisper gold mini site. We shot this just off Great Eastern Street in the pouring rain.
Last week was a busy week for me running around Berkshire and London shooting a school over in Slough and a deli in Soho. It’s be a refreshing change from music photography shooting everything from sport to still life over the last 4 days. Of obvious reason I can not put any photos of the school shoot but instead I will wet your appitites with one of the food shots I shot in the lush food emporium and deli Foxcroft and Ginger situated on Soho’s Berwick street.
