I’ve decided to do a 365 this year, and instead of clogging up this blog I signed up to Tumblr and post a photo every day on there. So far I’m on day two! (I have a short attention span so that’s pretty admirable!)
You can check it out H-E-R-E!

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[ I also made this little sig for 'signing off' my blogs! ^_^ ]

The festive season has come and gone. Manchester’s fluffy white blanket has turned hard, annoyed everyone, then melted again. I ate farrr too much food and drank faarrr too much booze (and trust me.. that’s a lot!). Mostly, however I’ve become stupidly behind on my blogging. So here’s the by-product of a late nightearly morning and season 1 of Prison Break. A nice big blog that should wrap up a few things I’ve done since my last blog, a few things I plan to do in the coming New Year and a bit of general rambling as my blogs usually contain.
So lets get the past out the way first. Since my last blog I’ve been to quite a few gigs, just never had the time to post any blogs. On the 19th Novemeber I went to shoot Rise Against at the Manchester Apollo. Great show, great lighting, great venue. Some people dislike the apollo cause it’s not as modern as the Academy and not even on the same scale as the MEN, but there’s something I like about it. Then I caught up with Five Finger Death Punch and Shaddows Fall for their UK tour. Interviewed them beforehand for Push To Fire.com then shot the show. Pretty dull lighting for Academy 1, but I got some nice shots of both Five Finger Death Punch and Shaddows Fall. A few days after that the Taste of Chaos tour came to Manchester so again, me and my friend Graeme went before the show started to interview a few people then after a few pre-show beers I got ready to shoot the show. Maylene and the Sons of Disaster are a band I’d particularly like to bring up. I’ve never heard these guys before, but for a support band, I really enjoyed them! In Flames bored me a bit, but they’re just completely not my style of music, then came Killswitch Engage who, despite my massive levels of nausea and sneezing, I stuck around to shoot and was extremely happy I did so. Pretty entertaining! The last gig I’ve shot this year was Set Your Goals at Manchester Academy 3 on the 13th of December (yes, my birthday!) I was asked to shoot the new promo shots for Broadway Calls new merchandise, but that’ll come in the new year. Anyway, I don’t know if anyone reading this has ever been to Academy 3, but it’s pretty small, there’s no photography pit and no barrier whatsoever. You can literally jump up on stage uninterrupted and pretty much, do what you want. Coincidentally what the guys in this crowd wanted to do was backflips, frontflips, running jumps, dives and any other air stunt into the remaining crowd on the ground. Unfortunately, as I can’t take photos while doing backflips, I was one of those grounded folk, who was being used as a crashmat by some of my fellow fans. I could’ve enjoyed this a little more if my priority wasn’t to take some photos. My gear got kicked, dropped on and knocked more times than my nerves could hack and I had to bail out pretty soon.
Other than gigs, I’ve been working along side I, Said the Spy for their new MySpace design. I did the shoot a while back but only got around to finishing the layout just before Christmas. Go check it out here.
I released a YouTube video tutorial on the SinCity edit I did a while back. I’m looking to do some more tutorials but can’t think exactly what would be worth basing it on. Any suggestions are more than welcome!
I think that covers the past. In the not too distant future I’ve got a few projects sorted out, and possibly some new gear to play with but I guess I’ll cover that in another blog. This one’s been waaayyy too long!!

Adios!
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Finally got around to recording a tutorial on this edit (thanks to the new Quicktime screen recorder!) so here it is!

If you want to follow this tutorial exactly and use the same photo as I did, you can download it here.

You’re probably starting to see a trend in photos of these guys. Purely cause every photographer befriends a few bands and these guys are one of mine.

They entered the Fuze FM Battle of the Bands for a chance to play Pangaea festival, the biggest student festival in Europe. Sounds pretty big right? Wrong. It was the smallest most terribly laid out venues ever. In truth, it was a bar... with some amps.
Of the 6 acts playing, one would go through to play Pangaea, the other 5 would walk home with their tails between their legs knowing they’d been beaten. Within 5 minutes of arriving the Laidback Legends team knew we weren’t exactly the perfect match for the other bands. Surrounded by people wearing ‘retro knitwear’ and flatcaps we felt a little out of place to say the least. There was even a girl tuning up an electric Violin!

The first band came on, and I can say this without an ounce of regret. They were terrible. Two guys with and acoustic guitar for a drum, and a terribly tuned electric guitar for the ‘music’. They forgot most of the words, lost their place all the time, kept falling out of time and decided to call it a night after 10 minutes of playing.

The second band were a bit of a step up. The female singer was without a doubt, a great singer, but the electric violin and out of sync drumming made me cringe a little.

Then came LBL’s turn. Even as we packed the gear onto the stage, everyone stared in horror, dreading the inevitable outcome of our set.

Lead singer Junior, after recently recovering from illness had a hard time singing, but gave it more effort than anyone could have asked for and by the end of the first song, I think a few people were pleasantly surprised and even slightly enjoyed it (even if they wouldn’t admit it to their curly haired comrades). As the set went on a ripple of applause followed each song, gradually getting stronger as the set went on.

Final song ended and they got a rather nice farewell from the underestimating crowd, packed the stuff back into the van and headed to the bar to ‘vote for our favourite band.’ Unfortunately there were no voting slips left (hard to imagine that many people had voted for either of the first two bands.) We wrote on a few napkins and soggy voting slips we’d found laying around and handed them in hoping we’d get even a slight chance. I left soon after and didn’t fancy watching any other bands as I was tired of it all to be honest.

Turns out they came second, so despite not winning, they did what they set out to do; get as many votes as possible from the most unusual crowd they could ever play to.

www.myspace.com/laidbacklegends

@J_Clique
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3OH!3’s ‘Don’t Trust Me’ quickly became one of the biggest tracks of 2008, and with support on their track ‘Starstrukk’ 3OH!3 have had a pretty quick rise to the top. Their first UK tour saw them pack out most of the venues they played at, and in Manchester they were upgraded twice, from Manchester Club Academy all the way to the biggest room Academy 1, which is were I caught up with them to cover their show.

Last day of the tour, how have you liked it so far?

It’s been awesome man; we love to come back here! It’s kind of our third time back here. We opened for Katy Perry in the same venue and it’s really good to go full circle and to be able to play it. We got moved up from Manchester club academy to academy 1, its crazy.

How have you liked England so far?

It’s been good man, the fans are great! We have a lot of great fans and whether it is YouTube or something else they all know how to act at the show. I don’t know if it’s us or them but each show is crazy, people dancing around and everything.

So with it being the last day of the tour, do you have anything special planned for us?

We’re going to do it completely sober…………nahh were not

What’s the best / weirdest thing to happen on this tour so far?

There has been a lot of driving so there haven’t been a lot of crazy nights yet. We did party one night in our hotel room, we didn’t exactly trash it but they did kick us out of the hotel.

So what’s it like headlining your own tour compared to support slots, festivals and even warped tour?

It’s cool because you know every night that the people who come to see you are there for you and you don’t have to fight for the fans. At the same time when opening for somebody you have to win over the fans and impress them. Here tonight everybody is out to have a good time and were here to put on a good show, everybody is helping each other out.

What style of music influences you? 3OH!3 doesn’t really fit into to a generic genre alongside other artists

For us, honestly there was a moment where we tried to do a lot more production as we came from a Hip hop background and we work a lot on computers. We started listening to bands like The Faint, a lot more electronic rock music, so we adapted that to our hip hop background and it came to a lot more of a live thing. We listen to a lot of different stuff, I listen to a lot of punk music too and it all fits in and helps out the music and all the live shows.

So describe the band’s music in two words.

Let’s see.. hhmm. Electro….. Pop

So how do you create your music, do you work a lot from home or does a lot change in the studio?

Nat does a lot of the production so he nerds out on his computer 24/7. I work a lot with the lyrics and melodies so for me its very note pad based. We always work back and forth with ideas, sending beats and melodies to each other. I made the song ‘Still Around’ just on the piano, we always work back and forth.

So has touring affected your new material?

Yea actually, we have about 33 new songs, sounds huge. Since it is software based, when we tour we can find time to work a lot of the time so we have the ideas / base elements to 33 songs. We are going to the studio in the next couple of months to throw out a new CD that’s different, but not too different. We have a lot of great songs

As you said, you went on tour with Katy Perry and she even features on one of your tracks too. If there were any artists, dead or alive that you would love to work with, whom would it be?

For sheer ‘bad-ass-ness’ if I can make up that word, it would have to be Andrew WK. That guy is amazing, he is a power ball of energy and he can’t fucking deny it.

So whats the future for 3OH!3?

This is a surprise for us to play such a big venue so we are very humbled at the fact people are coming out for us. We like to play shows, we like to make music and it’s been fun for us, it’s a blast. We don’t really have expectations at all; we have goals that we want to meet. We definitely want to make our next album before the summer hits, tours around the spring time and hopefully back here for all the summer festivals. We can’t wait.

Either / Or

1. American football / English football – American

2. Hayley Williams / Avril Lavigne – Hayley

3. English girls / American girls – American

4. Home town shows / New shows – New shows

5. On tour / Studio – Studio

6. Myspace / Facebook – Facebook

7. Tupac / Snoop dogg – Tupac

8. Lyrics / Melody – Melody

9. Dance music / Rock music – Rock music

10. Gangster rap / Hip hop – Hip Hop

11. Phone calls / Text messages – Text messages

12. Chinese food / Italian Food – Chinese

13. Festivals / Playing solos – Festivals

14. Old school / New school – Old School

15. Crowd surfing / Mosh pits – Mosh pits

16. Orange juice: With pulp / No pulp – With pulp

17. iphone / blackberry – iphone

18. Will Smith / Jim Carrey – Jim Carrey

19. Playing UK / Playing USA – Playing UK

20. MAC / PC – MAC

Interview by Graeme Brown; Originally published on Push To Fire