PHOTOGRAPHY
I briefly gigged a lot during the 1980s. Lots of people did.
But back then, somebody bringing a camera, even a disposable cardboard one, to a gig was a real event. It didn’t happen often, if at all so there’s precious little record of any of those gigs.
To make up for it somewhat, I recently started taking photos of every gig I went to. Much easier when you have a digital camera built into your phone. And the more photos I took, the more I noticed how low-fi they were and the more I tried to improve my output. I definitely haven’t finished learning.
I’m 62 as I type and my favourite photographer is Robert Doisneau. My better gig photos have something human and maybe something humorous about them. I like small stages because the people performing are forced to interact with each other. Larger stages often mean you come home with just a bunch a of headshots.
I wanted to have a website for my photos because social media can be quite arbitrary and one day I may well get banned for whatever arbitrary reasons and I could lose years of images. I’ll post stuff here as I shoot it. Hope you like it.
MUSIC
I am also (largely) a solo musician and I perform mostly on the acoustic bass guitar. My music is acoustic, instrumental and has been described as cinematic, atmospheric, highly original, ambient and lyrical. It seems to fit somewhere on some edge the folk spectrum as well. I have played in a wide range of Wellington venues and events including corporate events, dinners, restaurants, bars, festivals, cafés and shopping centres. I’m not above busking in the honesty of the streets as well. You can see a partial list of places I’ve played here
Because I am the worst singer in the known universe, I don’t sing. To compensate, I often tell small, often humorous stories about each song. And there are so many stories in there, From the ancient Aegean sea to the birth of aviation. From lolloping camel trains to quiet nights walking along the beaches of the Mediterranean and glad kisses under the rain.