I used to be quite keen on the twee indie pop scene, you know. It was around the time when Los Campasinos! were dominating and I was all flailing limbs on the front line, at a little club called Twisted by Design. But all that sugary pop eventually overloaded my system and I had to take an extended sabatical, largely consisting of listening to Tom Waits and trying to ace Ramstein on Guitar Hero's Expert setting.
But gradually I recovered my sweet tooth and clambered back on to the Cardiff indie gig scene. Wales Goes Pop was to my first major test. Could I get back into the groove?
Obv.
Because there were some damn good bands playing. Kid Canaveral were indeed my fave-best find, bringing a driven soaring super-charged sound to proceedings. And they were super-tight, too. You can catch one of their songs here: 'The Wrench'
Then there was The Onions. Snappy dressers they were, but a terrible name. I mean, they didn't even make me cry. Tch.
Allo Darling, a mainstay of the Cardiff scene, do some fantastic fast-folky-pop armed with ukelele. Twee headline material.
Big Wave were pretty cool. The lead singer was a firecracker, bouncing around stage and being all kinds of awesome.
And then there were The School, soon to be touring America. Lead singer Liz is behind the fest, and rather sportingly chose the early afternoon graveyard slot to have her band play. It's thanks to her I got free tickets to shoot the thing, which was nice. The School have many fine songs. Why not search for them on Youtube, or something?
I really hope to get more gig photography done in future. It really pushes my camera though, a D90 is no longer as cutting edge in the ISO department as it once seemed to be. I found that I could edge up to 1250, but any higher and things seriously began to fall apart. It's only thanks to Lightroom 4 that I can keep the images looking clean - but even I'm helpless in the face of some tonal issues. Ahh well, they pass muster. Still, wouldn't mind a Fuji X-Pro1 or a D600, that'd settle things. Cheers for getting this far anyway, I'll bow out with a handful of photos from t'other bands. Laters!
