LIVE music photography

Anyone who has read my previous Ting Ting blogs will know that I am a fan of the band. I have seen them from their first London gig and with for former A&R hat on think Columbia/Sony have done a brilliant job in breaking them. The Ting Tings have come across as genuine pop act who have swept all sectors of the press and media with their naive charm and innocence and until recently they were the darlings of the NME. However with success comes overexposure and band looked exhausted tonight and were pretty much just going through their paces. Gone was the inane chat between numbers and the strain of the past few month was evident on Katie who looked tired and in need of a break.

From a work point of view photographing The Ting Tings live has always been pretty easy however tonight the ITV camera crew in a fairly small pit along with 15 photographers was too much to handle and after the first number all the photographers were kicked out by the security as the camera men complained that they could not get the unreserved access that they are accustomed to. The relationship between photographers and camera crews are always fraught at the best of times however this level of aggression was something that I had not experienced before. Anyone would have thought that we were photographing U2 on their comeback tour.

Already the knives are out for the Ting Tings and many in the media are questioning what sort of second record they’ll produce and whether or not their time has come and gone. If I was in the shoes of their A&R man I’d look to do something radically different for the follow up record and probably would hire Rick Rubins or Danger mouse to do produce their record. Bottom line they are going to have to do something really different next time up in order to be recognised as a real band with longevity.

Another band who received media backlash earlier in the year was CSS. How can you record a follow up record that sounds like “Cansei de Ser Sexy”? In a word you can’t so you make sure your next record sounds like vintage Garbage (that band that is) and The Breeders. Maybe it’s too soon to predict the downfall of The Tings Tings however for those of us old enough to have seen it all before The Ting Tings MK2 need to start now.

Written by John Rahim

So far this year’s iTunes Festival has thrown up few surprises, most of the acts booked are reasonably well established and have have fairly loyal fan bases.The festival has certainly moved on to the next level and whilst I enjoyed last year’s ICA shows the event at Koko is certainly a much bigger and better coordinated affair. That said most of the support acts so far have been fairly well known so it was great to watch a new band who have been around for less than a year who have been tipped by many in the know as the next indie band to breakthrough band of the summer.

Florence & The Machine who are from South London have been making waves in the Radar pages of the NME and have been tipped by Dev Hynes from Lightspeed Champion as ones to watch. Musically they or more rather Florence is really hard define. Many of her songs remind me of early Kate Bush however I can’t look at her and not see a resemblance to the American folk singer Stephanie Dosen, which is certainly not a bad thing. Her best known song ” Kiss with a Fist” has been receiving considerable airplay on the cooler shows on XFM. This song which is much harder and rockier than the rest of her set could be mistaken for Ida Maria however in my opinion is much more commercial than the rest of her work and a marked change from the rest of her set.

I guess the problem nowadays is that if a band has a decent press agent, which they do, that invariably it will not be long until they find themselves in the pages of the NME and the likes being tipped as the next big thing. The problem in my opinion occurs when this is so early in a band’s career that they have not already figured out which musical route they are going to explore. Any band who switch between a cover of a Cold War Kids song to a PJ Harvey/Ida Maria(ish) number is obviously interesting and well worth watching however is probably at least a year away from defining their musical direction.

Written by John Rahim