First up today for Dubai Sound City is Sound Of Guns singing 'We are architects' next to a building site! The main stage kicked off on Thursday afternoon just as people were finishing work for the weekend so people were just starting to turn up when they took to the stage and in 95 degrees of heat and with the singer having a really bad throat they still managed to kick up a storm.
I've never heard Irish band Aslan before but they fitted right in and were the first band that had the crowd singing along. Might have been something to do with the fact that the main stage was in the Irish Village!
Very close to completion and an opening date this is the tallest building in the world at a silly height of over 800 meters!!! This view from across the gardens of a nearby hotel includes the nightly water display which itself seemed to be reaching like 40-60 storeys high! The tower will no doubt feature in more pics to come!
OK, I'm back and I'm on the blog! Don't know what happened out in Dubai but I couldn't sort out my blog at the venue to the point that even the interface seemed upside down though I don't think my brain was the right way around anyway most of the time due to working and playing very very very late hours over the course of a 3 day festival!
So now there's stacks of photos to upload over the next few days and first up is Super Furry Animals who introduced themselves as the Bunnymen 'cos the Bunnymen had last minute cancelled their headline slot. As to why they'd cancelled I don't know for sure but there was mention of a sick singer and a doctor's note. I haven't had a doctor's note since I was 8! Needless to say their were a few disappointed fans as living out in somewhere like the UAE, it's a bit special when your favourite band comes to town and proper gutting when they cancel. Let's hope he's really ill but the night still went down a storm as the Super Furry Animals were a great replacement and a brilliant mostly chilled out wind down after 3 days of madness! The madness is to come.....
Seeing as how I'm having upload/internet/photo agency/email/ichat/geek nonsense problems I'm going to jump forward to headliners The Human League who played a brilliant closing set on day 1 of Dubai Sound City.
Last of the random shots and these were taken in and around the Emirates Hotel, home of the conference, before we headed off to the Irish Village for the first of the days bands! More very soon.
The conference has started with an opening speech by Sound City director Dave Pichilingi, who's also a birthday boy today, and then two days of talks and debates have got under way in the rather impressive surroundings of the Jumeirah Emirates Towers hotel.
Last night saw a very very very nice reception held in the grounds of the British Embassy and after a long first day I didn't do anything official but got a quick shot of the party and then tried to do a nice skyline photo on the way back to the hotel.
This morning I've mostly been organising my scans and the latest images to go up onto my Facebook Archive are from my large catalogue of images from the Berlin Love Parade.
This was some sort of camera club holiday by the looks of it who spent about 20 minutes taking and comparing their close ups of pigeons and all the time swapping lenses, changing flashes and messing about with right angle finders etc etc to get the ultimate in pigeon portraits. Obviously they'd been in Venice long enough to exhaust all other photographic potentials.
In England they're seen as rats with wings and are to be avoided at all costs but on San Marco in Venice, Pigeons seem to held up on some sort of higher level and there's no greater honour than to spend a few hundred Euro on a small bag of bird seed so you can cover your body in it and pray that the birds will eat off you. Must be like good luck or something like being shit on by a seagull! Oh and tomorrow's Pigeon fanciers are even weirder!
Lido De Venezia
The Bridge of Sighs just along from San Marco, in Venice, is one the biggest attractions that the city has to offer or at least it's one of it's most recognisable. Therefore, it's a good place to sell advertising!!!!! Wrong diddly wrong!
It's Sunday so here's a picture of a church.
San Marco, Venice.
This was taken a few weeks ago in Burano which is an island off Venice.
Just spent a week or so in Venice which has got to be one of the hardest places to photograph in any sort of original way. Everywhere you go are familiar scenes you've seen a million times before and you're constantly surrounded by hoards of other people taking photographs to the point that I nearly decided not to bother taking photos on more than one occasion. Funnily enough the feeling passed and I came home with thousands of photos I now need to work through! More to follow!
On the way home from a few days walking in Welsh Wales, we called into Rhyl for a quick 20 minute wander around. It was 70 odd degrees, the beach was busy and the newly revamped outdoor pool was even busier, there were families sunbathing on the pavement, the underground car park steps were crammed with children smoking weed, the drink of choice seemed to be Carling Black Label and there were a couple of people passed out on the shiny new lawns that run along the prom but nobody seemed to notice. Reassuringly, all was as expected.
I've also just been asked to go back again with a Liverpool band who want to use the place as a location for a shoot. Some people opt for the Maldives or Florida but taste and budget says it's back down the A55 for yours truly!
Still keepin' it Rhyl!
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I reckon this will be my final post from my trip to Texas but I'll no doubt post more over at my Flickr site. This selection is as random as it gets and includes the closed crazy golf site (the dinosaur), a spaghetti looking sculpture by Jesus Rafael Soto and the infamous Death Metal Pizza parlour!
The last 24 hours have been strange to say the least. Two flights, a hazy view of the New York skyline, three in flight movies (Citizen Kane, The Day The Earth Stood Still and Australia), a couple of green beers in the Hoot County Bar sat along the bar from a 30 stone man dressed as a leprechaun and then an early morning call for a flight to Austin. Leaving Houston's car park and hotel strip themed JFK Boulevard now for Austin's SXSW. More later!
