liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Feb 8, 2012, 4:13 pm
When King Creosote and Jon Hopkins enter the Junction2 stage it’s still dinner time but the cosy Cambridge venue is packed. Cambridge is a folk capital, there’s no debate about that, from the folk festival to the many tiny folk concerts all year round there’s not another British place where p...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Jan 30, 2012, 7:24 am
If someone just few years ago told me I was going to open my 2012 concert season with Norwegian synth pop of a band named Casiokids, I’d been laughing out loud for a good half hour. Unpredictability of the landscape in the ever evolving internet era is probably the most fascinating of the trends ...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Jan 19, 2012, 7:42 am
The reason why Warpaint debut LP isn’t in any best of 2011 album lists it’s simple: it was out in October 2010. This is also when I bought my copy at FOPP for just 6£. Incredible isn’t it? It is to me. 2011 has been Warpaint year. An all-girls Californian rock band, is already a nice news ...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Jan 6, 2012, 7:11 am
It must be part of a music writer competence to be able to acknowledge an artist despite the fact it never broke through his heart. Assuming this is also valid for a music photographer with blogging ambitions (me), time has come to post James Blake set shot last year and, more difficult, find some ...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Dec 20, 2011, 7:24 am
2011 looks as a busy year for Thurston Moore, but if you have followed his career, to his standards, it has been pretty much business as usual. In the thirty years Sonic Youth changed the relationship between noise and rock, the 34th guitarist of all times (courtesy of Rolling Stone), has always be...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Dec 5, 2011, 5:47 pm
In the end it happened. In the end I managed to see Okkervil River live. It’s more than 10 years Okkervil River are at the centre of attention of anyone interested into Americana flavoured indie-rock. Whether you call it folk-rock or alt.country, they are part of it. They are one of the seminal ...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Nov 23, 2011, 6:11 pm
I may sound naïve, but the following really happened. I have been after Other Lives in concert for months, so when I read about a Shepherds Bush appearance I started all my PR seducing techniques to get a pass… and a ticket to stay, which is a must-have thing at the Empire. It wasn’t a big ha...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Nov 12, 2011, 1:28 pm
The Electric Ballroom has two temperatures set tonight. In the stalls it’s sweating hot. The legion of people that didn’t leave a single ticket to the league of touts desperate outside to buy one, make it clear how the Girls concert in Camden is the hottest tonight, regardless the other 4, 5 bi...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Nov 3, 2011, 5:30 pm
I saw Emmy the Great live for the first time few years ago. It was 2008 I think, she opened for Get Cape, Wear Cape, Fly. This is Emmy then. Shot on B&W 35mm film. I never published this shots anywhere, never even scanned until today. She hadn’t published any album too, at that time. She wasn�...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Oct 21, 2011, 7:15 am
It comes pretty useful that I moved to digital in time to portray The Horrors touring their new album: Skying. It matches. From different perspectives we both moved to colours. Despite they already hinted at a more accessible sound with her sophomore album, Primary Colours, it is Skying that broug...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Oct 13, 2011, 7:00 am
This is an apocalyptic story. A story of life, death, missing people, destiny and resurrection. “Swans are Dead”. This is the title of Swans’ 1998 double live album. It documents fifteen years of the band’s history recorded in what was (supposed to be) their last world tour. At the turn o...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Oct 1, 2011, 1:00 pm
It must have felt weird to Portishead inhabitants about twenty years ago. Until the early nineties Portishead was a small town close to Bristol and not many have heard of that. When a band named after it appeared on the scene leading the trip-hop Bristol scene, in the company of artists as Tricky ...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Sep 24, 2011, 7:00 am
White Denim have been one of those comets orbiting around my galaxy without ever winning the gravitational force needed to land on my planet. This was until D, their latest album, was properly released. To stay within this nerdy astronomical terminology D is a stellar piece of work. An adjective mu...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Sep 14, 2011, 7:03 am
When I moved to UK, 10 years ago, I had two dream concerts: PJ Harvey and Tom Waits. Both achieved. With PJ Harvey I did better, I saw and photographed her multiple times. To write about PJ Harvey is easy and difficult at the same time. I am a fan, know all her production and I am biased. I wrote ...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Sep 4, 2011, 3:10 pm
I own anything Nick Cave recorded. From Birthday Party to Grinderman, including the Bad Seeds discography complete with the B-Sides. I recently bought several versions of the remastered deluxe editions (very badly recorded on CD originally) and I also have a couple of (forgettable) soundtracks. I ...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Aug 18, 2011, 9:30 am
I shot My Morning Jacket few years ago at the Forum in London. It was during those 35mm on B&W film times when I was still believing someone cared of the photography support and would appreciate people working on film. Not. Evil Urges was out and My Morning Jacket were touring it. It had been the ...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Aug 7, 2011, 11:45 am
Ah the nineties. I am a 90s guy. I lived my twenties in those years and this is the music I am most attached. It’s personal, emotional, memories. I hope when 80s mania will end (will it ever?) there will be a nineties revival. Yuck could be driving that, there are good signs. In the meanwhile, w...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Jul 26, 2011, 4:00 pm
With in mind the idea of a photographic project about East London Hipsters’ scene I decided to forget last year disastrous organization and ask for a photopass for the 1234 Shoreditch Festival, a one day event in the centre of East London coolness. To get to the Shoreditch Park isn’t easy. Hidd...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Jul 17, 2011, 3:00 pm
This is a two part review. One dates back to May 2010, when I saw Boris double set at the ATP curated by Pavement. The other half is June 2011, when I saw Boris at the ULU in London. It is a two part review because I basically saw two different bands, maybe three. Part One Boris performance at ...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Jul 7, 2011, 12:41 pm
I am not in the position of writing about Amon Tobin music. It is not the music I listen to, it is not the music I know, I couldn’t put together other then meaningless words to disappoint fans and people in love with him. I learnt Tobin is a Brazilian musician, DJ, overall famous for sampling, ju...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Jun 23, 2011, 7:12 am
There is a legend going on in the music biz around the second album. It states that it is a critical step for a band following a successful debut. A legend that assumes it is difficult for a band in a busy moment of their career to reproduce a second work that confirms the positive impression of the...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Jun 13, 2011, 8:52 am
Duke Spirit is one of those bands. In the endless panorama of indie-pop that forms the milky way of British music, they appear just as another star. They shine together with many other groups and fight hard to differentiate and find a space to have visibility, gather fans and keep the dice rolling....
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Jun 4, 2011, 3:18 pm
It must not be easy to be Anna Calvi in 2011. The English newborn star, of Italian fatherhoods, embodies all the pros and cons of a musician in the Internet millennium. A parabolic system that sees artist going from unknown to worldwide fame in a blink with the risk that the slope is as steep as th...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - May 23, 2011, 2:41 pm
It needed the warmest spring of the decade to make the temperature inside the Union Chapel comfortable. This full working church in Islington at nights transforms into its Mr Hyde becoming one of the best live music venues in London. Assuming you bring scarf, gloves a jumper and a warm hat to bear ...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - May 9, 2011, 8:23 pm
To my credential I have been for a reason or the other, following the Libertines‘ hysteria since their beginning. I was at the infamous Libertines gigs in 2002/3, I have seen Babyshambles when they were more of a pusher’s gathering than a rock band than again at their heydays. I saw Carl Barat ...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Apr 18, 2011, 5:39 pm
I may look contradictory. I usually slate reunions but I went to the Forum for this Kyuss Lives! comeback which isn’t even complete, missing a key band element as Josh Homme. I went because I missed Kyuss in the 90s. Twenty years later they still demonstrate how relevant they are to contemporary ...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Apr 3, 2011, 6:16 pm
It is a nice Friday night when Erland & the Carnival members unload the van and set up their gear on the dark Haymakers stage; the pub that quickly achieved the reference role to listen emerging live music in Cambridge. Behind Erland & The Carnival there are some big names of English music. Simon ...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Mar 7, 2011, 8:24 pm
This warm-up show it’s the first live show Elbow play in a long time and very likely it is going to be the last in such a small venue for even a longer time. Warm-up gigs have become a sort of special intimate events for bands who got big enough to be on the verge of touring large arenas. Liter...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Feb 25, 2011, 5:46 am
It might be I am neither English nor American but I don’t understand the name. Which is good, because odd band names attract my curiosity and I end up listening to their music. Now, Sea Of Bees has been on my radar for a while, they are (she is?) a Line of Best Fit favourite since early days, I ...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Feb 16, 2011, 12:09 pm
There has been a new trend in the UK music press in the last couple of years. As known as “to do the Elbow thing”. The idea is very simple and surely catchy for that indie philosophy which sees with a cinic interests every band struggling to put together enough money to pay the rent of the tour...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Feb 7, 2011, 6:30 pm
Gary Moore 1952 – 2011 Readers of Live on 35mm know I am a fan of blues. I don’t know where it comes from, probably I was harvesting cotton in Louisiana in a previous life, but blue notes hit some nerves that no other music does. Blues isn’t cool to the alternative/indie rock tribe which mai...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Jan 31, 2011, 5:47 pm
January is over so it is my insight into the latest ATP. To cover all the 40-ish bands I watched and photographed would bring me to the end of the summer, but 2011 is plenty of new music, so I made a selection (with your help) and, after GY!BE, Scoutt Niblett and Bardo Pond I close with the most ext...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Jan 23, 2011, 12:47 pm
These days there is something immediately odd that comes to mind when using the word psychedelia or space-rock referred to contemporary music. What in the past decades was so well defined to be at the same time mainstream and avant-garde scattered randomly and has been diluted in endless revivals. ...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Jan 12, 2011, 7:06 pm
“It’s the amount of music still out there for me to discover that gets me out of bed every morning.” Twitter years, 140 characters thoughts. This is what came out of my phone about a month ago and reached the twitsphere after I attended the Scout Niblett concert at the Nightmare before Christ...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Dec 31, 2010, 7:00 pm
Everything around Godspeed You! Black Emperor doesn’t follow the normal path of a rock band. Probably doesn’t follow any path at all and, surely, they are happy with this, they control it. if you approach GY!BE through writings, articles, magazines, essays you encounter a mythological creature...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Dec 24, 2010, 8:00 am
When I wrote about The National the first time, they were touring Boxer and I photographed them at a gig in a half full Shepherds Bush Empire. It sounds a different age but it was just one album and no more then three years ago. Since then the rise of the Brooklyn band has been unstoppable and uns...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Dec 12, 2010, 6:06 am
Beach House is another of the bands that needed time to grow in me. It must be my reluctant approach to simplicity and essentiality that has been developing only recently. 2010 has been such an amazing year for Beach House that even the more reluctant of people couldn’t ignore the buzz (actually ...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Dec 6, 2010, 4:00 am
I was on the Titus Andronicus list for an East London gig about 2 years ago. When I knew the gig was cancelled I was already on the train to Liverpool street, such the trepidation. I have been waiting for them since and, after missing another London gig last May, I was ready to travel far to catch ...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Nov 29, 2010, 7:13 am
It took me more than a while to love Low. It hasn’t been at all a love at first sight band. First time I heard of Low it was because of some lazy journalism (sometimes it can help), in Italy at the end of the nineties. I read them associated to Morphine. Someone must have confused LOW-rock, whi...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Nov 21, 2010, 1:16 pm
It’s my fault to a certain extent. I have been listening Queen of Denmark, John Grant solo debut on spotify since it was out but in a fairly distract way. Attracted but also hijacked by the presence of Midlake as a session band playing in it, I thought it was a bit close to The Courage of Other,...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Nov 14, 2010, 5:34 pm
UK music barometer follows directions as unpredictable as its weather, which is probably the cause of the obessional tendency to classify music genres into separate, impenetrable boxes in a similar way they classify tomorrow’s forecast. It is reassuring for both kind of customers. If you have br...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Nov 7, 2010, 2:38 pm
It’s with a perfect timing that Pontiak arrive to UK and then onto liveon35mm. The same week Kyuss announced they’re reunion (minus Josh Homme) and follow the post I was pondering about reunion tours, solo projects and Carl Barat. It gives me a lot I want to talk about, let’s go in no order....
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Oct 28, 2010, 8:56 am
There is a clear trend in bands nowadays. Their most charismatic members, to exploit the natural decline in popularity which sooner or later arrives (around the second or third album on average), opt to publish a solo record. Pioneers of indie-rock marketing since they bought their first stage suit...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Oct 18, 2010, 6:56 pm
There is something at the same time fascinating and irritating about a band having a name as Somebody Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin. It is half genius, half lack of information. Genius because, strictly speaking, with such a name there is no doubt anyone reading about you will forget. Then pushing...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Oct 8, 2010, 8:04 pm
There is music, there is fashion. There is performance art and happenings. There is circus, dance and there is theatre. Then there is our modern world, desperately seeking to pigeonhole everything. An attempt to contain us into small comfortable rooms. Sure (“them”) to identify our field of in...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Sep 24, 2010, 4:22 am
I never doubled a band on Live on 35mm, I usually update old posts with new photographs but WordPress doesn’t allow to put them back on the frontpage so they get lost in the “past of the post”. Time to break this virtual barrier. the Smoke Fairies which I have been following since the very ea...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Sep 14, 2010, 7:08 pm
For some unknown reasons indie band names split into three categories. Either they are as peculiar as possible… in about a month I am going to photograph a band because of its wonderful name Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, only later I discovered they actually sounds very good… bands go z...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Sep 1, 2010, 2:59 pm
There are bands you know are good but can’t click on you completely until you see them live. Then, when it finally happens it is going to be enduring love. One of these bands are The Walkmen. One of these gigs was their Islington Academy warm up show for Reading and Leeds. Not sure how their set ...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Aug 20, 2010, 8:35 am
This is the fourth Time Mark Lanegan appear on this place, making him the undisputed star of Live on 35mm. I love his endless bunch of works but the reason is more linked to the fact that despite is unreachable persona he is far more easy to shoot than Nick Cave.. and PJ Harvey doesn’t tour as mu...
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liveon35mm posted an article on Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini - Jul 23, 2010, 5:19 pm
There was something strange in the air since before the starting of Regina Spektor last concert of her tour. Small signs that I would have filed as coincidences if she didn’t explain everything at the end of the gig. But let’s go in order. Rumours about Chris Isaak supporting where a bit of ev...
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