The Vault

The Big Day Out peeps have created an awesome web page to celebrate their 20th anniversary. It's a trip down memory lane called the Vault and you can see the posters, tickets videos and photos from each year's event. Check it out here.

Peace Love and Brown Rice

I love it when good design and great content comes together to produce an amazing book. I recently got my hands on Peace Love and Brown Rice: A Photographic History of the Big Day Out. As the name suggests, it documents the Big Day Out music festival from the first one in 1992 (with Nirvana and The Violent Femmes on the setlist) right up to 2005.

The photos in this book are all by Sophie Howarth, and I love how she didn't just take photos of the bands but the whole festival vibe. A lot of the photos of the wacky festival punters are more interesting than the band shots! The pages are so thoughtfully designed to perfectly capture the gritty, grungy and chaotic nature of the BDO festival.

A beautiful book. Love, love, love it.

Tony Mott

Of all the types of photography out there, music and concert photography interests me the most. I recently received the book Rock'n'Roll Photography is the New Trainspotting which is a retrospective of Tony Mott's photographic works. The reason why he's one of my favourite photographers is because he has managed to capture the essence of so many Australian bands, some before they hit the big time. Midnight Oil, The Divinyls, Paul Kelly, Nick Cave... the list goes on.

The photos in the book are amazing and there's a good mix of old and new and local and international bands. I wish there was a bit more info included about the photos though - sometimes Tony will say something like 'the band was difficult to work with' and I was dying to know why!

Muse news

Ok, so I've been a huge fan of Muse since forever (yes, forever!), and last year I went to see them in concert in Glasgow. I was so surprised when recently I got an email from the people at Big Day Out, asking if they could use photos I took at that concert to promote their upcoming Australian tour in December. Could they ever! The pic here is taken from the BDO homepage http://www.bigdayout.com