mirgraphy

Finding it difficult to believe that Easter is round the corner and with today being Pancake Today to boot. I cheated with the photo, it was taken on Sunday when one of my housemate decided to cook pancakes for everyone. He did repeat the performance today, cooking a batch of blueberry pancakes for his workmates. If you would like to recreate this wonder yourself the recipe is here.

I did go to church on the weekend, but not for the traditional reason. Owl Parliament was an all day folk festival held at the Union Chapel in Islington, a functioning church with a rather innovative approach to raising money. It was easily the most unusual venue I have been to, especially when we sat down in our pew and saw  the large stained glass window looming behind the stage.

Part of the attraction was to see the incomparable Laura Marling perform. Unfortunately we were late to come back from the dinner break and only saw her for a good twenty minutes or so. The rest of the line up included: Jeffrey Lewis, Herman Düne, Johnny Flynn, Mechanical Bride, Planet Earth, Peggy sue, We Aeronauts and Stars of Sunday League. I am not sure if we just had the misfortune of missing out the better acts because we were late, but I was not that impressed with the acts we managed to catch; Jeffrey Lewis (pretentiously  unfunny) or Herman Düne (isn’t this the same song?). I was rather disappointed to miss out on Johnny Flynn, but at least he’s local enough that the chance of catching him in the future is high.

I discovered Laura Marling a while ago and managed to infect my housemate with her music as well. Consequently, while I was sick in bed she managed to hunt up some tickets for a sold out concert that was the perfect reason to recover as quick as possible, because there was not way in hell I miss watching Laura Marling live!

To those who are not familiar with her, her style of music is rock-folk think Joni Mitchell but in the same vein as Clare Bowditch. Every single review I have read can’t help but mention how young and mature she was (she’s 18), and I can’t help but do the same. Her voice was amazingly rich in person and even though I love her recording, listening to her live was a completely different experience. Despite her relative youth she was incredibly poised and charismatic on stage as well as being photogenic. She played a number of songs from her new album, definitely not as bright in tone as her first album, but looking forward to its release next year all the same.

The first photo on this blog was taken minutes before her last song, she was rather apologetically letting the crowd know that she doesn’t do encore on stage.

I managed to burrow my way to the front despite a rather unfriendly crowd who were more difficult to budge than normal. The closer to the front I managed to get, the younger and surlier the crowd. All photos were taken with my 50mm lens and incidentally to D90 users, Apple has finally released their Aperture patch for RAW files and this definitely made my life easier. That being said, I was a little surprised that the photos taken from that night did not require that much post processing as I would normally expect.

The supporting act for the night was a band called Jay Jay Pistolet, who did reminded us of  Josh Pyke somewhat. Must be the beard, and the style of music. It’s terrible making comparisons with Australian musicians all the time, but there are similarities! I am rather fond of his music and gave his EP a fair bit of a work out, check him out as well if you have time!