Getting Intimate with The Xylophone Race

Well hello again, long time no see?

I’ve been neg­lect­ing my site recently, only vis­it­ing to get rid of some of the spam that’s been build­ing up. Between the new job and Mod­ern War­fare 2, I’ve been kept pretty busy. I did man­age to sneak in one gig, and one which sur­prised me. Let me explain.

I’ve pho­to­graphed The Xylo­phone Race once before — they were play­ing at the Iron­works in Inverness shar­ing the bill with a few other bands — and I couldn’t help but be very impressed. It’s very rare see­ing such a young group play­ing the kind of funk/rock hybrid, and even rarer see­ing it played was well as they do. So when they asked if I could shoot a few more shots for them at the Loft in Ding­wall, I jumped at the chance.

What I didn’t real­ize is that Ding­wall isn’t really like Inverness when it comes to gigs. Where I expec­ted reas­on­ably sized crowd, with vary­ing light­ing and the good ol’ photo pit, I found a room barely big­ger than most people’s liv­ing rooms filled with bean­bags and other soft fur­nish­ing in the loft space of a local shop… Oh, and by the way, did I say it was acoustic?

That threw me big-time, and I’m blam­ing that for the lack of decent shots that night. The light­ing was simple to say the least which although made it easy to work with, it didn’t lend itself to good gig pho­to­graphy con­di­tions, and with the small space it was very dif­fi­cult to move, so I landed up hold­ing my ground nearer the back so I could get access to my gear and not get in every­ones way. Unfor­tu­nate, because I really enjoyed myself that night — whilst funk rock played acous­tic doesn’t sound like a good idea on paper, The Xylo­phone Race pulled it off, and well.

This was the first ever gig at the Loft (Above the Green­house), but it cer­tainly won’t be the last.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 at 12:04 am and is filed under Bands and tagged with acoustic, Bands, dingwall, funk, green, house, intimate, loft, race, rock, xylophone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.