Quasi
I was a crab dragging claws through the mire
Down below in the murky depths of nowhere
Merry Christmas, Happy New Year
Pleased to meet you, oh how do you do?
You were the head in the window of a car
Passed by over and over again
Merry Christmas, Happy New Year
Pleased to meet you, oh how do you do?
I was blind, blind inside
But now I see how you told the truth
When you lied to me
To be nowhere
To be no one
To have nothing
To be free
To feel everything and nothing at all
To see everything and nothing at all
To be everything and nothing at all
Don’t let them get you down
Don’t let them get you down
You’ve gotta get control of your own sweet soul
Don’t let them get you down
How can I feel so low?
I don’t know why
I just know I love you so
So…
Don’t let them get you down
Don’t let them get you down
And when you pass the sign for the end of the line
Don’t let them get you down
You turn me on and it’s hard to turn me on:
Mornings I tell you what I dreamed
Before we’re swalllowed by the work machine,
And spit out in the vening drained half dry.
And that is why you turn me on and it’s hard to turn me on.
We traveled many miles to no guarantee
Everything’s a joke to you; it’s not that way to me.
And Walt Disney cannot make me happy, cannot make me go along
But you turn me on and it’s hard to turn me on.
I don’t really care if I’m going nowhere
Nowhere’s just somewhere to be.
When you’ve got nowhere to go
Nowhere
Is where you’re gonna be.
I wrote about Quasi already, about 3 years ago. I wrote that they are the quintessential underground band. One of my favourite bands. They record incredible albums too, that you should buy. They have a taste for songs and melodies like few others, fed with provocative but intelligent lyrics as you have read in this post. Quasi music submerge the words with the roughest and rawest of garage sounds.
When the world will discover Quasi, it’ll be already too late. But they won’t care, I keep pushing… they are one of the very few to appear twice on this blog and this one is to wish everyone another great Christmas and a Happy 2014.
Quasi are here [website][facebook][twitter][spotify]
Photo tip
Cargo in Shoreditch, East London, hasn’t featured on my Famous and Infamous Rock Venues list I reviewed in the year till today. For a reason.
It has always been a bloody dark place to photograph. So dark that to cover a gig without flash is pretty much impossible, until this night.
I shoot Tame Impala and few more bands destined to get bigger here, much before they went playing Brixton Academy and large venues, but photos are mostly red lights usefulness.
Cargo entrance is under the railway tunnel in Rivington Steet in the heart of Shoreditch. It’s a small door with a beautiful “Scary” graffiti on the brick wall the other side of the road. I can’t find my instagram pic of it.
Inside there is a (nice) bar and a (good) restaurant so consider it on a night out here.
At the end of the venue, there is the big room used for live music.
It is a simple rectangular room, bar at the end, small size about 500 people I’d say.
The stage is low, there is no pit if it’s packed it’s sweaty and you have to get to the front to see something. For photographer there is the option to walk along the left of the stage for some side shots. Assuming there is light.
I came to see Quasi and to be safe I brought my old Contax flash that hasn’t been used for about 5 years. I don’t use flash. It’s so old it doesn’t have any automatic setting to couple with the digital Nikon body I use. Nevermind, if the situation went to the usual darkness extremes of Cargo, it would have probably saved me with half dozen useable images.
Manual shooting, check the monitor, adjust the setting, shoot again.
Thankfully I didn’t have to use it.
There were some nice lights tonight, very simple and shaping semicircles on the backstage which worked very well for my composition freakiness. I managed to shoot around 800-3200 ISO with a shutter speed up to 1/250s which is heaven for concert photos in small venues.
I really loved the chance to use the light to my composition advantage and, despite this is clearly a 24-70mm 2.8 kind of venue (with a 50mm 1.4 back up ready at hand) I used the 70-200mm for some portraits and even some 14mm ultra wide frames.
A simple light scheme, if well thought, worked very well and helped the frames. The only downside was the non-homogenous colour and intensity between Janet on drums and Sam on guitar/keys which made band shots a bit trickier to balance. Some white balancing in post edit did the job.
Have a Merry Christmas and a wonderful start of the year, my friends, I’ll be back with more concert photo tips in 2014.
Live on 35mm - by Valerio Berdini 
Just WOW that looks like a great concert!
Really amazing pictures!