Magazine: The Electric Mandolin
The Electric Mandolin
My love affair with photographing musicians began on 5th August 1973, at an outdoor peace rally in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. That was the day I plucked up the courage to squeeze to the front of the stage with my Dad’s Contflex camera which he allowed me to borrow from time to time.
The band I’d made the effort to see were a group called Horslips. The seventies were a time of great musical change in Ireland. Horslips took folklore, ballads and legend, plugged them in and created a sound that rocked.
That day in the park I was hooked, not on the music which I knew by heart anyway, but on trying to capture on film something of essence that is live music. I don’t know if I’ll ever achieve my goal but even today, when I stand in a press pit before a gig, I’m back in Dublin remembering the first notes of Charles O’Connor’s electric mandolin and I get that same tingle down my spine.
By now of course I’ve learned, that once that moment passes and the band starts to play it’s time to get to work. Constantly looking for the clean shot without a forest of microphone stands, trying to figure out the lighting sequence, work out which if any of the people on stage will be the performer.
I could of course resort to portrait photography – for essentially that’s what I’m doing. In the studio I could control everything from the pose to the lighting, but where’s the fun in that?
A lot of the larger venues have a “first three numbers only” rule for the press to prevent paying punters from having a gaggle of photographers getting in the way. I don’t have a problem with this but it does concentrate your mind somewhat.
By the time I get home from a gig, download the images and start editing you realise that although you are surrounded by music on the stage you seldom ever get time to listen to it. My eclectic range of music on iTunes attests to this because there is nothing quite like editing images to music – a far cry from 1973 when I had to wait a week for the film to be processed. As an impoverished student I couldn’t afford the 24hr processing!
I’ve never seen Horslips play live since that day in Dublin. If nothing else I should make the effort if for no other reason than to say thank you for that electric mandolin moment.
Tony Bell