Over the last couple of weekends, I was tasked with covering the Aviva Athletics Roadshows at the Meadowhall shopping centre in Sheffield and the Bullring in Birmingham, respectively.
Each day, a number of athletes were in attendance – notably, world Junior Hammer champion Sophie Hitchon in Sheffield, and high jumper Tom Parsons and British record holding pole vaulter Holly Bleasdale (pictured below) in Birmingham – for Q&As, demonstrations and games led by Fuzz Ahmed, the UK Athletics High Jump coach – he’s surprisingly nimble for a 45-year-old.
This was one of the more fun things I’ve covered recently and I must admit, it got me thinking about back in the day when I was at school and athletics was one of my main interests, when I didn’t have a smartphone, games console, a computer or a TV in my room to distract me (and I wasn’t old enough to drink!). Good times, which I miss, but I wish we’d had a proper track and not had to run everything on grass.
These days, other than the gym, it’s just squash and football – neither of which I am particularly good at, although I do have a decent turn of pace in a straight line!
Oops – sorry, reading masses; I forgot to post ‘evidence’ that the team completed the National Three Peaks Challenge last month. My personal fundraising total reached a brilliant £481.81 and the team total was a massive £4374.82 – a BIG thank you goes out to everyone who supported us. We managed to complete the challenge in just over 24 hours, which was a shame, but still a massive achievement given the size of the team. We started at Ben Nevis in the dark and pouring rain just before 6am – look how happy we were:
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I covered a few events for Manchester International Festival in July – this included a number of interviews with notable industry types and live performances by artists and bands of all shapes and sizes. The highlight for me was Dave Haslam’s interview with Bernard Sumner, in which Bernie pulled no punches when describing his relationship with Peter Hook. Ain’t gonna be no reunion!
Evidence:
Sinead O’Connor!
Bernard
LoneLady
Snoooooooop D Oh double-G
Here are some images from the first Ben & Jerry’s Sundae in the Park at Heaton Park, Manchester, this July. It was another good selection of music and free ice cream. I’m not a massive fan of Gary Numan, but when I saw him walking round in the artists’ area in a Nine Inch Nails t-shirt, I thought I would give it a chance. That was a good decision… Ash rocked, Fun Lovin’ Criminals grooved, Maximo Park bounced and Ocean Colour Scene took us back.
Evidence:
Gubbins from this year’s Manchester International Festival, some Rock Sound stuff and Ben and Jerry’s in the (hopefully sunny!) Park.
In other news, I went to the Tate Modern recently. It’s one of those places that helps take your mind of other things that you can’t get your head around, by making you concentrate on other stuff that you can’t work out either.
I didn’t ‘get’ most of what I saw, but some of it I liked, without knowing why. This is an example of something that fell into both categories – possibly because a decent string of words happened to flow by, just as I took the shot.
Geek stuff: taken with iPhone 3GS, processed in the Instagram app, with tilt-shift effect and Hefe filter.
Like most people, I like good weather over a bank holiday weekend, so this one was a good ‘un. The weekend started with a trip into Oldham on Thursday night, which naturally came free with a hangover on Friday. This was mostly cleared by a walk up in the hills with my mate’s dog, Bleu.
[Bleu]
The good weather continued until Sunday, when I got on the bike and had a ride down by the river up to Chorlton Water Park. Quite a few other people had had the same idea, too. This place is great when it’s sunny, but pretty grim when it’s dull.
[CWP]
I shot these three bands for Rock Sound on Wednesday:
Attack! Vipers!
Circa Survive
Thursday
It wasn’t as busy as I thought it would be, but that was probably because most of the styoodents have buggered off home for the Easter holidays.
This would have been much better if the apostrophe hadn’t been missed, but I suppose if you’re careless enough to have set yourself on fire for what doesn’t seem like the first time, you might be in a bit of a hurry to finish your latest graffito.
Obviously, it could also be that this was a particularly sunny day and that the artist was merely in need of some skin protection from a passer by.
This was a mission. Originally, this gig was supposed to happen at Kro Bar. Easy enough, I thought. I phoned up to check the stage times and they had no idea what I was going on about. Much Googling later, I found that the gig had been moved to a place called Gullivers. Pirates, parrots and eye patches sprung to mind. It took me the best part of an hour to find a working telephone number, let alone an address for the place, but I got it in the end.
Anyway, I’d almost lost the will to live by that point, unlike End of a Year’s Patrick Kindlon, who looked like he was actively fighting off sure death in the form of a particularly bad case of the lurgy – for someone so ill, he had bags of energy.
Kids in Glass Houses played the Academy back in November. Everything was very dark and very purple, which made things a little difficult to shoot. What little light there was came from the back, naturally!
I first shot this band at the Star and Garter, about 5 years ago – a pokey hole of a venue, nut one that lets you get up close and personal with the bands. This has changed over time, as the venues they play have increased in size and the distance from the crowd has widened, but their energy has remained.
Aled seems to look ill all of the time these days – too many late nights have given him dark eyes like mine. Oh dear.