Photographing Babyshambles and Pete Doherty on a Wet Friday in Norwich
Friday 21 August was the night a lot of people had circled on the Rock N Roll Circus line up. The Streets were closing it with a full performance of A Grand Don’t Come For Free, and underneath them on the bill were Babyshambles, back in a Norwich big top and fronted by Pete Doherty. I was on site at Earlham Park across all four days of the festival as part of the official media team, covering stills, video and aerial work, so Friday came with a fair bit of anticipation attached to it.
This is a look at how that set was photographed, and why an indie set in a circus tent is a very different job to a band on an open air stage.
The Big Top changes everything
Rock N Roll Circus is built around one idea that sets it apart from every other festival I work at. The headline performances happen inside a giant circus tent rather than on an open field stage. From a photography point of view that is both a gift and a problem.
The gift is atmosphere. You get canvas above the band, rigging and trapeze points in the roof, and a crowd packed in close on three sides. Everything that lands on the stage stays in the tent, so colour builds up and hangs in the air. Pictures from inside that tent look like nowhere else in East Anglia.
The problem is that there is no daylight to fall back on and no even wash across the stage. You are working entirely with what the lighting designer gives you, and on a set like Babyshambles that means deep reds, hard backlight and long stretches where the singer is lit from one side only. You cannot fix that with flash in a pit, and you would not want to. The look of the room is the point, and the job is to expose for the face when it turns into the light and let everything else fall away.
Reading Pete Doherty rather than waiting for him
Some frontmen work to a shape. They hit the same mark at the same point in the same song every night, and once you have watched a couple of tours you can more or less place yourself and wait.
Pete Doherty is not that. The set moves, the phrasing moves, and the good frames arrive out of sequence. He will drift back from the mic, drop his weight over the monitors, turn away from the lights at the exact moment they finally do something useful, then give you two seconds looking straight down the barrel with no warning at all. If you are chimping at the back of the camera you have missed it.
So the approach is simple.
Watch Babyshambles perform, not the screen. Keep both eyes working, one on the viewfinder and one on what the rest of the stage is doing. Learn the shape of the songs quickly so you know when a chorus is about to lift the crowd and the band with it. Most of the strongest pictures from that set came from anticipating a movement a half second before it happened rather than reacting to it after the fact.
The other half of it is knowing what you already have. Once the wide establishing frame and the clean portrait are in the bag, you can spend the rest of the time hunting for something less obvious. The hands on the guitar. The bassist and Doherty sharing a look. The silhouette against the tent wall when the backlight kicks in.
The crowd is half the picture
Festival clients do not only want the artist. They want proof of the night, and that means the people who paid to be there.
A Babyshambles crowd gives you plenty. Arms up, pints up, singing every word back, the pit compressing and releasing as the set goes on. Inside the tent you can shoot back from the pit and get the whole room in one frame because the canvas gives you a ceiling and the light bounces off it. On an open field at night that same shot is a black rectangle with a few faces in it.
Friday also happened to be the wettest day of the weekend. Rain made the outdoor stages hard work, which pushed even more people into the big top and gave the whole night a packed, steamy feel that showed up in the pictures. Weather is not always a problem. Sometimes it hands you a better set of images than a clear sky would have done.
What the festival actually gets out of it
None of this is photography for its own sake. Everything shot at Rock N Roll Circus had a job to do.
Babyshambles and Petye Doherty Press and PR images went out fast so the festival had something to give the music press while the night was still current.
Social images went to the team for same day and next day posting, when the audience is still checking their phones for pictures of themselves.
The strongest frames then feed the campaign for next year, because a picture of a packed big top with Doherty in full flow sells a 2027 ticket far better than any amount of copy.
That is the thing worth understanding if you run an event. The photography is not a souvenir. It is the marketing asset that carries the event through the twelve months when nothing is happening.
Backstage candi [hotograohy adds a new measure. Side of stage gives another great perspective. It’s where AAA access holds an advantage over those shooting purely from the pit.
Concert and festival photography in Norwich
Rock N Roll Circus is one of a number of music assignments we cover, alongside long running work at Forest Live in Thetford and a range of concert, club and touring work around the UK.
Music and events sit as a full service rather than a sideline, and for a festival of this size we crew it properly with photography, video and drone all handled by one team on one brief.
If you are running a Music Festival or any other type of event where commercial photography and video production will be a great return on investment, the Blanc Creative are here to help.
If you want coverage form a professional team who have worked every conceivable type of concert, festival, corp[orate event or commercial gathering, then please get in touch and we can talk through what you need and what it costs.
Pricing is set out up front on every assignment.
