Let’s Be Having You: Shooting The Streets at Rock N Roll Circus Norwich

I have photographed a lot of headline sets at Earlham Park. Friday 21 August 2026 was the first time the main prop was a bus shelter.

The Streets closed night 2 of Rock N Roll Circus Norwich, and they did it by playing A Grand Don’t Come For Free from the first track to the last, in order, the way Mike Skinner wrote it in 2004.

Twenty two years on and still the first time that record has been performed in full on a UK stage outside this run of shows.

If you grew up with that album you already know why that matters. If you did not, a Norfolk field singing Dry Your Eyes back at the stage explains it in about ninety seconds.

The bus stop on stage, and the best gift a photographer gets all summer

Centre stage, life size, straight off the album cover: a green bus shelter, perspex panels, a timetable map behind glass, the lot.

Mike Skinner spends the opening of the show inside it and keeps coming back to it all night. Song three, he writes on it… Sounds the whole track with his back to the crowds and the camera while he sings.

With a closed stage and even working as official event photographer and videographer, we couldnt get past the first three and really, it could’ve been the first two only, but the results of the writing is what everybody wanted to see.

Let’s be having you, in marker pen

He also writes on the panels as the set goes on, a different line in every city, so by the end the glass is covered in scrawl. In Dublin he asked for a spice bag.

In Norwich he wrote Let’s be having you.

If you are from round here you have already made the noise. If you are not, it doen;t need explaining because it’s an icoinion backstory that the whole of England should or did know about. But I’ll explain anyway.

28 February 2005, Carrow Road. Norwich two goals up against Manchester City and pegged back to 2-2 by the break.

At half time Delia Smith, joint majority shareholder, celebrity chef, national treasure, walked out onto the pitch with a microphone, told a silent ground she needed a twelfth man, asked where they were, and finished with those four words… Let’s be having you!

Norwich lost 3-2 and went down at the end of the season. Half the country decided she must have been on the sherry.

She has always said it was passion, and that in this country the two get confused.

Twenty odd years on it is still shown every time Norwich are on the telly, still shouted at closing time on Prince of Wales Road, still on t shirts and pint glasses and the side of half the vans in Norfolk.

So four words in marker pen on a bit of perspex is not a polite nod to the locals. It is a card played properly.

Skinner has spent his whole career writing about small, specific, local things and taking them seriously, which is exactly what Delia on that pitch was.

He picked the one line in this city that belongs to everybody in the field, and the field went up.

From where I stand, that set is a proper gift. Most headline sets give you a black stage, a rig full of backlight, and your job is to find a face in it.

This one gives you a story you can put in the frame. The green ironwork gives you strong verticals to build around, the perspex bounces the LED wall back at you, and the roof line cuts the sky in half.

Mike Skinner at the bus stop, Earlham Park, Friday 21 August 2026. Photography by Blanc Creative.

Head to toe Stone Island, and why the fans love him for it

Skinner walked out in black Stone Island, top and bottom, compass badge on the sleeve. No costume, no stage clobber, nothing you would not see on the terraces at Carrow Road on a Saturday.

That is not an accident and the crowd know it. Stone Island is casual culture, football culture, a badge that says something about where you are from and who you go out with. Skinner has always written about the same people who wear it: the taxi rank, the offy, the mate who owes you money, the argument outside the pub. So when he stands there dressed like the front four rows, the gap between stage and field closes. The bloke in the bucket hat next to me had the same jacket on. Nobody was pretending to be anything.

It also makes for better pictures. Solid black against green ironwork and a bright LED wall is clean. No busy pattern fighting the background, no logos to blow out. You get shape, gesture and face, which is all a live frame really needs

The album in full, in order, at last

A Grand Don’t Come For Free was never really a singles record. It is a story about a thousand quid going missing, a broken telly, a girl called Simone and a bloke making a run of daft decisions. Skinner studied screenwriting to shape it. Play it out of order at a festival and you get a few bangers. Play it front to back and you get the plot.

So you get the songs that never made it onto a set list before sitting next to the ones everybody came for. The crowd sings the album tracks as hard as the hits, which is the tell that the record has stayed in people’s lives rather than just on their playlists. And when Blinded By The Lights lands, then Fit But You Know It, then Dry Your Eyes in the right order rather than dropped in wherever, the whole field goes somewhere different.

Dry Your Eyes is the one I will remember. It goes quiet in the pit. Phones up, arms round shoulders, a lot of people who came for a night out ending up somewhere they did not expect. That is the moment you stop firing and pick one frame, because the picture is not on the stage any more, it is behind you.

How we shot it

Same rules as any headline set: first three songs, no flash, then out. You do not get a second run at it and you do not get to ask anybody to do anything again.

Which means doing the thinking before you go in. I watch the support acts to learn the rig, work out where the light actually falls and where the LED wall is going to lie to my meter, and I know roughly where Skinner will stand because I know the shape of the show. When the three songs start I am shooting, not solving problems.

The other half of it is discipline about the frame. It is easy to come out of a pit with three hundred near identical head shots at 200mm. None of them tell you where you were. Norwich in late August gives you a low sun over the trees for the first half of a headline set, and that is worth more than any amount of gear. Use it, shape with the shadow, and let the field be in the picture.

More than just music: one crew, three disciplines

Rock N Roll Circus was not a photo job with a bit of video bolted on. We ran a four person crew across four days covering stills, video and drone, delivering PR and social images daily and two end of show films for the client to promote next year with.

That matters more than it sounds. A festival hiring a photographer, a separate video company and a drone operator ends up managing three sets of insurance, three risk assessments, three accreditation lists and three people standing in the same spot at the same time. One crew on one brief means the drone plan already knows where the photographers are, the video team already knows which songs are the big moments, and the client gets one point of contact.

The drone side is the part people underestimate. Working over a site with twelve thousand people on it is not a case of turning up with a Mavic. It is a site specific risk assessment, take off and landing zones marked and agreed in advance, airspace checks against the hospital and the university, NOTAM checks on the day, a dedicated spotter, and a hard rule that we never overfly the public. That work happens weeks before anybody hears a note.

What actually makes the best UK concert photography

Search best UK concert photography and you get a lot of very big portfolios. Portfolio size is not the thing. Anybody who has shot enough sets has a hard drive full of good frames. What separates a good live shoot from a great one is far less glamorous:

• Knowing the show before it starts. The picture editor at a national is not waiting for your best guess at song four.
• Frames that carry the story. The set, the crowd and the light, not just a face lit from behind.
• Delivery while it still matters. Images out the same night are worth several times more to a promoter than a gallery a fortnight later.
• Behaving properly in the pit. Security, tour management and the other shooters all remember who was a liability and who was not. That is how you get invited back.
• Being able to hand over the whole job. Stills, film and air, cleared, insured and covered by paperwork that stands up.

None of that is about kit. Carrying more of it is usually a way of shooting worse pictures more slowly.

Book Blanc Creative for your festival or live show

We are a Norwich based commercial photography, video and drone team working across the whole of the UK, and live music is a full service for us rather than a hobby that pays for itself.

Official photographer at Forest Live in Thetford, official coverage at Sundown and at Rock N Roll Circus, plus tours, single shows and album campaigns.

Have a look at More Than Just Music for how we crew a live job, or get in touch with your dates and we will price it properly and transparently, the same way we do everything else.

Words and pictures by Lee Blanchflower, Blanc Creative. The Streets, Rock N Roll Circus, Earlham Park, Norwich, 21 August 2026.