Dickie Beau, Helen Noir, Nando Messias, Ingenue St. John & A Man Da Pet took over the Front Room at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Friday night, for an evening of music, video and performance as part of the Various Voices 09 festival. Pix here…
Birthday-eve, Anne-Fay took me for dinner at Dalston’s underground pop-up art/dining experience de jour, behind The Pale Blue Door. All a bit shhh at the moment, so can’t share any more detail than that as to where it is, who is organising, or how to book a table, but we had a lovely evening, and very enjoyed the show from the wonderful-as-always A Man Da Pet. Some pix here, to give you an idea of just how special the evening turned out, up in the boudoir, through the tiny tiny door.
Helen Noir, Ingenue St. John and Ma Butcher doing their thing upstairs at the Horse and Groom. We left early and missed Ma playing my favourite Sparx track ever. Next time! Pix here.
Dalston Superstore — East London’s eagerly awaited new venue from the people behind Disco Bloodbath and Trailer Trash — got a prelaunch workout last night. Hot Boy Dancing Spot took over the space (still in the late stages of construction), for a hardhat and high-viz-themed night of eclectic, sweaty (no aircon yet!) fun. Pix here.
London’s Disco Bloodbath teamed up with Glasgow’s finest for the warehouse party of the year (so far). The rave-y vibe wasn’t due only to Optimo’s eclectic dipping into their oldskool record box, although 3am classics from the KLF and their peers brought a huge cheer from the crowd. Nor was it just the underground venue, or the retro laser effects: the people were there for the music, and loving what they heard. The Disco Bloodbath crew always put the music first, hence the Funktion One sound system taking pride of place at the front of the room. Brilliant. Photos here.
Relocated from the BGWMC to the much friendlier (not hard) Marie Lloyd Bar at the Hackney Empire, Scottee and some of London’s finest alt.performance stars presented an evening of Polari, poetry, dance, scatology and vomit: something for everyone. Photos here.
I was down at Bank around 1230 to get some shots of the ‘four horses’ arriving. Stuck between police lines, I ended up with a small few decent pictures of the first surge forward, and the police response. A couple of these photos have been picked up by Indymedia for their coverage of the day.
I’ve been playing with Imagenomic’s Portraiture 2.0 plugin for Photoshop. Forget masking, smoothing, tweaking portaits — Portraiture does it all. An Auto-Tune for portraiture? Maybe. It’s not going to turn you into Pascal Dangin. However, start with an image properly lit and posed, tidy up any serious blemishes with Photoshop’s various brushes and stamps, and Portraiture will take care of most of the subsequent masking, smoothing and tweaking, quickly and easily. Even its default settings do a pretty good job. Portraiture also supports Photoshop’s automation processing workflow for batch processing. And, as with Auto-Tune, you can also pull the sliders …
Helen Noir, Dickie Beau, Ingenue St. John behind the decks (and elsewhere), downstairs at the venue otherwise known as Shoreditch’s ‘disco pub’. Pix here.
Dalston’s finest returned to their cosy just-south-of-the-junction venue for another night of disco mayhem. Pix here.