Shlomo and the Vocal Orchestra, a set on Flickr.

Last Friday, on my way back to the Big Smoke after a week in the Derbyshire Dales, I spotted this tweet from beatboxer of some renown, Sholmo.

This got my attention for several reasons. Firstly, I’m a big fan of Shlomo’s work, and haven’t had the chance to see his perform live yet. Secondly, the Greenwich Summer Sessions take place a stone’s throw from chez Banksy, so it looked like a pretty convenient gig.

As luck would have it, I’d recently finished polishing up a new portfolio site for my photography at rickybanks.co.uk (more on this soon), so I tweeted Shlomo the link and he invited me along to shoot the show.

Shlo and his manager Irit were kind enough to give me on-stage access for the whole gig, which was nice. I used my usual Canon 5D + Sigma 28-75 f2.8 combo, plus a 550D with a 135mm f2.8 lens on it, which worked pretty well for close-ups. It’s a solid lens, that one; a good length for small to medium stages and really sharp at times. Just ignore the soft focus setting.

The show was awesome. Sadly, it was the last time the Vocal Orchestra will perform together, but Shlomo already has a new venture up his sleeve.

See the full photo set here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rbanksy/sets/72157627338511820/

(L-R: Steve Lamacq, Jo Whiley and Zane Lowe backstage at the BBC Introducing tent, Glastonbury, 23/06/2011)

In Photos: Glastonbury 2011

This year at Glastonbury Festival, I was lucky enough to get a photo pass for the John Peel tent and West Holts stage. It’s the first time I’ve been let loose on a couple of bigger stages at Glasto. Normally I’m either confined to the BBC Introducing stage or inside a portacabin full of whirring laptops.

I was shooting for the brilliant BBC Glastonbury website (bbc.co.uk/glastonbury), where you’ll see some of these shots.

For those interested, I was shooting on my Canon 5D + Tamron 28-75 f2.8 and also a Canon 550d + Sigma 70-200 f2.8 which I borrowed from the nice folk at Radio 1.

I’m pretty pleased with the results. I would have liked to get a better portrait of Big Boi, but with backlighting throughout and that cap on his head, it was never likely.

rbanks_photography’s Glastonbury 2011 photoset. See all 50 photos.

All shots by Richard Banks, Copyright BBC 2011.

True say.

(Source: laurelandahalf)

BBC Introducing FTW (Redux)

Back in September last year, I posted a picture of a shiny trophy that I collected at the BT Digital Music Awards for BBC Introducing. The project was named Best Place to Discover Music and I was extremely proud to accept the award and make a little speech. 

Seven months on, I’m slightly embarrassed to say I recently had to make another trip up the podium steps, this time at the Grosvenor House Hotel to collect a Sony Radio Academy gold award in the Best Use of Multiplatform category. Here’s the shiny perspex block sitting proudly on my dining room table: 

(Keen-eyed readers may have spotted in the background the special edition King of Limbs ‘newspaper’ package that arrived the same day as the award. Unfortunately I don’t get to keep the gong. The Radiohead vinyl, on the other hand, has already taken up pride of place on my shelf).

In the radio business, the Sony Awards is the biggest event in the calendar. If you’ll excuse the hackneyed phrase, they are ‘radio’s Oscars’. My first exposure to the annual event came in 2006, where I won Bronze in the Best Music Programme category as part of the hit40uk team at Somethin’ Else. Back then, I was the show’s Interactive Producer, and though I worked in the Capital Studios during the live show on Sunday afternoons, I didn’t feel as if my work online had contributed to the award all that much; rather, it was just recognition for the excellent production team that worked hard to make the chart show sound so snappy, lively, gossip-filled and fun.

By contrast, this year I’m ecstatic to be on the receiving end of a Sony Gold, for several reasons.

Firstly, because BBC Introducing is a project that I believe in passionately and one in which I’ve become emotionally invested over the last two-and-a-bit years. It’s been a challenge, I won’t lie. We’re a small team, and though we’ve lost some inspiring colleagues (hello, Martyn and Chris) and faced some tricky technical conundrums, we’ve survived a period of immense uncertainty and change at the Big British Castle. I’m a firm supporter of local radio and public service broadcasting, and I’m proud to have been involved in a project that has both at its heart. 

Secondly, because the category in which we came out top is so special. It’s one of only two categories solely dedicated to the digital realm (the other being Best Internet Programme, which the brilliant Answer Me This! team won).  In this week’s RadioTalk podcast, James Cridland speaks about how he fought to keep the award and how it intends to focus on the way nascent platforms (does the web still count as nascent? discuss) can be used to make better radio. That’s exactly what my department - BBC Audio and Music Interactive - exists to do. For BBC Introducing, I edit bbc.co.uk/introducing, manage the development of the popular ‘Uploader’ product, and oversee the online coverage of our live sessions and events. I wouldn’t be doing any of that if it didn’t in some way make our radio programmes stronger.

Finally, I’m particularly chuffed because I wrote our Sony submission personally (our talented Assistant Producer Dan did a great job with the audio - do check out his excellent mixes at forgettherestival.com). If I remember correctly, it was the week before our huge live-streamed Musicians’ Masterclass event, and about halfway through a massive technical project to rebuild the aforementioned Uploader, so, you know, it wasn’t as if time was easy to come by. 

(Me with Andy Puleston, Interactive Editor for BBC Music Interactive)

Anyway, this is starting to read like an acceptance speech, which wasn’t really my intention, so I’ll wrap up here. The last couple of years working on BBC Introducing have been a challenge, so I’m genuinely over the moon that we’ve been recognised in this way. No doubt 2011/12 will hold new and different challenges of its own.

I’ve recently kicked off a new photography project. My better half and I are walking the Thames Path, from the Thames Barrier in Charlton to the river’s source, and I plan to document each section of the walk as we go.

We did the first few miles on a glorious, hazy March day when the light made the industrial docklands gleam.

It was the first proper road test for my new bits of kit. I’ve recently sold my Olympus gear and upgrade to a full-frame setup: a Canon 5D teamed with a 28-75mm f2.8 Tamron lens. Both second hand from eBay and in excellent condition (thankfully). The lens isn’t razor sharp, maybe needing some calibration at some point in the future, but it’s incredibly versatile, fast and great value for money. 

I’ve put some of the best shots on Flickr.

I’m particularly chuffed with this one, taken off the cuff, just around the bend of the river from the O2. I love the juxtaposition of the two banks here; the superdeveloped north, all steel and glass, in impenetrable blue and silver; the south neglected and unassuming in earthy, sun-baked hues.

It left me with a bit of a cropping dilemma. I ummed and ahhed on whether to crop tighter on the dude in the foreground and lose the guy in the rear altogether, thereby moving the main subject nicely off centre. But in the end I couldn’t do it - I’m a sucker for graffiti and I just love that superman sweater. Plus I wondered whether it would be odd to leave one kid but two bikes in shot.

Two Sides of the River (by rbanks_photography)

Beardy Box - Generative music app by Dead Rat Orchestra →

On Monday I saw Dead Rat Orchestra supporting Godspeed You! Black Emperor at London’s Troxy. Sound check problems prevented them front playing for longer than about minutes, but in that short time they impressed me greatly. Theirs is a rich multi-textured choral sound that fuses folk with instrumental post-rock.

I met the trio’s violinist in the Troxy foyer after the gig, and he told me about their generative music app ‘Beardy Box’ for Mac. It’s a nice little idea. I quote:

Each time the button is pressed the four elements are re-configured, creating a continually shifting form.

Download Beardy Box

Update: found this YouTube clip of the band performing at the Good Ship in Kilburn - I’m particularly fond of the wood chopping.

Blogs are the band everyone envisioned they’d have, and get to name, as a teen.

— (via kellyoxford)

Bands, those funny little plans…

Honest Cowards were born at my good friend Mark’s cocktail party in North London in October 2008. There was Mike (guitar), Adam (vocals) and Anders (drums). I was drinking Grey Russians (don’t ask) and despite the fact I didn’t own a bass guitar and had never played one, I became a bassist. I’d been playing guitar since my teens and figured, hell, two fewer strings and no chords? Sounds like a breeze.

We wrote a bunch of songs. Pretty decent ones, I think. Poppy and by no means earth-shatteringly inventive, but catchy and with a bit of grunt behind them (I quickly discovered that my TurboRAT distortion pedal sounded ten times better with a bass than it ever had with my guitars). We probably played about five or six gigs in total. One was an acoustic set at an organic cafe; I’m not even sure if that counts. 

After a year or so, we decided we’d be better off without a drummer and could programme our own beats. In hindsight, it wasn’t the best decision we ever made. Sure, it meant we could rehearse and record at home for free, but it stifled us creatively. Instead of spending hours tweaking shit in GarageBand, we should have been writing stuff and messing around in an actual garage with amps turned up too friggin’ loud. We never annoyed any neighbours. Perhaps that’s where we went wrong. 

We recorded one song as a trio - a joint effort named Claustrophobic which started life as a two-chord studio jam. Adam’s lyrics gave it structure, Mike’s chiming guitar lines and EBow swells set the mood, and over several cold weekends sat hunched over Adobe Audition in my kitchen, I beefed it up with extra guitars and mixed it down.

Honest Cowards - Claustrophobic by failbetter

At the time, we never made the final mix of Claustrophobic public. We never even shared it with our friends. I’m not sure why. 

It’s the last thing we did as a band - for various reasons, we’ve all moved on. Adam’s currently busking in New York and Mike has turned his hand to web design (he did a pretty fine job of pimping the Honest Cowards MySpace page, back in the day).

As for me, I’ve spent most of 2010 converting my flat from a 1 bed to a 2 bed and messing around with a loop pedal in my downtime. Now that I have a spare room/studio, I might start posting up my little experiments. Watch this space (I’m sure you’re waiting with baited breath).

When I listen to it now, I’m really proud of our one and only demo. I hope you like it. 

The New Inquiry: SEO & the Disappearing Self [Re-Blog] →

A thought-provoking post from thenewinquiry which picks apart the way Facebook manipulates your newsfeed (i.e. friends’ status updates) to ‘adjudicate sociality’.

“…the friend market functions like most others: it depersonalizes exchange and reduces transaction costs, thereby increasing the number of exchanges that occur. Accordingly, the volume of friend communication was consume thanks to Facebook has increased exponentially. But we have next to no ethical obligation with regard to any of it — that’s understood by all parties entering into Facebook’s market. We are obliged only to be rational maximizers, like we are in ordinary markets.

But what has radically changed is the nature of friendship, which once upon a time was something intended specifically as a bulwark against depersonalization, against market logic. With Facebook, the consumerist allure of “more, faster” fuses with a closely related moral cowardice about rejecting people to drive us en masse to the platform, bring the efficiencies of commercialization right into the heart of our social lives. With friendship in play as an alienated revenue stream, we must retreat even further into our private lives to find a haven from commercialization, to preserve the disappearing self”

Read the full post.

(Source: thenewinquiry)

The Million Pound Drop

The Million Pound Drop Live on Channel 4 is incredibly good. Not only is it a fantastically simple but devilishly difficult-to-beat mechanic for a game show, it’s supported by a truly addictive, immersive play-along app.

During the last run of programmes, I played along every night. At one point, my wife was so desperate to join in the fun, she booted up our broken old HP notebook and we sat side-by-side on the sofa three-screening it like total nerds.

That’s when I realised: we weren’t even watching the telly. We’d completely lost interest in the narrative of the game and the couple actually playing it for real wonga. We’d stopped listening to Davina and were having more fun competing against each other. All of which somewhat detracted from the liveness of the programme, which is kinda the whole point. Instead of sharing a live experience with the nation, we’d disconnected and were playing in our own silo. 

This detachment is probably the exact opposite of what the commissioners had in mind, but the fact the game is this addictive and competitive is testament to the work of @matlock and his cross-platform team.

Could this perhaps be resolved by not displaying the potential answers to the online player, and instead merely giving them the option of putting their money on options A, B, C or D? Hence, one would need to pay attention to the programme in order to know where to place one’s cash. Without watching live, you wouldn’t be able to play along at all while the show is on-air. 

I also wonder why C4 haven’t made it possible to (re)play the game (in its current format) outside the hours of transmission? Does the game lose its appeal if the nation isn’t playing along with you? I don’t think so. I still play the BBC’s Only Connect game from time to time, after all. The Million Pound Drop is a genius format, so why restrict its opening hours? 

Unthinkable Consulting - Blog - The iPlayer, the commentariat and BBC Nathans →

Insightful post from the Unthinkable guys (two of whom are former bosses of mine) about integrating social functionality into high profile products like BBC iPlayer. 

I was struck by this point in particular, on the practice of sharing and consuming links (e.g. via Twitter) without ever actually engaging with the content, its message, or indeed the writer: 

a broader and more probing survey of society and media might conclude that there is potential spiritual, intellectual and social damage to be wrought from such an instantaneous, and necessarily micron-thick engagement with information. This has been a year of published scepticism with regard to the effects of Web 2, from Jaron Lanier’s remarkable You Are Not A Gadget, through Viktor Mayer-Schonberger’s Delete and on to Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows. I personally have some sympathy with the arguments made by each of these books, and certainly worry about the effects of network culture on my own thinking, concentration and engagement generally.

Judging by the summary on Amazon, The Shallows seems right up my street. It’s a topic I’ve been concerned about for a while, as I find my attention span and level of concentration dwindles in certain contexts (e.g. on the commute, thankfully not at work yet). I can’t help but think the age of social media and link sharing (“check this out!”) is partly to blame.

BBC Introducing FTW

So, last night I had to make my first ever acceptance speech. The website I run at work was named Best Place to Discover Music at the Digital Music Awards 2010.

I’m extremely chuffed that BBC Introducing has been recognised. Our core team is tiny and it’s been a hard slog, but it’s a project that I’ve loved working on.

The awards are a curious mix of populist (“Best Song”) and industry categories (“Best Innovation or Gadget”) but the fact that ours was judged by public vote makes it all the more pleasing. Met some nice guys from YouTube, iTunes and Last.FM, too. A very good night, all things considered.