The Horrors at Yes was one of the last gigs of 2024 for me. It was a last-minute thing – a friend offered a spare ticket and I jumped at it. The venue, Yes in Manchester, is pretty laissez-faire about taking cameras in. And The Horrors were huge in my formative years (though I could never quite fit into the skinny jeans, myself).
The Yes Pink Room is an iconic Manchester venue. It’s exactly as it sounds, with pink walls, floor and ceiling. It also sounds great and has a nice flat stage, meaning the crowd is right up to the band.
It also means there’s no photo pit!
Photo pits
A photo pit is, really, a total luxury. Some venues have particularly roomy ones. Others don’t have one at all. It tends to be the bigger venues with nice pits. This means that as you “progress” as a music photographer, in theory you will always have a pit.
But when your music taste equals bands that still play the smaller venues, you still have to get stuck right in there.
Luckily for me, I’ve spent years in the smaller venues. I learned my trade using 3 x prime lenses (still use ’em!) from the middle of a crowd. Brilliant Liverpool venues such as the Kazimier, and the Shipping Forecast, have prepped me well for a life of minimal elbow room and trying not to get in people’s way.
All this is a long-winded way of saying The Horrors at Yes was absolutely heaving.
The lighting
At gigs like this, I remember that the crowd are not there to see the back of my head. I get to the front and tell the crowd there that I’ll be out of their way after one song. This has always been met in a friendly fashion, fortunately for me!
The technique worked this time too. Except I hadn’t counted on the light show for a Horrors gig. I couldn’t see a bloody thing.
Between sheer darkness and total light – this is again where years of experience comes in! I trusted my camera settings and my positioning, and essentially shot blind. The results were hit and miss, but the hits were worth it…
