musopantz

This post is a part of a series: V Festival 2009 Australian Tour. Plenty of photos of all the bands from all the shows!

Oh my gosh… if there was any band that I would kill to see at the V Festival, then The Dø would have to be them. My mate  Jason lent me their album A Mouthful a couple of months before the tour had started. The first track, “Playground Hustle”, is the perfect introduction to The Dø setting such a playful precident for the rest of the album. It’s still on my high-rotation list whenever I want to chillout or jump on my bed.

I got to catch The Dø at the Gold Coast, Melbourne and Perth V Festivals. I heard them as I was coming out from backstage after a shoot with Elbow but I had to rush off to shoot Vanilla Ice (but then that got pushed back… d’oh!). They always started with the aforementioned track and followed into “At Last!”… from cheery to swinging in the space of a few minutes. Aww man… I wish I was back there.

This photo might not look like much but I hope you can see that big, wide, cheesy grin on my face right in the middle there. This photo was taken at the V Festival Afterparty at Deville’s Pad that night. I had been awake for 24 hours - waking at 4AM AEST to catch a plane from Melbourne home to Perth, to shoot the Perth V Festival and after almost crashing in my hotel room, pushed on to the afterparty. This photo was taken around 2.30AM. Yikes!

Sitting around at Deville’s like a zombie, it was very surreal watching all these artists dancing and drinking around. The place was quite empty, but most were outside smoking and socialising. Two Red Bulls had no effect in getting me to party so I went outside to see “anyone” before I would leave with some friends. But then I was stopped outside…

“Hey! You were following us around and taking photos of us!” - it was Olivia from The Dø stopping me outside. OH MY GOSH! Someone noticed!!! She was so sweet and beautiful. I told her my story with the V Festival and she was really grateful a fan was there for them. Apparently it wasn’t hard to spot me… I was the only “happy, dancing photographer” compared to all of the “sad, boring photographers” in the pit. Aww… bless you Olivia!

So, when I got out my point-and-shoot camera to have happy-snaps… battery died. Panicking, I switch the batteries only to find my spares are dead. Courtney comes to my rescue and lends me her camera phone. Shitty photo, sure whatever… in the above photo are Dan (The Dø), Alison (The Kills), me, Olivia (The Dø) and Jamie (The Kills). OH MY GOSH!!! Can you see why I’m so happy?

Definitely the biggest highlight of the whole V Festival tour. She asked to contact her on their MySpace… I’m right onto it!

There are heaps and heaps more photos on my Flickr V Festival photo set.

Much more V Festival to come!