Nick Miners Photography

The ever excel­lent Ja Ja Ja Nor­dic held their latest event at the Lex­ing­ton last night, fea­tur­ing Manna from Fin­land, Denmark’s Freja Loeb, and one of my favour­ite Icelandic bands, Útidúr. I was intrigued by how they’d fit the 12 strong Icelandic col­lect­ive on the tiny stage, but as it turned out there were only 8 of them and they just about managed.

Here are a few pics from the evening.

I recently had the pleas­ure of a pho­toshoot with Claire, a friend who volun­teered for a ses­sion after see­ing my recently added Por­traits port­fo­lio (which now includes some pics of her from the shoot). I have included here the best of the bunch, and would also like to intro­duce you to my new por­traits busi­ness, the ima­gin­at­ively named Nick Miners Por­traits. If you’re in the Hert­ford­shire area, or Lon­don, (or even if you’re not but are pre­pared to pay my travel expenses) please go and have a look and feel free to book a ses­sion or make an enquiry. I would love to see you.

Nas­cent folk label Folk­room Records held their first ever launch event last night at the Queen’s Head in Lon­don, to mark the release of Andrew Butler’s EP  ‘Feb­ru­ary 14^th’. A won­der­ful little pub ended up very busy, and rightly so, for we were treated to a delight­ful even­ing of acous­tic stringed instru­ments and their sing­ers (or was it the other way round?).

Head on over on 29^th for the next Folk­room event. You won’t be disappointed.

God Don’t Like It, run by Anthony Chalmers, is put­ting on a series of farewell shows this week as Anthony looks to pur­sue other interests and draws a close to the GDLI name. The first of the three shows at the Lex­ing­ton in Lon­don fea­tured Drum Eyes, an immensely noisy band who fea­ture no fewer than three drum­mers, sup­por­ted by the sim­il­arly noisy weird­ness of Christ­mas Gimp.

Here’s a double-​​whammy for you. New York punks Cereb­ral Ballzy played at the Macbeth in Hox­ton a week ago and I caught the action for Drowned in Sound. Flash was a no-​​brainer here, really, as it was rather dark and there was quite a lot of run­ning around going on, as you can ima­gine. Sheffield’s own Grazes warmed the crowd up with a bonkers performance.

Then, last night, almost exactly one year after I took my first set of gig pho­to­graphs, I shot Emir Kus­tur­ica and the No Smoking Orches­tra at the Royal Fest­ival Hall, sup­por­ted by Gabby Young and Other Anim­als, as part of Lon­don Jazz Fest­ival — two bands who brought the house down. For an all seater venue, there was an awful lot of dan­cing going on, and at one point the audi­ence were even invited onto the stage, much to the dis­may of the house staff who were try­ing des­per­ately to retain a sense of order…