Memories of Lonely Planet's Last Blastoff Charity Gig July 1, 2011

Flip Video is never going to give you a rock event experience- the picture is impossibly grainy, it is hand held and shaky, and the sound is awful - with a bizarre bias to recording the laughter and clinking glasses around you over the 100dB+ of stage generated music.

It is really just to give you a glimpse of the ghost of a concert past, something to excite the synapses of your own memory and fire them off. Or to imagine the possibilities.

Photographs are much better records from this type of event - here you get the artist telling a story, seeing things that others didn't, and enabling anyone to hear those stories (in the ultimate of ironies) with their eyes and imagination, even though it is primarily a story of deafening walls of sound.

Luckily photographs can be deafening to your senses as well.

Share them round!

Update on gig: Speed Orange and Slabotomy raised over $2800 for the Peter Mac Foundation in memory of our friend and colleague Richard Samson. A record 300 people were at the charity gig, filling the John Curtin Bandroom to the brim.

The Flip video collection:

Walk this Way: http://youtu.be/0W-v2dmEYCA

Hate to Say I told you So: http://youtu.be/_3Pp-zn1vV8

Debaser: http://youtu.be/IPRxCXvGHmc

All these things that I have done: http://youtu.be/bnQmhviok38

Sweet Dreams & 7 Nations: http://youtu.be/FOP5ZWV0F_Y

The Writings on the Wall: http://youtu.be/lojAw5wFTE4

Bad Romance: http://youtu.be/jPTyOo9jSpk

Proud Mary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clbjOdFFfXk

Paranoid: http://youtu.be/HbwKONhshos

My hero: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoOYXKAhQ8s

Zombie: http://youtu.be/i6LDi04lWl8


Mark Broadhead's Photographs are here on Facebook.


James Pierce's Magic Leica Photographs:

Lonely Planet Band - This Lovely Planet Gig, July 1, 2011

When you live in Melbourne, Winter brings cold mornings, long nights and an infinite amount of AFL football on your TV screen. But it brings good things too - and the annual Winter Charity gig for the Lonely Planet band and friends Speed Orange is a very good thing.

This season our charity is the Peter Mac Cancer Research foundation - in honour of their care for our friend and colleague Richard Samson, a tireless band supporter who lost his battle with cancer early in 2011. There'll be a little bit of Pixies just for him.

We'll also be saying goodbye to some long-time band members who have left the company amidst the move of our website business to London:

Vivek Wagle, Website editor, the former band manager, a lead guitarist, arranger and singer of punk and power-rock alike is heading back the USA with the band member he married Janet B.A small part of Vivek will remain with us in Australia, as he has left his beautiful 1984 BC Rich Mockingbird in mine and Noah's care.

Dave Burnett, singer and guitarist, unequalled fan of the Beatles and all things British in music is seeking new shores in Melbourne to practise his content technology wizardry. His heartfelt version of London Calling when the BBCW bought us is still talked about today.

Songstress Katie Marcar (my favourite was her brilliant job on The Grates 19-20-20) is going to practice her web-mastery somewhere in Melbourne. Her harmonies are going to be missed, but she has whipped up some magic to go out on.

Tony Jackson, lead singer, composer and musician for both Lonely Planet TV and his amazing band Speed Orange will be practising his creative crafts in Australia somewhere - Melbourne hopes to keep him!

Ryan Sweeney, who regularly opened for Slabotomy with his band Roostar will be missed by LP and the Slabotomy crew for his powerful lyrics, great guitar riffs and that harmonica.



Maureen Wheeler, our patron and founder of the original LP band has of course gone beyond the Lonely Planet - we missed the chance to honour her and Tony when they sold their shares, so this gig is for them too. A little something special to toast them is planned (clue: see the gig name).

And of course, I'm taking my Stratocaster and busking for work somewhere in Melbourne too.

Slabotomy, as the outworking of a very creative community of musicians at Lonely Planet, has a special Dr Who quality, in that it has regenerated many times over the last 2 decades, but this is definitely the last show with this lineup.

Expect fireworks. 4 sets from 8pm to midnight.

That amazing poster is the work of David, Bruce, Will and the team at R+R in New Zealand, who have once again given their genius to our cause and made something extra special for the last blast-off gig.

Lonely Planet Band at the Espy, Winter 2010

Huge night raising money for Child Aid, a Planet Wheeler foundation supported project working on child literacy in rural areas in Guatemala. Great crowd, great music, and a wonderful event.

Lonely Planet's rock collective Slabotomy followed three great bands - Tony Jackson's Speed Orange; Ryan Sweeney's Roostar; and a trio of bluesmen with Travis Winters at the helm.

Here's the first photos in - shot by renaissance man Jamie Supple. I apologise in advance for curating a sub-set that include far too many of me ;-)



These artfully lit shots are from Mark Broadhead and his magic Nikon.

Lonely Planet Espy Gig June 10th, 2010

Let’s fill the Gershwin Room!

Every year the LP Band gig at the Espy’s Gershwin Room gets bigger and bigger. In June, we’ll need your help to make this the best event ever.

This time, we are supporting Child Aid in Guatemala – a Planet Wheeler supported project recommended by LP authors Lucas Vidgin and Danny Palmerlee. They give rural Guatemalan children access to books, build community libraries, train teachers, organize literacy programs and get kids back into school.

We are honoured this year to share the stage with some astonishingly talented musicians in the Lonely Planet community:

Speed Orange, fronted by Tony Jackson (also legendary producer of many LPTV soundtracks)






Roostar, fronted by Ryan Sweeney (he played the Espy only this week in fact)




Travis Winters, full time dad and bluesman – watch what he can do with a brutalized Telecaster at our open mike night!



Slabotomy will take the stage around 9pm with two ambitious sets of rock/pop/jazz/fusion. We’re proud to introduce several new musicians alongside the long-timers this time around.

You can also help out by Tweeting and Facebooking an invitation. Or, for the old-school, just tell all your friends! It’s a great cause, and we couldn’t be more excited. Let’s make this a night to remember.

P.S. Thanks to David and Will at R+R Communications in NZ for the awesome poster design

The Best Things in Life - being 8 years old and jamming with the Lonely Planet Band

Open Mike night, February 2010. 28 degrees on the rooftop of Lonely Planet in Melbourne looking back over the city.

Ian, Trav, Josh, Vivek, me on Cream's Sunshine. Awesome photo by Steve McInnes

Then this happens:





A memory that will be with that boy for the rest of his life.

More photos from the LP crew here on Flickr.

More video from Lucy Birchley on Youtube:
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fg2xBBTpoF4
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCdDERnqLoI
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA6eH6JU6zs
Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpbY-Y-n34U

Tintin Coincidences - #2 in a series

This one from Flight 714, where Tintin, Captain Haddock and the Professor hitch a ride with eccentric millionaire technologist Laszlo Carreidas from Djakarta to Sydney.

Our CEO at Lonely Planet is Matt Goldberg, New Yorker, and a true champion of the telephone as a communication device.

Lonely Planet Band for Christmas

The band added Robbie William's Let Me Entertain You to the Espy set and went wild again celebrating the end of 2009 in style. Once again supported by Sparkle Motion, who performed a tight version of their Espy set and showed their musicianship.

Bunch of miscellaneous photos, as always biased towards Slabotomy's #5 guitarist.




Here's a taste of the skills of Mark Broadhead shooting bands and events.

Lonely Planet Band Rocks the Espy

The gig finally arrived.



A great audience filled the Gershwin Room at the Espy on a Wednesday night - mid-summer this time so lots of beer bought to keep the venue happy. The pool of friends and family from both the Thoughtworks band Sparkle Motion (who opened the night with a hard-rocking set), and Slabotomy who played 2 sets raised over $1200 for The Hotham Mission.

Tony and Maureen Wheeler came along to support the crew, and like most were amazed by the rotating talent on stage.

Photos are mostly from LP documentarian Mark Broadhead, whose skills at capturing such vibrance in next to no-light situations are renowned. Please excuse the obvious bias - I've only grabbed the ones with me in them, as I know Mark likes to have a bit of an edit before he puts them out in public.

I played bass on Hot and Cold, added a nerve tangling E on Song 2, held the G - F - G - Bb - F - G line for Lady Marmalade, some rocking chords on Dakota (my favourite) and was honoured to tinkle away behind Zjelko on a searing Creep. 6 notes, 5 songs, and another lesson in how to bring the house down from the gods of Slabotomy's theatre of rock.

Lonely Planet Band Returns - Espy Hotel, 25 November 2009

Get this in your diary quick – the Espy is always a special night out for Lonely Planet and the band.

Joined this year by Thoughtworks' Melbourne band Sparkle Motion, it promises 3 sets of rock so good you won’t dare admit that you stayed home and watched NCIS Los Angeles instead.

Proceeds to the Hotham Mission.

That stunning poster was done by David Robertson, Ezra and Will from Robertson Communications Consultancy (R+R) in Wellington New Zealand.

We know Agile rocks, but can Rock be Agile?

If I learned nothing else this Winter, it was that the process of making music in a rock band is pretty damned spontaneous and collaborative - with changing requirements the whole time as singers come and go from rehearsals, too many guitarists of differing abilities attempt to play on the same songs, musical keys need transposing for different vocalists and instruments, and downloaded tabs proving to be largely misleading and mostly wrong.

Some of the funnier moments were when the riffing of our talented lead guitarists and bass player started to go awry (it happened occasionally), and cries of "Jazz!" would go up, seemingly a code word for 'over-wrought bullshit riffing going nowhere here". Or maybe it's just that Tad has a big black Fender Jazz bass?

To the newbie, some rehearsals seemed to confirm every stereotype of rock music (think Spinal Tap), and as the resident 'Nigel' I would occasionally start looking for tiny stonehenges descending from the ceiling of the warehouse. But there is a mojo about a rock band that is so tangible you could use it to keep the 7:30pm Pizza delivery warm while a troublesome vocal is ironed out.


With this in mind, with great trepidation I suggested a little experiment as we kicked off the Christmas/ Summer band this week. An Agile story board - with suggested songs on cards, prioritised at a standup before each rehearsal, building up the set-list and eliminating the cries of "what's next?" and "where's the vocalist for this one gone?"

Would this kill the band's mojo? Plenty of software developers claim Agile does, but they don't work for Lonely Planet ;-) They're using their 'mojo' to build crap code somewhere else.

I spend much of my day job devoted to implementing Agile Software Development at Lonely Planet, where the fundamental principles of managing the delivery of software in a socio-technical fashion have a lot of parallels to the way I observed our band working - particularly getting started and getting organised each Thursday night, but also ensuring close teamwork from a multi-disciplinary musical group, and regularly reviewing what works and what doesn't.

Needless to say there was hue and cry from the artists about "it's not ROCK!" and "you can't organise rock music!"

It's always a little hard to tell among a dozen good-natured Australians in the presence of 2 dozen Carlton Bitter precisely when you are having the piss taken out of you (sometimes easier just to assume 'all the time'). Anyway, I was saved from humiliation by the real musicians grabbing the tools (board, cards, microphone, pens - see the photo) and in a matter of minutes we had the priority song-list for the night.

Someone quickly suggested we add the vocalist's name to the card. No cards would get played if they didn't have the requisite MP3 track to listen to, the lyrics on paper, and Tabs. Some cards got prioritised downwards for when our ace drummer is able to join the team later in the year. A card even got put in the 'not to be developed' column (Dave, we miss you already).

I'm fairly certain when my personal mini-stonehenge arrives it will have 'Scrum-master Flash' or a similar witticism etched on it to remind me of the evening - but anyway, we used to try to organise the set-list on an Excel bloody spreadsheet. Even I can see that certainly is not Rock.

For those about to rock ... Slabotomy at the Espy Hotel

Comedy gold as Vivek inducts me into the International Rock Guitar brotherhood (with Pete Townsend Windmill instruction) before we start the gig at the Espy hotel on Thursday 18 June, 2009.

More pics to come via Flickrfeeds. First up a set of pictures shot by Jamie Supple:



Then a bunch shot by Mark Broadhead at http://www.flickr.com/photos/markbroadhead/

Lonely Planet Band Images

Flickrfeed from Matt Cashmore




Stills by Venessa Paech

Stupid goofy smile from man having too much fun with a Fender!


Nicked these off VP's Facebook, but I'd rather send you to her erudite blog instead for some good reading on the subject of online communities.

Toast to Ando and Beck

2008 was the year Lonely Planet got back into the online game with the launch of a new website after struggling to do that for too long. With new shareholders BBCW on board, we met some wonderful people who gave up life in London to put their weight behind the project - which in the end won both the Australian iAward for the simultaneous transformation of organisational capability with delivery of the world's largest travel site; and the People's Choice Webby for Best Travel Site.

Here's our toast (from my colleague Chris Boden and I) to two of them, Andy and Rebecca Conroy. Apologies to Afferbeck Lauder and his brilliant book Let's Talk Strine - you cannot imagine how funny a South African and a Kiwi delivering this could be.

We're hair terday in this Gloria Soame
Ter sendoff Ando and Beck
We'll do it in proper strine style
Gettin' blotto on the deck.

In pommie-land 18 months ago
Old Smithy had a spout
Wheelaffta send a cuppla guns
To sort the mippies out.

Sex of content!
That's what she needs
Ta make a website bitter
Aorta jam the books online
And get it out the shitter.

The problem is I gunga din
To all the different bits
I need a single sign-on
It's just getting' on me tits.

Hare we gunna build all this?
Some bits moron once!
We'll get stark ender everything
In just a garbler munce.

"She'll be done by Cupdee" Ando says
But come spring in Melbin tairn,
There's no race-day for half the team
Beck just chucks her hembairg dairn.

The points are crook, she's up the spout
Said Beck "it's like a bloody maze"
But nothing we can't bodgy up
Inner narkup laddaze.

And launch we did, Navimber last
With not much egg jelly rooted
Scona beer bonza site
Zactly like we mooted.

We're gunna miss them bee in rand
As LP as Jimmy's 'roo
It's like a furry tile ya know
Zarf trawl that we've been through.

So laze and gem I ask you now
To rayzup all yer glasses
To Ando and Beck, who we've come to think
Aren't bad for pommie bastards.