Christmas came early this year for me. Never did I think that Me First and the Gimme Gimmes would be playing Dublin, and never did I ever think I'd get to shoot one of their shows! Well, that all changed last week when they played the Academy in Dublin on a cold, damp, Monday night! I've been a fan since 1997, when one of the lads I worked with, brought in a copy of Have a Ball . It was love at first listen! I did manage to catch them live back in 2019 when they played the O2 Forum in Kentish Town , London, and it was every bit as good as I'd hoped, but it paled in comparison to Monday night in Dublin. So, how did it come about? Well, back in 2013, I interviewed the band for a now defunct Irish website called Chunk.ie . Over the years, I've stayed on their PR roster, so I took a chance and emailed my contact there. Lo and behold, a few emails later and all was sorted, I was down to photograph the show. How was it? Brilliant, amazing, fantastic,...
Originally published July 2013 on Chunk.ie A big céad míle fáilte to The Standstills from us here at CHUNK.ie We’ve been listening to your track Jesus over and over and over again here at CHUNK HQ and I think it has safely worked its way in to our Top 5 tracks of the year. Having said that, your cover of Black Betty is outstanding… It brings back memories of drunken moshing on the dance floor at Nijinskys night club… Fun times! Maybe you could give us a brief history about yourselves and the band. How did the Standstills come about? We met in a music program and became really good friends, we had a lot of the same tastes in music and both of us loved to go to live shows.. For a while I had been doing a solo blues thing, but really wanted to jam with a band.. Renee had played drums in a couple different projects in the past, and liked what i was doing so it was inevitable that we should jam.. We really hit it off and since then we've kept on going. You’re obvious...