I look mean and moody (pic courtesy of Alex Schneideman) but was actually so fricking happy after such a magnificent night at me book launch. Could not have asked for more. Just wanted to say a massive thank you to everyone who came down and made it such an epic turnout and to all those lovely folk who bought a book…I sold every single copy I had so you made me a sell out! Cheers for that! Was so great to see you all there and be able to share that experience with you.
Being a photographer is quite an isolating experience, you are mostly always working on your own, or I am at any rate, so it was great to be in a room packed full of people enjoying the work and be able to interact with you in person. So thank you for transforming this lone wolf into a wolf pack!
p.s I took a total of zero pictures so if anyone has any shots from night please send over x
..but for only £15.95 (RRP) you can buy ‘MYLDN – a streetview of London Life’.
See what I did there? An almost imperceptible link from salacious picture to sales pitch, well imperceptible until I flagged it up, obvs.
This photograph was formerly known as #MYLDN (566) and was posted back in 2015 and is one of the shots in the book which I may have mentioned is on sale now in all good bookshops and online..and there I go again…subtle selling masterclass 101.
If you can’t see the vid above please click on this link. Please share if it made you laugh/cry/wet your pants/scream in pain/break out in hives…etc etc
If you are in London and able to make it would be great to see you there. Drinks, projections, music and speeches will all be available to consume on the night..oh, and you might even be able to pick up a signed copy of the book, at a reduced rate (taking a few squid off for scrawling all over it ;)
If you can’t make it and desperately want a copy but can’t wait till Tuesday when it comes out you can pre-order a copy here:
I apologise in advance for some heavy plugging over the coming weeks but I once read a great quote which said: “Without promotion something terrible happens..nothing”
After leaving “an important part of my brain somewhere, somewhere in a field in Somerset” (sorted for pulp paraphrase) I have returned to the streets of West London…
What unites all these wonderful characters and cultures this week? Nothing other than geography. We live together in the same space. That is it. The sense of community in this neighbourhood is strong and it doesn’t matter where you are from or how long you have been here. If you live here, you are in. You belong. End of.
London has the structure and population of an ant colony but we do not work as a collective. We work as individuals who’s focus is on ourselves rather than the greater good. Ants understand that if they all join forces and share the load they can achieve all that is necessary for a harmonious and productive society . We do not understand this because if we did, we would do it. So we are basically dumber than ants.
At best we work within mini groups, be they neighbourhood communities, religions, football teams or families. These are tribes that exist within the colony but who do not co-operate together. To survive we will need to understand we are one big tribe. Only that will give us the force to fix what is broken and to survive…together we are strong, divided we are pretty useless.
I have just updated my website so you may have noticed that you are now getting emails from wordpress.com rather than from babycakes romero. I don’t know know how to change back so guess we are stuck with it. On the plus side, it will hopefully highlight that you cannot reply to this email post as comes from donotreply@wordpress.com than directly from me (as it always has).
And again, if anyone had replied to one of my posts to the address that sent it I would never have received it so apologies for not responding but I never would have received it. If you do want to get in touch, please leave a comment or email me via contact button on my website..and if you aren’t a subscriber you can become one with a swift click on the ‘subscribe’ button on the top menu above and you will receive a daily photo from me and not much more. As the saying goes “a picture a day keeps the doctor away'”, no wait, that’s apples, sorry, it might boost your mood but you can’t count it as 1 of your 5 a day I’m afraid..
If you gonna go bright on the festival outfit you gotta stay chipper
Jeff Goldblum fans leave 15mins into his set cos he was so friggin weird and just whitttered on about nothing rather than actually play any music.
The Hackney Colliery Brass band – best thing we saw all weekend. They even did a bangin version of Prodigy’s out of Space
Now this is doing Glasto in style. We saw Mavis perform at the Pyramid and she was superb and deserved this incredible on-site vehicle, beautifully designed by Joe Rush who also created Pangea and Glastonbury on Sea.
fat white family vs festival fatigue. FWF lose.
This is the q for the rabbit hole on sunday night. These people clearly have no idea what they are going into otherwise they would know it is def not worth the wait.
What used to be Arcadia, now Pangea. The MC declared to the crowd..”this is not EDM, this is D&B” Ok, cheers, thanks for clearing that up.
The giant spider is dead! Long live the giant umm crane!
Dawn at the stone circle (she’s the one on the left in the red jacket – drum roll puh-lease!)
A guy holding a cross, a guy dancing to no music and a guy who looks like he has his hands down some other guy’s shorts…welcome to the Stone Circle.
A ton fuck of people turn up for this ancient Glasto ritual which involves wathcing the sun rise whilst off your head and spending 2 hours trying to find your mates
And so we survived another Glasto. Just about. Hope you enjoyed my skew-whiff vision of Glasto (is there any other kind?) This was MYGLSTO but you can be sure that everyone out of the 200 odd thousand people on site would have had a different one. I have tried to show you a Glastonbury festival that you won’t see on TV. The one away from the main stages. And also to show you that it ain’t for everyone. Not as a warning just in the pursuit of an honest depiction.
And in all honesty I’m not even sure if it’s still for me. I have slightly lost the desire to dealing with crowds of that size and as there is more of a sheep mentality now at Glasto (see rabbit hole q for perfect example) which creates giant walking dead style herds of festival zombies lurching from main act to main act rather than venturing off the beaten track, it can become overwhelming. And having just read that they’ve had approval to increase capacity by another 20,000 that kinda puts the fear in me.
I also felt this year there was a lack of mixing between the multitude of sub-genres and musical tribes present. I liked that everyone moved between worlds but people tend to stay more in their respective camps these days. The ravers, the rock heads, the popsters, the hippies, the vaudevillians, the bucket list baby boomers, the poshos, the locals, the workers, the middle class munters..these independent worlds have always existed at Glasto but it felt like there used to be more crossover between them which for me was the best thing as you got to speak and hang out with folk from different bubbles to your own. I also judge a festival on the quality of the stop and chats and I would have to say it was definitely down on previous years. But that could have been me. I gotta feel it and I guess I wasn’t.
This year was in some ways one of the easiest (no rain, no mud, tent with shade, wangled an on-site vehicle pass) but also one of the toughest. Having been to a few smaller festivals of late which are all the fun, none of the aggro, it felt like a slog. We were slightly battered on arrival (after an unintentional run of nights in the lead up to the festival – textbook error) which meant we were maybe a bit jaded and too weary to deal with such a humungous event.
And without wishing to end on a downer (but I feel it would be disingenuous to not mention) I am also finding it very difficult these days to party with carefree abandon with the looming climate apocalypse lurking over us. Its a proper buzzkill and finding it harder and harder to shut it out and keep pretending all is well when it clearly isn’t. I just feel we need to put everything on hiatus until we sort out this shit show. Glasto should be a celebration of life but I just don’t feel like there is much worth celebrating right now. We need to take action not fuck around with frivolities. At least till this mother of all messes is dealt with. And yes, it was great they banned plastic bottles this year but that is a drop in the ocean (pun obvs intended) to what needs to be done.
And I think deep down it is having an effect on everyone but its the ‘elephant in the field’ no-one is really willing to discuss. And no amount of intoxicating substances can wash away the feeling that we are ignoring impending doom. If it is an emergency, which has been proven unequivocally, why aren’t we still not acting like its one? Why are we still doing all this shit? I love dancing in fields to great music whilst hugging strangers as much as the next festival go’er but maybe this isn’t the time? Just sayin…
Elvis on Sea dancing to the Black Kat Boppers. We danced to about 4 hi-tempo rockabilly tracks in 90 degree heat and then had to sit in the shade for about 4 hours to recover.
They had clearly done the same
You can’t altho at the prices they were charging everywhere for food you kinda felt like you were…
A massive crowd descended on the hill at the Park for the ‘not secret at all’ gig by Foals who then all got up as soon as it started as they realise they couldn’t hear it from where they were.
White supremacist tipi anyone?
By sat eve the revellery was staring to take its toll…
I’m sorry, we don’t have Satanic Milk, soy & oat only…
The 5g mast not very cleverly disguised as a giant antenna atop a souvenir hut.
Hot Chip innit
Their finale was to set the stage on fire – impressive altho how they got that past health & safety I do not know.
The view from the roof of Emily’s caravan..
Slamboree
Dawn
By Saturday we had officially run out of steam and stayed true to our intention and didn’t leave the park area for the entire day and night which was bliss. Each area is like a festival it is own right so there is enough entertainment on offer without having to go anywhere. It was also friggin boiling so a 10min stroll rendered you beaten and battered from the heat which made an excursion to anywhere not that enticing.
When you first get to the festival you’re like all “I wanna see that, and that, and them, and we gotta do that and go there and there and there and etc etc” – by the time Saturday rolls around you’re like “I just wanna go where’s near..and where there is shade. My favourite act of all time who I have never seen playing on the John Peel Stage at the other end of site in 45 minutes? I would, its just I really need a sit down and a cuppa tea n a bit of cake…
So we stayed put and sat on the hill below the Glastonbury Hollywood style sign and we watched as maybe half the site seemed to slowly join us from every corner of the festival. So you think, well, if you’re willing to trot across town for an hour to get to this spot its probably worth me for me doing sweet fuck all to stay here. Egernomic energy conservation is key at Glatstonbury. It is definitely a marathon race not a sprint.
We saw Hot Chip and then hit the Bimble where we saw more brilliant bands. 2manyTs were dynamite and Slamboree were superb, even though they were a redux version, normally having 14 members, down to just 3 but they blew it up. Big time. Their frontwoman had an amazing stage presence, commanding the crowd completely.
There was a drum n bass/dubstep influence to a lot of the bands we saw, even the brass bands and together they felt like a whole new genre, delivering electronic dance vibes with live musicians. Westside U.K bands fusing their urban inspirations with their own spin, a fresh hybrid which consequently felt like the most exciting and interesting thing on site.
When you get music genre mash ups that combine to make an entire new thing, spliced together from divergent influences, both musically and geographically, that couldn’t exist anywhere else, you see that cultural cross pollination is the way forward..
We were still rollin at dawn which is actually pretty easy at Glasto as it gets so light so early and we strolled around and saw who was still standing and who were casualties of a long hot Saturday night on Worthy farm…just one more mega day to go..just knowing that filled us with energy, we knew we were on the home straight, we had been on the ropes, our knees had buckled but we never went down…the finish line was now in sight…
Words on the street this week, a variety of scrawled statements telling you how it is…I think you can learn a lot from walls personally. They speak the truth delivered with either humour or hate. These two for example, indicate a reasonable amount of resentment for a much maligned minority but they are probably one of the only demographic who you can freely abuse without fear of recrimination. Just like hipsters. And men who wear socks with sandals. And fans of Celine Dion. And Celine Dion…
Dedicated followers of fashion this week. We all have our own little ‘look’ going. It’s hard to say why we gravitate towards certain styles and outfits and maybe even harder for other people to understand. Are we dressing for ourselves or are we dressing to impress? It’s difficult to say. I think our clothing choices are like our music tastes, they are impossible to explain. We’re just into them and we don’t know why. Our fashion is naturally a series of conscious decisions that might relate to how we wish to be perceived but they are driven by an unconscious attraction towards certain looks.
One of the things I love about London is you can where literally anything and people will barely give you a second glance. You can really ‘go to town’ and not be inhibited because someone is going to have a problem with it. I think sometimes that this city is made up of people who wanted to be able to be themselves whilst not having to concern themselves with other people’s concerns. And so I applaud the individually orientated dresser. Wear what the fuck you want. If its a problem, make it someone else’s problem…
The events this week I have seen as part of the Extinction Rebellion’s uprising has been the most phenomenal display of positive people power I have ever witnessed. And after the negative divisive national meltdown of Brexit, it has made me once again proud to be British. Solidarity, compassion, decency, unity, community, love and respect have been the driving forces and the glue that has kept this protest and the people that are part of it together and showed that with cooperation and togetherness we can achieve anything. We must now put aside all our differences and work for the common good. Regardless of your political persuasion, or your beliefs, or your ethnicity, we all breathe the same air, drink the same water, eat the same food and all of these things will be at risk if we do not pressurise our government to take the action required to avert climate catastrophe.
Last night we were down at Parliament Square and we stood and watched as police, who had surrounded rebels who had chained themselves to each other and to the ground, began the process of removing them one by one with axe grinders and bolt cutters. Whilst this was happening a group of a few hundred people sat around them and sang hymns to them. It was incredibly moving and powerful because, despite massive police presence, it was utterly peaceful.
I have to say that the police have been phenomenal all week and shown such respect and consideration for the protesters because they were, in turn, shown the same. I spoke to a policeman on the frontline and he said that they were in support of the protestors but still have a job to do but the restraint and decency they have used in dealing with this difficult situation has been truly exemplary. Again, it made me proud to be in a country where we can exert our democratic right to protest without fear of violent retaliation. I can’t imagine in any other country the same thing happening as they would undoubtedly have used excessive force to remove us rather than the good natured natured approach the Met have shown throughout this demonstration. The Rebellion has proven that non-violent protest works.
Sadly so much of the mainstream reporting has been on the whether they should be using these methods rather than their reason for doing it. It does not matter whether you agree if this is the right approach, all that matters is that you accept and agree that it is as bad as the evidence shows it to be and that we must all take action to get the government to initiate policies that are drastic enough and fast enough to have any effect whatsoever.
And again I would like to thank all the rebels who allowed themselves to be arrested to maintain the blockades and keep this protest going. Every person I saw get taken away had nothing in common other than they were willing to make the sacrifice and I sincerely hope that now more will join the fight and see that if as individuals we are useless, but as a unified force we are unstoppable.
I don’t know how much longer the rebels can hold on for but I hope it has been long enough for people to become aware of the situation and to wake up to the emergency that we are now in. If we had dealt with this for the last 30 years instead of ignoring it we could have incrementally altered our lives and slowly ushered in a sustainable existence but nothing has been done so now it will have to be fast and severe and we will have to give up lots of things if we want future generations to inherit anything other than a hell zone. The rebellion’s shutdown of London might be drawing to a close but this is just the beginning. And we now all have a choice…extinction or rebellion?
DAY 3 is underway for the Extinction Rebellion’s shutdown of London. They have successfully held their blockades at their five designated points: (oxford circus, marble arch, piccadilly circus, parliament square and waterloo bridge). As mentioned yesterday each one represents a different aspect of the climate situation and their demands. All the shots featured are from the base at Marble Arch which is where most people have camped out. Some of the Earth marchers walked from Lands End and left up to 5 weeks ago to get to London in time for the protest. And there are people here from all over the country. People who have put everything on hold to do this. To give up their lives for as long as it takes for the Government to acknowledge the situation and respond accordingly. And these people are just regular folk. Lots of ordinary families who are not born activists, they just don’t know what else to do.
I don’t think I have ever been part of something that had so much goodwill and positivity and a sense of community which is what we will all need if we want to go forward as a species. There was an incredible atmosphere up at Marble Arch with music, meditations, yoga sessions, speeches and even piano recitals powered by kids on dynamo bikes. There is no aggression, no violent intent, no negativity despite the despair felt with the desperate lack of action by anyone in power. There have been dismissals of this movement as a hippy affair but there is not one type here. The only thing that unites them is that these are just people who understand that this Earth was not built for us. We just live on it and we need to take on board that if we don’t live in harmony with it we will not make it. This is not to protect Nature. We are nature. We are protecting our own compatibility within it. This is not a given. And we are in very grave danger of losing it if we continue to ignore the destabilisation we are causing.
Marble Arch has been taken up under the banner of “This is an emergency” because that is exactly what it is. It doesn’t feel like one and it definitely isn’t being tackled like one but it mostly certainly is and the sooner we start treating it like one the sooner we can intiate the drastic changes that are required for the human race to survive. If you think this is overly dramatic read the mountain of scientific evidence which shows that the perfect goldilocks zone we currently live in where this planet’s temperature is suitable for humans to live in and for us to grow our food and to have drinking water is rapidly altering to shunt the equilibrium that allows us the stability to exist.
If you have been affected by the shutdown and consider it an inconvenience you must understand that this is last resort tactics and not what anyone wanted to do. There is just no alternative left. Farhana Yamin, one of the most respected climate change lawyers in the world, was arrested yesterday at 3pm at Shell HQ. She had glued her hands to the floor. Her reason for taking direct action? “Because writing books wasn’t working”.
And as Owen Jones tweeted yesterday: “If you think #ExtinctionRebellion causes outrageous inconvenience, boy are you in for a shock when climate chaos envelops the planet!”
If you are in London, come down to any of the blockades and see what is going on and you will see these people are not different to you in anyway. They are you. And you are them. And we all need to recognise we are one and the same and this sense of solidarity and belonging amongst us is what is so vital so that we can rise up together to demand action and to defeat this problem which will affect every person on the planet bar none.
