The smoke cleared, the lights dimmed and you screamed, you moshed and cried with joy. The strobes flickered and you danced, you drank, you swayed and sang. You forgot where and who you were. You stared at your phone and missed the stage dives. You txt’d, tweeted, shared and liked. You lost your friends. You found new friends.

Under the bright lights you cheered, you clapped and even sometimes you kissed…

…and in the shadows of those big lights we did this…

Featuring photos from:

Leah Carroll

Having attended many a gig as a regular punter, Leah decided it was time to get involved and capture exactly what was happening up on stage. Shooting a wide array of events and festivals mainly for State Magazine, RTÉ and Volunteer Ireland’s corporate comms, Leah has built a varied and diverse portfolio.

“Sometimes it’s really special and sometimes it’s tough to capture what you so much want to present to the world. You don’t want to disappoint the fans or the band and yet that split second can come to represent a bands entirety in just one frame. The music photographers that I know are in it for the love of the bands and their work as much as taking the photos. They don’t want to disappoint or disrespect the band or their fans, because most of the time they themselves are the fans.”

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Kieran Frost

Over the last ten years, Kieran Frost has managed to photograph close to every band passing though, or based in Ireland. While in college in Cork, he photographed local bands, before becoming the station photographer for Phantom 105.2, covering the stations events and festivals. He is now a freelance contributor to the Redferns Music Picture Library, with work regularly published in Rolling Stone, Time, The New Yorker, Q Magazine, Billboard, NME, Pitchfork, and The Guardian among others.

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Colm Kelly

He belongs to a near extinct subspecies – HomoSapien-PhotographusMusicae (i.e the Lesser Spotted Music Photographer). Like the cockroach (which has also existed for millennia) he thrives in dark spaces, but prefers those that are filled with loud vibrating sounds and coloured lights.
With his camera he documented louder nocturnal creatures and the resulting photographs have been published in Hot Press, The Sunday Times, Irish Independent, State, Goldenplec, the Sunday Independent and The Sunday Business Post.
Further research has also found that his mating call sounds disturbingly similar to that of The Fall’s Mark E. Smith.

James Murray

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