BB King UK Farewell Gig & The New Wembley Arena
Highlight of the photographic and musical year for me so far was, a few days ago on 4th April 2006 I got the opportunity to photgraph B.B. King for his last ever UK concert. Whilst the Arena is looking fantastic and much improved visually, the same disorganisation surrounding events and acts still reigns. I got some great shots, and I’m really happy with them, but I’ll outline the timeline below to illustrate how it went.
19:00 - Arrive at Wembley, park car and go to main entrance to collect photographer passes. I also notice that the doors are already open and regular ticket holders are filtering into the arena, which surprises me. Gig is at 20:00 as published. I figure that 1 hour should be enough time to get setup, get some concept of the lighting, setup the kit appropriately, get my bearings and report to whoever is taking care of arrangements.
19:05 - Get sent to the back of the guest list queue by security, told to wait in line until they are ready. Temperature is about 4 degrees celcius and windy, we are all queuing outside.
19:25 - Member of Security notices my camera bag and asks if I’m a photographer, when I reply yes, tehy enquire as to why I’m standing in the back of the guest list queue, apparently there is another seperate queue (more of a huddle as it turns out) of photographers. I join them and start to talk to them (they’re all standing there managing to successfully ignore each other) several of them are quite happy to break the ice, others prefer to remain aloof. Apparently a few of them have a start time of 19:30 for the first act which is news to me and they are quite distressed that the first act is due to start in 5 minutes. I’m not so concerned, because people are still arriving and the guest list queue has not yet moved.
