The 1980s
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Me and my OM10
I only really started getting into music in my final years at school. That went up another level when I went to University in Manchester where there were gigs on most weekends at the Student Union building. The main music venue in Manchester at that time, the Apollo, was less than a mile away from the University. I had never been to a gig during my time in sleepy North Yorkshire villages but that all changed when I moved to the big city to study.
I "invested" my holiday earnings from the farm where I lived my teenage years on a hi-fi system from Laskys, an electronics store in central Manchester (now long gone, taken over by Comet in 1989). During my last year at University in Manchester I bought my first "proper" camera, an Olympus OM10 SLR with the basic 50mm lens. That cost me just over £100 which was quite a lot to me at the time. It had very positive reviews, and had a manual override which would in due course prove itself very useful when trying to optimise film exposure.
Initially I would take the OM10 to the football at Old Trafford as well as Belle Vue speedway. I also noticed people using SLR cameras at gigs at Manchester Apollo, and decided to give that a go. The Apollo would attract most of the major bands who were touring the UK, even though it's capacity was only 2,693 in an all seated theatre.
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I did venture a little further afield to see AC/DC at the Deeside Leisure Centre, but most of my gigs were at either the Student Union or the Apollo. I saw the likes of Wings and the Who at the Apollo, although getting decent seats for acts like these would involve queuing up outside the Apollo overnight.
The first time I took my new camera along to the Apollo was for Slade in 1982. Thereafter I would take it to "selected" acts, as it started becoming a bit clearer that cameras were frowned upon by certain venues and/or acts. Equally films were not cheap and developing them was also expensive to someone living on a student grant. During the next 6 and a half years I would capture some very special moments, but just how special only became clearer when I started looking back at some of these photos during the second decade of the 21st century.
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