Lyric at Vivid Sydney 2026 — A Night Through the Lens

Live photography and film from Lyric's Friday night set at Vivid Sydney 2026.

Sydney was wearing its Vivid colours on Friday night. The harbour was throwing light back at the buildings, the bridges were stitched in projection, and the city felt — for one weekend a year — like it had remembered how to dress up. Down in Darling Harbour, tucked in behind the ICC in Tumbalong Park, the amphitheatre was filling fast. Lyric were about to take the Tumbalong Nights stage, and the air had that low electric quality you learn to trust over the years. You can feel a good night before it starts.

I've been around live music for a long time. Years at MTV put me side-of-stage with most of the artists who shaped a generation — Madonna, KISS, and a long, lucky list of others — and that kind of run rewires you. You stop watching gigs the way fans watch them. You read a show the way a sound engineer reads a room: in the first thirty seconds. The walk-on, the breath before the first note, the way a band looks at each other when the lights drop. By the time they're a song in, you already know what kind of night you're getting.

Lyric had me at thirty seconds.

The Set

They came on without ceremony and earned the crowd inside of a song. What surprised me wasn't their power — I'd expected that. It was their patience. A lot of bands at this level still sprint. They're afraid of the silences, afraid of the long beats, afraid of trusting an audience to come to them. Lyric weren't. They let songs breathe. They worked with the lighting design instead of fighting it, holding long beats of single-colour stage — big saturated washes and slow gradients that matched the visual language of the rest of the festival outside — and giving me, frankly, gift after gift to compose into.

The middle of the set was where they took the biggest swing. They stripped it back to almost nothing, pulled the whole amphitheatre quiet — that rare kind of quiet where you can hear the harbour through the gaps — and then turned it back up with the kind of timing that can't be taught. By the encore, the back of the bowl was as loud as the front. That doesn't happen by accident. After a couple of decades around touring acts, I know exactly how rare it is.

I don't write reviews. But I'll say this: Lyric have the thing. The thing you can't manufacture and you can't fake. They sound like a band that has decided who they are.

Shooting It

Live music is a constant negotiation between stills and motion on a single body, and Vivid adds its own twist on top. The lighting design is built for spectacle, not for sensors, and Tumbalong is an open-air venue — which means you're also reading the night sky, the spill from the surrounding architecture, and the way the harbour lights bleed in around the edges of the amphitheatre. There's no fixed ceiling on what the frame will look like one second to the next.

I shot the whole night on the Canon R1 with the RF 70-200 f/2.8 L. One body, one lens, a single focal range. That's a deliberate choice and it's the way I've been working live gigs for a while now. You stop reaching for the wider safety net, you commit to the compression, and you let the 70-200 do what it was built to do — pick a face out of a wash of stage light and hold it dead clean. The R1's autofocus didn't flinch all night, even in the deeper purples and reds where most cameras start hunting. ISO sat high, shutter held to keep some motion alive in a guitar arm without losing the moments where someone actually stops moving. Those tiny still beats inside a performance are usually the most honest photos in the take, and they're the ones I'm always hunting.

The film side is where the patience pays off. When a stage holds a single colour for eight or ten seconds, you can shoot it like a scene. You can let a shot run. You can find a face inside the wash and trust the frame. The temptation at gigs is to chase every cue, to cut as fast as the lights change, and that's how live music film ends up feeling exhausting rather than alive. Lyric's set didn't want that treatment. It wanted to be watched. So I watched.

There are nights where you fight your kit. And there are nights where the venue, the band, and the light all line up and hand you everything you need. Friday was the second kind.

After

I packed down close to midnight, walked back out through Tumbalong Park, and Vivid was still going — the buildings still talking to each other in light, the harbour still throwing everything back at itself. Most weekends I leave a gig already editing in my head. Friday I just walked for a while.

The take is sitting on the drive now. Stills coming through first, the film piece to follow. I'll post them as they come.