Pop Shield

So, here – by popular demand – is a little tale about an influential US hip-hop collective called the Woo Woo Gang and a bunch of live sound engineers.

It’s my first year of working on the main stage of Mudstock Festival with some of the world’s biggest rock bands. My job is to be up on stage in constant communication with our expert balancers in the backstage sound truck to assist in the line checks. High profile, high pressure and at times a stressful and noisy environment. The sound is being mixed not only to a massive crowd, but live to radio, live to TV and so on. Teamwork amongst the stage and truck crew is key in this kind of situation. You need to get on with everyone, pick your moment carefully and get your point across concisely.

Having just got married, I had had little time to mentally prepare for the job ahead. I literally had unpacked from honeymoon, thrown some stage blacks and a multitool in a suitcase. In the moments before leaving the house, it inexplicably became a priority to plug my name into the Woo Woo Gang Online Name Generator and see what it came up with. Aptly it seemed, ‘Wacko Pupil’. So, I then searched for my teammates’ names and shared the results with them in the car on the way down to Mudstock – much amusement all round.

On arrival, more Woo names were quickly attributed to our colleagues working on other stages. By the next day the main stage PA crew also had their own Woomonickers. It was decided that we would refer to each other solely by Woo nicknames on the talkback: Scratch, Conq, Smiley, X-Pert, Wacko and so on. Anyone not using the correct name was snubbed. This added a game element to an already pretty complicated task.

Woomania rolled on and on. Even certain hit producers visiting the truck were entered into the Woo Name Hall Of Fame. Scratchin’ Leader, Ruff Begga, Arrogant Conqueror, Thunderous Menace, Pesty Mercenary, Undiscovered Bum, Bittah Contender – the list pinned up in the truck became longer and longer.

By the time the Woo Woo Gang hit the stage, Woophoria has reached fever pitch. It’s a joy to witness the moment that two coincident yet separate worlds collide. Made funnier of course by the fact that only fifty percent of the participants are in on the joke. At the side of the stage is a band dressed in trainers and dressing gowns holding bottles of champagne. They are doing little gangster jogs in readiness to run on looking all tough and hard. Meanwhile, just metres away from the real deal is the sound of Scratch calling out to Fearless on open talkback. And Fool is sat at his laptop generating more Woo names.

Just funny.