Pop Shield

It’s the rig day for One Big Headache. “How are things shaping up for the Crayzee headline set?” I ask Yoda.

“It’s not looking good, not good at all”, comes the reply. “I only got the information last night and the input list is the biggest load of bleep I’ve ever seen. Full of holes!” He waves an A4 piece of paper of inexplicable landscape orientation within which the stage sources have been typed downwards in columns. There are around fifty sources which have been machine-gunned over one hundred columns. It’s like a child’s input list. Typed up by a monkey. Not worthy of a man who has sold fifty million albums.

“Oh dear”, I reply.

The next morning, I head up to the main stage at 9am prompt armed with a long list of questions to ask their engineer Stephen prior to line check. Stephen is sweating and shouting at people.  He looks a bit unapproachable. I approach. “Hello! I was wondering if could ask you for a few bits of information about these inputs to help out our guys in the broadcast truck?”. “Yeah, like what?”. “Well, for starters can you confirm who plays the main drum kit and what are the additional kick and snare lines being used for? Also, what kind of material is being contained in the various tracks of Unableton sources? And what is being carried on these two Outotune lines and how is the effect being inserted? What instructions are there for fading this up or down? And which radio mic line is being used for which artist?”

It’s clear early on in the proceedings that Stephen is not able or willing to give me answers. “Oh, you’re really better off talking to Jerry about the drums”, he says. So, I identify Jerry and follow him up to a platform full of synthesisers and ask him. I get one good answer and so I move on to the next one. “Oh, you need to ask Stacey about Unableton”, he says. So, I make my way over to Stacey and introduce myself. She is wearing dark glasses, chewing gum and keeps on giving me shoulder shrugs and breaking off to talk to other people then coming back to me with the odd “Huh?”’ interspersed with “What?” and occasionally “I don’t know what you’re asking me.” With the tenacity of a Jehovah’s witness addicted to witnessing Jehovah, I manage to get fifty percent information that sounds really hopeful – the other half that sounds like gibberish. “It’s just Outotune. Fade it up.” I ask again for some clarification before reporting back to the truck.  Eventually there’s an honest answer: “Oh, I don’t really know. You need to ask Pablo if it’s about Outotune. He’s Westside’s engineer.” So, I identify Pablo. He gives the polar opposite answer. “So, the Outotune is inserted on Westside’s mic channel and categorically no need to fade up these Outotune lines down here at the end of the input list?” I say. “Oh, well, I don’t really know about mics” he replies, “You need to ask Olivier about that.” Dear God, help me. Olivier is worse as he’s the monitor engineer and hence the busiest and most irritable out of everyone. He gives me a ‘talk to the hand’. I try again. Talk to the hand. And so it goes on.

Meanwhile, I find out that Taco is actually friendly and eager to help. The problem is that Taco doesn’t actually know anything of any use to me right now. He’s like the friendly decoy elf in the magic cave of an adventure game.  You know the type – the one who spouts riddles and sends you the wrong way. Each person I manage to engage with says something different to the previous person and then waves me away to talk to somebody else. At one point I am trapped in an ‘ask Stacey’ / ‘ask Pablo’ infinite feedback loop. The process is endlessly frustrating. Eventually the soundcheck is finished. Drum and Unableton lines have been idented, the radio mics have been tested and accounted for, and the Outotune instructions have been optimally deciphered.

In the evening, during the soundcheck prior to the headline act it’s the same thing all over again, except this time poor Shiny’s bearing the brunt of these people’s rudeness. I follow his conversations on the talkback and am heartened that at least the answers he’s reporting back to the truck concur with what I was being told earlier. The band comes on stage and for the first five minutes there is a genuine sense of achievement that comes with getting the last band of the day on stage. All seems ok, until at the start of a new song that’s when the talkback from the truck first comes alive and never seems to stop. What ensues is too painful to recall. Twelve hours of standing on my feet enduring those noise levels on stage becomes the least of my problems, as a catalogue of errors from Crayzee’s crew begins, over which we have very little control. No amount of shouting at these guys gets us anywhere.

“We’ve lost lines 99 and 100!…We don’t have anything on Unableton 7 and 8!…We don’t have ANY beats on 99!…”

While we try and sort out the track problems a fun new game called Radio Mic Russian Roulette starts.

“We don’t have the guest rapper mic! Now we have the guest rapper on the lead rapper’s mic!…We don’t have the second guest rapper’s mic!…Now the second guest rapper is on the backup guest rapper’s mic!“

”…We’ve got the beats back!…The beats have gone again!…Right now we don’t have a show!“

”…The beats are back but they’re heavily distorted!“ And finally the words of defeat: ”We’ve gone over to the front of house mix!“

Hell on earth. And a right mess for all involved to unpick as there’s multiple multi-platform programmes to consider. Shiny has the good sense to get the Unableton wavs that Stacey has offered us. We are all gutted. When we eventually manage to get away from the truck, a drink in the bar and a good debrief helps things. Well, a bit. Everyone loves to hear about a drama and colleagues nerd out on all the gory details. “Aha! So, the levels were post and the routing wasn’t isolated from the front of house desk scene changes!” they exclaim with gleefully geeky schadenfreude. I feel terrible. But deep down I know it’s not really that bad in the big scheme of things. In time this will become just another anecdote to tell in late night conversations like this.

The next day we reconvene for another hellish soundcheck with one of Crayzee’s stablemates which unbelievably goes worse than Crayzee’s thanks to some good old hum loops. One of their techs ends up walking around the stage shouting “bleep me and bleep my life”. None of this helps the healing process, although as time goes on, we do slowly start to laugh about one of the worst sound disasters we’ve all been a part of. “When you came off that stage last night you looked like you’d come back from a war zone” jokes Yoda. He then recalls Crayzee’s song about having lots of problems with money and racism and the police but none at all with the ladies. It is with perfect symmetry that it is the corresponding number of problems in that famous song as the line numbers on that ominous input list where our problems had started.