Pop Shield

Well. That was one of my favourite days in a LONG TIME! I was at Maid of Orleans, working on a new booking for me, Extended Planet Jazz. Not least, because my day involved a lot of lovely people spanning the musical genres, job roles, different areas of technical knowledge and the best of good old fashioned Corporation cross-pollination.

Takes a jazz band to unite the building.

Me and Martin both got booked onto this session, and one of us is supernumary, which is a fancy name for an extra person. We’re a bit confused. It’s probably Latin. This never happens. Me and Martin meet walking along the boulevard. He has sleepy eyes because his daughter has moved in with her flipping cat that he’s allergic to. I just never got the hang of these plane trees, at any time of year.

Despite this, on arrival we both start gambolling around the building and grinning like the keen audio gazelles we are. Before he has even gone to the toilet, Martin is saying “Oh, I’ve got a question for you!“ and we are off. With one hand helping and assisting Gilly, to the best of our abilities, and with the other, telling clarinet jokes and swapping tips and tricks. Discussing desk modes and reverb engines, jackfield patching, mic assemblies, classic drum micing techniques.

Once we’ve caught wind that our good friend Sir Roger Andrews, Head Of Everything, is in the next door studio, the circle is complete. We suck him into our jazz vortex and things really start to get going. I feel like a junior member of the world’s most excitable – and possibly most misguided – supergroup. And, since Gilly’s supposed to be at the receiving end of mentoring today (if he can get a word in edgeways) this gig is basically in aid of charity. Which makes all the self-indulgence and glee all the more acceptable, right?

I’m not sure this was the intention of the supernumary nature of the booking, but it’s a rare and fine treat. The holy grail. I even get the time to take the vintage MD box up to PK to fix. As with most things, he brown-labels it as “suspicious”. Sure enough, its rugged cable has been run over a million times via by the even more rugged PA speaker on wheels that lives right next to it.

Given we usually live in parallel universes, there’s a possibiliy that Martin doesn’t yet know about Mudstock’s mid-summer Secret Santa gifting Marv those bespoke Christopher Mulligatawny Fridge Magnets. He’s gonna love that. I tell him, but immediately become aware that Peter is signalling to us that the jazz musicians are trying to listen back. Since I have spent my career telling everyone at the back of the control room to shut up, I get it. Within the hour Martin has regaled the story straight back to Peter. You cannot keep a cat in a bag.

Martin and I turn our attention to cat chat. “My daughter’s cat keeps sitting in our fruit bowl. Driving me MAD!” he says. “No way!” I exclaim! “My cat does the exact same! Drives me MENTAL! But at the same time – god, it’s so cute!” I reply. “I’ll send you a photo!” “Yes please” says Martin. “I mean, who doesn’t love a cat photo?”

In and amongst all this we both try and give Gilly lots of support, but also some space too. We can see he that he is smashing this, but I’m not sure that he knows this. Without drawing too much attention, I point out some workflow stuff on the big mixing desk with thousands of buttons and chat about phase checks on the drum channels. Then I try and diffuse any tension this information has caused by telling him an anecdote about the jazz band’s tour bus getting stuck in traffic in the road outside the building.

“Oh! Did it?” said Gilly, on cue.

“Yes, it resulted in a massive jam.” I reply.

“Did it really?” Gilly says.

I look at him pointedly and raise my eyebrows.

“Oh!! Ahaha!! Thanks, I needed that!” I can see he’s feeling under pressure despite the cool exterior.

During the course of the day Peter mentions he has procured a mini SD card to take the audio away on, but that he is lacking a card reader. You can hear the cogs whirr as Martin and I mentally scuttle in multiple directions to our various parishes to make it so.

Throughout the afternoon and into the evening, Martin, Peter, Ted, Stephan, Roger and I conjure up all kinds of treats for our guests from all corners of the vast corridors of Maid Of Orleans. Piano, Hammond organ, bass amp, guitar amp, music stands, lamps. We even pull off the rabbit in the hat trick. This is in the form of retrieving an acoustic guitar belonging to Sir Roger Andrews from Room 101.

One of the illusions that goes a little less well is when the lovely musicians gather in the control room to listen to playback. Whereupon they unanimously insist that they can hear distortion on one of two sax microphones we have put out.

Various cables and leads and mics and desk channels and speakers get swapped in and out until the only particles left in common reside within the actual instrument and the the sax player.

We do another hundred takes and overdubs but yet the band are still insisting there is an audible fault on the sax mic.

It’s only when three audio engineers and an experienced producer – who has been intently listening on lovely headphones with his eyes closed – get together behind a closed door that an alternative take on the situation starts to unravel.

“To be honest I couldn’t hear anything wrong”

“I’m telling you it’s coming from the mouthpiece of the instrument “

“That’s a relief. I couldn’t get what they were talking about either”

“I thought it was just me! I was too embarrassed to say!“

“We’ve been properly had. It’s the Emperor’s new clothes!”

We get around the issue by EQing the second sax mic to an agreed sound, and don’t mention it again. The whole situation is a little shame-inducing.

The sax player asks me about the legacy equipment remaining from Ray’s Bionic Glock Shop, and I feel compelled to help as much as possible. I tell him I will fetch the resident expert. I head off on the five mile round trip to retrieve Sir Roger Andrews, only to discover that has teleported himself and his giant rucksack out of the building.

Now, normally you can’t find Roger and he appears when you phone him. But there has been a strange fault at play today. Me and Martin have successfully located him in MOO4 all afternoon, excitably asking questions about SlowTools edit groups and soloing to large monitors. My phone rings and it’s Roger phoning to say that we won’t be able to find him, but that he has taken the key to Room 101 with him. Which, as we all know, is attached to a brass candlestick and cannot logically happen. Luckily, he’s left the door on the latch, so we return his precious acoustic guitar at the end of the session. This is done in the tradional style: Don sunglasses, open the door, hold breath, just fling it in. Slip the door catch as you go.

In return for all the day’s acts of good will, the keyboard player takes the time to properly explain the drawbars on the MOO3 Hammond organ to Peter and I, which had been bugging me for ages.

Talking of embarrassment, Peter tells us about his little incident with trying to get hold of an SD card. Peter is a polite man. As is his type, he occasionally breaks into Latin. Much like Christopher Mulliatawny did once did at a meeting when I was trying to persuade a group of people to spend some money on some much needed equipment. On that occasion, the Latin worked in my favour as no one understood what was being explained. There was a misunderstanding, followed by a conversation to clear that up, followed by an objection which was raised to something I hadn’t been proposing in the first place. Once this issue was resolved, we returned to the original point. By which time everyone was so confused and relieved that there were no further objections and the thing got passed. Yes, exactly.

Anyway. Peter finishes his SD card anecdote.

“So I went down to the Patronising Equipment Centre and said to them “I’d like an STD please.” Which is a tad awkward.”

And when I retire, I shall perhaps regale the world about my exciting days as a signed-up Corporation session engineer. And in the meantime, I shall regale you.

“‘…Oh, and did I tell you of my discovery about the 12-way XLR loom belonging to the Panic Meat Eaters’ touring keyboard rig?” I shall utter.

Perhaps there will be a small audience, who understand none of it, yet look upon me with some amusement. Much like today.

“Red before brown!” I shall exclaim. “At ONE end only! Crosspatch!!!

“…And then I discretely took the keyboard tech aside, maintaining a 2-metre distance, pointed and muttered through my face covering “wcwndoflajdkfkdjwjf!”

“…And then he said, “Oh ok, yes you’re right, that was the fault of The Noise Boys.”

“…And then I said, “It’s not a phrase I’m fond of in principle, on the grounds of gender equality, but I understand that rhymes can be very satisfying.”

The Corporation’s legendary Maid of Orleans studios have, at one time or another, been frequented by most of the famous musicians in the land.  Once home to Ray’s Bionic Glock Shop, creators of incidental music for early television programmes, its endlessly long and confusing corridors spawned a myriad of crazy sound sculptures including the Doctor What Theme. And for the past sixteen years, inexplicably, it has been one of my places of work.  Hello Cleveland.

It’s 7am on Sunday morning and I’m parking up outside the building’s long white façade.  Upon entering, the security guard on Reception looks, quite frankly, put out to have to engage with another human being. I feel the same. It’s too early. Come 8am today we are going to have our work cut out because a film crew are invading with their own unique type of bizarre military organised chaos. They are making a TV documentary series about the history of electronic music. They will be filming Ray showing off a vintage bionic glock from a collection belonging to the Corporation.  Which is curated by my friend and yours, the legendary Sir Roger Andrews, head of everything.

I use the term ‘curated’ loosely. It’s mostly bits and pieces packaged in bubble wrap and hidden in crumpled cardboard boxes stuffed into wonky metal cupboards around the building.  Some items are ‘filed’ in Room 101, more of which later. The important thing is that Roger Andrews recognises the important difference between, say a piece of extremely valuable legacy equipment worthy of being exhibited in a museum, with a load of old tat. Which no-one else does.

Roger Andrews has set this booking up.  In the trade, it is known as a ‘Roger Andrews Special’.  This is when Roger Andrews dreams up something unfathomably complicated in his head and it’s everyone else’s job to try and reverse-engineer what he might be thinking.

Roger is a small, quiet and helpful man.  I say man, he is actually half man, half rucksack. He walks quite fast but prefers to travel using a combination of white magic and MIDI message and can easily vanish to any room in Maid Of Orleans and back in a split second.  The catchphrase during these bookings is “Have you seen Roger?”. Whereupon he sometimes apparitions, already having just done what you were about to do, and sometimes not, but then he appears when you phone him. None of his devices have ever run out of battery power. The trade-off being that precisely one minute prior to any live radio transmissions broadcasted from Maid of Orleans, the equipment has a tendency to drop out and then inexplicably restore itself, having been perfectly fine during the soundcheck.

The entire building is dark, and so I play a little game of Automatic or Not? with the lights.  Interspersed by a few rounds of Switch Hunt.

I pull a giant lever to power up Room 333, where Ray and his fellow pioneers of early sampling used to work.  Whiling away their days tweaking test tone oscillators with their toes, hitting piano strings with whistling kettles, and running five-mile tape loops to The Mothership and back via a secret hatch in the basement leading down to the Bakerloo line. This is one of two spaces I am to offer the film crew.  The other is Studio 5 downstairs.

As well as the famous bionic glock, Ray will need two old tape machines, a rare vocoder and a vintage analogue synthesizer (now worth two million guilders).  Roger has told me that he would set everything up in advance.  However, there is no sign of any equipment anywhere.

I head downstairs to Studio 5 to throw a few more giant switches and play a few more rounds of Automatic or Not?  No gear. Hmm.

My phone rings. A man called Luke and his crew of thousands have arrived at Reception.  I head upstairs.  Looking at the throng, I have no idea who is who, and just say hello to anyone and everyone then instantly forget their name.  Aha.  Here is someone who looks organised.  “Hi, my name is Pop, I say.  “So is mine” says Pop.  “That’s easy!”  says Pop. “Yes Pop, it is.”  Pop seems to be in charge.

Luke asks me where to load in.  He now seems to be in charge. I explain that one space is upstairs, and one is downstairs, but they are a few miles apart and it rather depends on where the filming is going to be. And that depends on where the equipment is. It is time to send a 16-bit trigger message to Roger Andrews’ brain via carrier pigeon. He generally responds just before you press ‘Send’.  In the meantime, Luke and I do the sixty-mile round trip to view the two spaces and back, whereupon Roger Andrews both calls me and apparitions in Reception at the same time.

“Morning!” I exclaim. “I wasn’t expecting to see you today, but I sure am glad to see you”.  “Ah yes, it got a bit complicated.  I’ll explain later” he says.  He never explains. “We’re in Studio 2.”  My phone goes again.  It’s Pete from the film company.  Pete seems to be even more in charge.  “Hello Pop” he says. “I’m in charge and I’m rather concerned you haven’t got the message that we’re in Studio 2”.  “It’s ok, I have just received it.”  I reply.  “Sorry about the delay and the confusion.  Load in at Door D.”  The security guard interrupts me. “Because the crew has more than twenty people, the unreliable goods lift is therefore out of action.” He says.  “Load in at Door C”.  “Load in at Door C” I repeat pointlessly to Luke.  “Let me show you where that is.”  We do another sixty-mile round trip.  “You’re going to have to carry all your gear down the steps.  Sorry once again for the delay and confusion”.

Roger disappears to start setting up all the crazy stuff.  As I mentioned, one of Roger’s many unique talents is hoarding old equipment. I have never known one person to gather up so much near-obsolete gear in my life. It lives everywhere, but most of all in Room 101 in a backwater of Maid of Orleans.  Room 101 is a nightmare.  It is full to the rafters with shelves upon shelves crammed with unsorted gear.

The master key for Room 101 is long-since lost, probably inside its four walls. In order to get in there, you have to go to the engineers’ room and borrow their spare key which is attached to a brass candlestick so that no one can lose it.  If their room is locked, which it is today, you have to do the sixty-mile round trip to Reception to borrow their key, which is attached to a concert grand piano so that it definitely cannot leave the building.

Roger teleports to Reception, puts the piano and the key in his rucksack and disappears.

Meanwhile, I open up Studio 2 and play a quick game of Switch Hunt in the control room.  Hundreds of people appear, all of whom seem to be in charge.  They start setting up tables of croissants and asking for access to WIFI, which only works every other day.  It never works if the visiting artists are taking a flight or staying in a hotel within the next 36 months.

Just after the crew have loaded in, Pete appears and says “Hey, this isn’t the right studio.  It’s next door’.  The crew then do some kind of crazy stop-frame animation thing, with tables of croissants and tea urns jumping from studio to studio all around the building, until everyone is in the right place and logged onto WIFI.  It takes about 25 milliseconds.

Meanwhile Roger keeps disappearing and reappearing, during which time the other Pop and I try and reverse-engineer where he is by looking at some recce photos on Pop’s phone.  I play detective and try to guess which room he is in by the distinctive vintage colour tone of the seamless flooring in the picture.  I get it wrong about five times, during which we cover another few hundred miles of the building. We later discover Roger has been in a secret room that no one else has ever noticed. It houses Ray’s famous bionic glock, one of the world’s rarest electronic instruments.

I give up trying to find Roger and instead focus on collecting spanners and kettle leads and GPO to igranic connectors.  I am quite good at this as I’ve tidied them all up into a special entropy-free zone.

Whilst we are setting up, a camera lady, who seems to be in charge, starts randomly wheeling valuable kit around to make the frame look pretty.  She seems completely oblivious to the fact that the items are (a) priceless (b) plugged in to power and attached to each other with cables and © that I am lying on the floor right next to them like a car mechanic trying to find inaccessible output sockets of unknown connector-type.  She does her best to run over my precious head at every available opportunity.  I glare at her incredulously, which has zero impact. So, I ask her to stop it. Immediately she is at it again. If she takes Roger Andrews out, we’ll really be in trouble.

Then my phone rings. I do another sixty-mile round trip to Reception to collect Ray. Ray is not in charge. He is going to be interviewed about the history of Ray’s Bionic Glock Shop. He is wearing a kaftan with a brown lab coat on top. His glasses are upside down and he merrily spouts endless fascinating facts about the former activities that lay behind the 527 doors that we pass along the corridor before taking the stairs down to the studio.

From there on in it all runs very straightforwardly. Roger Andrews evaporates.  We record for one minute whereupon the massive crew pack everything away via stop-frame animation teamwork in about 30 seconds. “Bye” says the other Pop. “I’ll never forget you!” “Bye!” I reply, and instantly forget her.

It then takes a couple of weeks for my weary head and body to work out where to put all the incredibly heavy equipment back.  During the course of this, I find new routes and several other rooms I have never seen before, and probably will never again.

The building falls silent and somewhat eery once more.  I throw some things into Roger Andrew’s scary lair and shut the door, slipping the latch and turning out the lights as I go.

This afternoon I spotted a temporary art installation on the pavement outside of the goods lift door at Maid Of Orleans Studios. Materials – concrete, sycamore leaves and seeds, camera tape, sharpie.

Yesterday I was at Maid Of Orleans working on a very special audience event with pianist and songwriter Sandy Jewson.

On the way home I made what I thought was the mistake of looking at several photos posted on Twaddle by members of the public. Many of which had been taken from the front row where the poster had had a much better view of proceedings than me at my front of house mix position at the back of the room.

After the recording I had been asked by a member of the public to assist in getting an album autographed by the artist, which I duly did in place of getting my own copy signed.

For almost a moment I started to think I was missing a trick.

But then I reminded myself why I don’t generally take photos of celebrities nor badger them for autographs and so on. It’s because I am a part of the inner sanctum, and I want them to know they are secure in my presence. And I suppose this is partly why I feel compelled to write it all down in a publicly private kind of way.

And then I think back to the soundcheck where it’s just me and him and a couple of other people in that massive magical room and he is rehearsing unheard material and we are discussing practicalities like piano and mic and table positioning and he is clearing his throat and practising major scales at the age of 74. Where I gain the insight that this man who sings out of tune in his endearing squeaky gravel voice actually has perfect pitch, when he questions whether the piano has been tuned to 440 ‘because it sounds like 442’ (turns out he’s right).

And I reflect on all the times I’ve looked down at my fingers touching their faders and I start to feel disembodied and then I float up into a dream cloud in disbelief that this beautiful voice which strikes such a chord within me and that has followed me around for all my life, singing these oh so familiar words is right here and now flowing through my very hands to all those hundreds of thousands of trucks and kitchens and cafes and bedsides and waiting rooms.

And then I am safe in the knowledge that my seat is the best seat in the house.

I am at Maid Of Orleans on a Sunday morning. Eusebio has run a fever so it’s me and Ian. Oh, and ten,  positively smiley, Icelandic female rappers. Somehow Ian seems to have developed a specialism in this kind of gig.

The ladies are strewn around the studio floor in a circle. Except for the heavily pregnant one who is sitting in a chair. The gibberish conversation bounces around the group, a scatter gun barrage of guttural husky singsong voices. I rig microphones around them. Before too long they break their flow to ask.

Exkewz Mi! Can we swear in Icelandic?

No.

What can’t we say?

You can’t say anything sexually explicit or defamatory or which denigrates people based on their race, religion, sexuality or gender.

Can we say *%?!

Definitely not.

But it’s biologically accurate.

Yes, but we’re English. We use pet names.

Can we say £!@+!

No sorry.

Can we say “breasts”

Yes, I suppose so.

^#>=?

I don’t think so. There are children listening. Let me check with Roger Andrews.

There follows a pretty surreal telephone conversation whereby I rattle off a list of expletives at Roger Andrews. He confirms our position and returns to his Sunday worshipful practice.

Then it continues.

How about “freaking”?

That’s fine.

“Slut”?

It depends on the context. You’re all feminists, it’s probably ok.

What about “s***ing” instead of “f***ing”?

No. Just leave a gap. Sorry. This is The Corporation.

It’s okay. We get this problem in TV too. It’s not really fair. Male rappers will then come on after us and say %*€$.

Yes, but I doubt they ever-so-politely check everyone involved is ok with their potty-mouth language beforehand.