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.

You may recall the time I helped song writing legend Dick Cadillac out of a fix by giving him a green teabag. Or perhaps the time I broke open my new box of Yogi Cold Season herbal tea to give a bag to song writing legend Roy Jones. No? Well never mind. Now I bring news of a brand-new celebrity drinks-related anecdote. Which, as many of these stories go, is just a shameless excuse for me to drop made-up names.

In an exciting turn of events, I am asked to accompany producer Adam and Britpop jacket-flapper turned king of culture Calvin Jocker to an exclusive Mayfair hotel. A place often frequented by the late great crotch-grabbing, white-gloved monkey lover Jackie Markson. Our mission is to record a question-and-answer session with veteran Canadian poet and musician Chester Lohen following playback of his new album to a theatre full of journalists and art critics. I am nervous about the audio as it is to be used on air by several big arts and news programmes such as Tomorrow and Back Row, as well as Calvin’s own Sunday Sequence.

The album is lovely, all deep and sparse and the conversation is honest and thoughtful. Calvin points out to Chester that his sad poetic imagery of a broken banjo floating in the sea is offset by the fact that it is perceived in the UK as a somewhat comic instrument. Chester takes all with grace, humour and humility. My BB+ recorder holds out too.

After the event I join Adam and Calvin for a quick drink in the private bar. It’s detox January and Calvin and I are both off alcohol. I order sparkling water, Adam beer and Calvin asks for an adventurous tonic with a few drops of angostura bitters. This is a talking point. Calvin kindly offers me a sip. I give it some careful consideration and say yes please. The only problem now is that there is a straw in the, as yet untouched, drink. This presents a social dilemma: Do I sip from the straw or ignore the straw and sip from the side of the glass but risk the eye-poke? Not without awkwardness, I bowl a googly and opt for a marginally more hygienic third way. I remove my own straw from my sparkling water and plunge it into Calvin’s drink. Which, as you ask, tastes interesting.  In fact, if “Interesting” were the name of a brand-new type of drink this is what it would taste like. Note to self – avoid career move into branding.

For anyone who was hoping for a “rum and coca cola” story I can only apologise.

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.

Boogie Bugle owns a greyhound called Give Us Yer Money.  He is running in 9.15pm Peterborough race.  Jez tips the producer that his dog is likely to win the race.  “Yeah, yeah.” says Sarah.  She puts on a tenner anyhow.  Roger Andrews puts another tenner on.  Mate and I put on fivers, as does Mike.

After we come off air, Paul checks the results on his laptop.  Our dog came in first!  Drinks all round.

Seeing as I announced to my colleagues at breakfast that I was going to write my memoirs then I better get started.

We were on an outside broadcast at The Beachball in Aberdoch last night. Ten minutes prior to live transmission on The Nations Favourite Radio Station, The Boogie Bugle Big Band starts playing and immediately, power is lost to the house. My comms to the radio truck fall silent, as the transmitter lies side of stage and is powered via the stage crate. The monitor engineer looks very panicked. I run out to the truck just as Paul is running in, having lost audio and camera and audio feeds in the truck.

Power is quickly restored two minutes prior to transmission. I can hear over my headset that in a catalogue of bad luck, the producer’s talkback isn’t working.  She is unable to warn the venue front of house engineer to hold back on fading up the Nations Favourite News Bulletin before the show starts. I make a dash for it, but I am not able to get there in time.  When I reach the front of house desk, the news is already up in the venue and the audience are being subjected to the details of footballer Steve Guest’s critical illness.  Nothing like bad news to get you in the jazz mood.  The concert was a storm though.