June, curse her sodden soul, is left mercifully behind amongst the skips of broken dreams, next to the dark load-out dock of the desolate Arena Nova. She weeps her wet and incompetent last tears of apology. A local promoter smiles behind the wheel of his BMW M3.
“ It’s OK,” he tells himself, “so the guitars buzzed a bit. Only when the lights flashed on and off. Punters didn’t notice. It was the band’s crew that got all precious about it. What’s wrong with sound and light off the same mains supply anyway? That extra generator they said they needed would have cost me a new set of alloy wheels. Sod 'em…” He roars off into the rain.
The sodium lights of Weiner Neustadt’s Arena turn the rain the colour of urine as we lurch towards July and
We’re now about halfway through a series of outdoor/indoor festival/local production shows. We left our own sound and light production behind some five weeks ago; we now live off local production and have survived fire, flood and riot, together with the odd roof collapse and backstage invasion of Austrian over-70s ramblers.
My diary has taken a hypercritically jaundiced view of most of the events thus far, largely brought about by hours of sitting bored shitless on a tour bus, abandoned in axle deep mud behind some far flung outdoor stage. The endless bill of local bands thumps its muffled way backwards out of the PA into the inner sanctity of the bunk, whilst rain drums its own rhythms on the roof. The trenchfoot, now suffered by all, disinclines anyone from paddling to catering to be disappointed by cold boiled rice, pickled salad and ten different ways of preparing dead pig. Again. Such is the glamour of the festival circuit this first summer of a brave new century.
Consoling myself with a post-show bottle of
Though the weather threatens to improve, I wonder if the control of all those extra outdoor show variables will? Will the stage be flat? Will the power be good? Will the powers that be be capable?
The huge crowd roars in the packed amphitheatre as
Well, that’s the way the promoter saw it when he set the gig up months earlier. Reality is
The small, yet adequate, lighting rig (promoter’s description) is up and running when we arrive to load in at midday, unlike the white tablecloth being used for video back projection by a puzzled video crew. Lacking both the necessary lenses and available depth behind the suspended tablecloth to project an image any larger than their combined IQ, they come up with the idea of reflecting the image off a dressing-room mirror to double the projection distance. We all admire the crisp focus and sharp colours of the back-to-front image listing to port above the drum riser.
The black parcans and Source 4s look, and indeed are, brand new. And there’s a good looking girlie on the lighting crew! Keen as mustard she shimmies up the ladder to focus with the grace and speed of a heavily pregnant Brachiosaurus. We focus the first lamp bar inside forty minutes. By lamp three of the second lamp bar she is trying to re-focus the first lamp bar. She can’t see the stage and move a lamp at the same time. A sort of Gerald Ford of the truss, really. I ask her to spin a ‘porcelain’. She asks me what a ‘porcelain’ is. Her boyfriend/dimmer man shouts something loud in German. She begins to cry. I do not lose my temper. Instead, an odd thing happens.
“I’ll show you.” I say, and find myself climbing a truss ladder and dragging my way towards her. What am I doing? I don’t do this anymore. I’m too old an uninsurable.
“Look, this is the porcelain and if you turn it like this…” 240 volts crash through my arm as I put my hand in the back of the brand new parcan. Tempted as I am to say, “Now you have a go,” I tell her that the ‘porcelains’ all look fine to me, and perhaps they’d be better if we let them be.
With a few wet and bedraggled Billy peering at a small screen hung crookedly off string at the back of the leaking stage, the sound engineer groans as
“Does that mean we have to hang about in this ‘til the end of extra time?” We both pray for an early Golden Goal.
The match re-commences as the screen cuts to a picture of a snowstorm with no sound. After three minutes the crowd becomes restless. Their damp displeasured faces are turned towards the out-front mix position. We shrug and smile back. The screen crackles and flickers back to football seconds before
The Turn do their bit and then we eat our load-out sandwiches (mayo, always soddin’ mayo!) watching the condensation dribble down the windows of the Hotel Phoenix. A drum tech is heard to wail, “Outdoor shows! Every day is a week.”
It’s a tent today, a great big blue and yellow plastic circus affair. At least we are out of the rain. The lighting rig is a bizarre collection of old 1kw and 2kw fresnels, forty or so parcans and a few old Lekos clinging to truss and scaff pipe skilfully, yet daringly, strapped and bolted to anything in or near the tent roof that looks vaguely like a hanging point.
The rig is devoid of colour or patch. I’m handed a plot and asked to fill it in. Rule # 1 kicks in – ‘Set realistic goals, given the time, equipment, and crew expertise available.’ I have a man, a ladder and two hours at my disposal to colour, patch, focus and program.
“I’ve got this great idea for a white light show…” I enthuse.
The ubiquitous guitar buzz delays doors by 45 minutes as dimmers are turned on and off once more and heavy cable is dragged across muddy fields towards some distant sub-station. The audience stands mute in the rain outside, waiting.
As The Turn hit the stage, thick fogs rises from the several thousand soggy but, by now, hot punters. Best cracked oil effect I’ve seen in years. Some short time later, as the warm fog meets the cold plastic roof, it begins to rain indoors. Umbrellas start to appear. My desk is covered in plastic sheets. I’m operating in Braille again. Summer is starting to take on a distinctly surreal countenance and is careering towards the banal and absurd. How many more 20th century theatre genres must we endure before the end? Or is it all one long act of cruelty, scripted by Antonin Artaud?
Alleluia! There is a God! We are indoors; it’s a regular gig. The promoter has looked at my drawings and I have a rig I recognise as something approaching ‘appropriate’ (that simple little word in our technical rider that seems to be continually overlooked) hanging gracefully from a dozen Lodestars.
It’s ten in the morning and after a hearty breakfast of bacon and egg (real bacon and egg, for Christ’s sake!) I’m given a Diamond 3 desk and a Mac 500 head to play with in the corner. I happily program a show. Meanwhile the crew pad around quietly and efficiently hanging the 20 Mac 500s, 10 Source 4s, 8 Megastrobes and 200 parcans. We seem to be in control. Then I notice a familiar face on the German crew that makes me feel uneasy. He’s patching dimmers with a hammer, surrounded by hillocks of knotted and unmarked Socapex cable. Now I remember. He was the rigger in charge of a large 6-leg floor support system I’d used earlier in the year. He takes nine hours to patch two 72 way racks.
I’m using the Bryan Adams rig today - or the bits of it that the humble support act are allowed to use. But it’s not here yet and isn’t expected ‘till noon at the earliest.
An overnight drive from Frieburg has all the residents of the Hotel Phoenix out scouring the site for those disgusting little blue boxes that you have to use before anyone else renders them unusable. “Yes, the toilets will be here after lunch,” smiles Gerhard, the local promoter’s rep. “But my turtle’s head needs tending to NOW!” wails a grimacing stage manager. Seven sets of clenched buttocks wait patiently for the cab to take them to the local sports hall. Not everyone will make it. The Adam’s trucks arrive accompanied by Wagnerian thunder and rain. The LSD crew, fresh from
Willie Williams, responsible for the fantastic, nearly all white light, low tech Bryan Adams rig, has thoughtfully insisted on his Avo Diamond 2 desk being placed stage right on a platform ten feet above the guitar techs instead of on the cold and distant FOH tower. I thank him from the bottom of my heart. No long stumble through the mud and bullets to get out front. The LSD crew, led by the incredible Mark ‘Scratch’ Hitchcock, thank him from the bottom of their heart too, as a combination of agents, promoters and truck breakdowns mean that the load in for this gig doesn't start ‘til midday. In the rain, of course.
The four cross-stage trusses carrying a simple mixture of Parcans, Source 4 Zooms and Source 4 Pars in open white, CTB and CTO, together with Willie’s wonderful backdrop of Chinese-built white rope light in aluminium frames, go up in no time.
Even the floor kack goes in quickly. 5kw Fresnels on sticks, a bunch of strobes, some dimmable florries and soft lights surround the white Marshall stacks each side of a minimal white drum kit.
The position of the lighting desk means that the desk operator can see and talk to every man in the grid during the swift, windswept focus. No need to bellow through the thunder and lightning that blighted this and so many outdoor shows this summer. The treck across the Somme to the out front position with a Diamond 2 desk (the long one) strapped to your back, towing a multicore through the cold liquid chocolate is an experience thus largely avoided.
Not entirely, however, as five Super Troopers have to be floated on pontoons to a pair of exceptionally high towers, where a SAR Sea King helicopter lifts them into place. The Troopers are the only source of colour.
As the infamous Scratch said, “Low tech! I love it! Willie is demonstrating that less is more, and because there are no moving heads or colour changers, just a bunch of dimmers, the rig is quick, reliable and adaptable. It’s ideal for situations like this. And the show looks great as well!”
I take my sou’wester off to you, Mr. Williams.
We find ourselves enduring a six-hour incarceration in a small ‘in transit’ room at
We have been told, “Out doors. Biggest event in the
Four months of negotiations with the Ukrainian promoter and I’ve extracted one fax-mangled drawing of a lighting rig that appears to be a post-revolutionary constructivist interpretation of my social realist Autocad original.
We will be staying on a ‘luxury’ steam-ship called the ‘Maxim Rysky’, anchored in Kakhova, a small port on the Black Sea, a few miles west of
I point out to the tour manager that ‘Maxim Rysky’ is Russian for ‘Extreme Danger’. He argues that the Russian for ‘extreme danger’ is ‘Ukrainian International Airline’ as we board the small charter plane to Nikolaiv. We are relieved to see the captain throw away his half-empty bottle of vodka as he enters the flight deck.
Arrival at Nikolaiv is something of a blur… stretch limousines and police cars, buses and vans, and lots of cameras. So begins a two-hour, high-speed, police-escorted convoy across the dark Bad Lands of southern Ukraine with full siren and blue flashing lights - with roadside urination stops every twenty minutes.
Midnight and just checked into the boat. I spread the single blanket over the pull-down bunk bed of the cabin that is my ‘luxury room’. A speaker above the bunk bellows loudly at me in Russian. It won’t turn off. It does this at odd times throughout the day and night for the next two days. A very loud sound system is pumping out 300 bpm on the deck of the sister ship next door.
We are called to the outdoor stage, built on the harbour’s edge, a short walk across water via a Russian army pontoon bridge.
Expecting to see a rig and stage similar to the drawing I‘d thrown out of the Hotel Phoenix roof, the bizarre, over-sized set that is being hastily nailed together by a committee of chippies takes me somewhat by surprise. I look up to see the vague shape of my rig swamped and surrounded by what must be the entire collection of Ukrainian lighting technology. Design by Politburo. My rig has been shoehorned into this aerial mess as an ‘added extra’. My front truss, carrying all my key light, is rigged fifteen feet behind the mic line. I reach for the
Olga, the nice young English-speaking lady from the lighting company explains, “Well the TV people sort of took over and changed a few things and we didn’t want to upset you…”
Out front I am introduced to the six non-English speaking desk operators behind the seven lighting control desks. “It’s OK, I will translate your cues as you call the show,” says Olga. Yeah, right! The seventh desk is mine, an old Avo Sapphire with an EPROM problem. It keeps corrupting memory as I roll from page to page. “Oh yes, it does that,” Olga smiles helpfully. A fraught overnight focus commences.
July 21st. Show day.
I hand out cue notes to all concerned and set about swearing at the desk for 6 hours as it refuses to remember the cues I’m trying to teach it.
The Turn hit the stage and it’s every man for himself as cue chaos reigns and notes are scattered to the wind. A dozen Russian voices bellow their tongue-twisted language over the headsets. Each desk operator improvises a free-form dialectic version of our show. I close my eyes and randomly push faders whose contents bear no resemblance to their legends.
The billowing smoke and mixed pizza that is now the stage reminds me of an old Soviet joke: ‘We know that you can turn an aquarium into fish soup; the question is, can you turn fish soup back into an aquarium?’
We have three sleepless after-show hours in our cabin before we leave for Nikolaiv, then home, with an old Ukrainian proverb ringing in our ears: ‘There will be trouble if the cobbler starts making pies.’
‘Danmarks Smukkeste Festival’ or ‘
Organised by the five thousand volunteers of the Skanderborg Festival Club, led by Walther, a four hundred and twenty-year-old woodland troll, it is an oasis set in a desert of festivals. Backstage catering in Walther’s VIP restaurant is the pinnacle of ‘al fresco’ cuisine. White linen tablecloths, waiter service, good food and fine wine.
The two brand new and much improved main stages sit proudly side-by-side carrying identical lighting rigs. There’s none of that ‘A’ stage or ‘B’ stage class-ridden nonsense here. Everyone is treated to the same excellent facilities. The rig hasn’t changed in years and plans can always be downloaded from their website at anytime. A hundred or so parcans and some moles, a few colour changers with a sprinkling of VL5s and Studio LP 1200s controlled from an Avo Diamond 1 and a Whole Hog all make for the perfect little long, light, summer evening, no-room-for-egos rig.
I’d given Murphy, the Whole Hog operator, his cue notes last night, so after a quick session on the Diamond at lunchtime, following a quick tweak of my specials, I’m relaxed and ready to rock.
Apart from a confused Dane who decides to crash into our out-front mixing bunker through the roof, the show went without incident. I even opened a bottle of wine for the show.
Skanderborg is a supremely well organised festival that sees the comfort and dignity of the punter as the most important element, and is determined to guarantee a stress-free time for all those onstage and backstage, and succeeds. Skanderborg seems to have all those extra little outdoor variables covered more than any other festival I can remember. It should be made a compulsory visit for all those organisers of the outdoor shambles and rip-offs I’ve stumbled through this summer.
But they wouldn’t have the time, would they. As I write this they’re already organising next year’s disasters …
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