Still More Dublin

First show last night. It was a corker. When everything got up and running the band was great and the crowd was climbing up the walls. Team audio had a bit of a nightmare situation. I don't do sound, and often the wants and needs of audio guys and lighting guys are diametrically opposed. Where they want to put PA or monitors I want to put lights. When they want to turn an AC/DC record up to 11 to make sure the pa sounds like a giant stereo I need complete silence so that I can communicate with the guy hanging upside down, 35 feet in the air focusing lights. It's a constant struggle for space on stage and sometimes power issues. Lights always make things 'buzz' on stage. The old retort is that people don't go home humming to lights. Also, people don't pay $30 to stare at a PA. Whatever. Yesterday I watched the audio guys sweat for 6 straight hours trying to get it together. The circumstances were far from ideal. Our monitor engineer is brand new. Not brand new in the sense that he hasn't worked before, but that he doesn't know the band at all. They have about a dozen mixes on stage. In theory that means there are twelve spots where a musician can stand. Each of those spots needs a different mix of things blaring out of them. Singers like to hear their voice. Drummers like to hear the drums, and generally keyboard players like to hear a perfect, auto-tuned mix of the backing vocals, the bottom snare mic, the underside of a xlyophone and the sound of a cricket's wings gently rubbing together. You get the idea. It's a rough job. With this band in particular, once you get everything dialed in, and about ten people are happy, it all changes. Each song is different. Each song introduces a new instrument. Often at random, musicians will walk over to a rack of guitars and pick anything they fancy, plug it in and go. A stratocaster sounds different than a ukelele, usually, so it takes time to get it together. Yesterday it was not so much together. The band's soundcheck ran 30mins past doors and the support band didn't get a soundcheck, which isn't the end of the world. However, when they line checked nothing, and I mean nothing, worked. There was a mini harpsichord that, when played, made that sound in The Matrix when someone travels through time or whatever through a telephone, only through the pa at 104db. Ugly. Again, I don't know a whole lot about it. I spent the day before slaving over a lighting desk so that I could come in yesterday, put my feet up and watch people run around like maniacs. Oh, I did fix a hazer which involved me truning it off and on five or six times, kicking it, scratching my head like an ape and then taking the filter off of the intake tube, rinsing it off and putting it back. It worked. Today is the second show. Backline and audio guys are in early today to make things work properly. I think I might stroll in around 4pm. Tomorrow we fly to Manchester (back to Manchester for me) for a day off. Thursday begins the tour proper with, in theory, everything as it had been planned. Hopefully it all works and looks great. The band has been really busy doing promo and such so there has been very little feedback about the visiual elements of the show, which is strange because the band seems to be very visiually oriented. Plus there is lots of video. There could be absolutely anything projected on the screens behind them. Really. Although in saying that, I did a hellish Belle and Sebastian tour not long ago that had some low-res video projected onto a backdrop. It ended up being some short video loops that I made, and lots of still images. It looked pretty cool, but the band had absloutely no opinion what so ever about what was projected 40' wide behind them. Curious. Here's to back to back shows in the same venue. I'm looking forward to 4 in London.