Posts Tagged ‘We WIll Rock You’

So where have I been since taking my dancing shoes off at the Nolans

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

Aside from being a bit too busy and occupied and then tiared to put updates on here. I left the Nolans tour early in the capable hands of Mr Nic Gray as I had to go off and PE the We Will Rock You move from Bristol to Edinburgh. This went fairly well I do like the Edinburgh Play House. The Fitup from our point of view went well even if our truck did turn up considerably later than advertised. I had to make a return trip as Brian and Roger were to play the Edinburgh Press Night.

After a thankfully dry Saturday at Norwich’s Earlham Park doing the PA for the fireworks with a nice big hang of Mayer Mica. I heded down to Autograph to help my old mate PJ with the re-working of the Saturday Night Fever we put into Madrid at the beginning of 2009. It was coming out of Madrid and going out on Spanish tour, however all the kit had come back to Autograph to tuned into a easy to move quick tour. I enede up going out to Valencia for a week to help PJ fit up the first venue with the Spanish Show Crew who were to tour it.
After a few days at home I went off to the NEC for a job with Delta for Toyota, their Dealer Managers conference, an intresting couple of days. Then well that was pretty much Christmas! The first year my daughter of nearly 2½ was starting to excited by it all.
Between Christmas and New Year there was a bit of a lastminute.com gig of pulling in some cables and reterminating some other things at Jeff Waynes’ Olliewood Studios as they have now replaced the Digidesign ProControl with a D-Control ES.

Most of January was taken up with We Will Rock You out of Edinburgh and into O2 Dublin also knows as The Point, in addition to the kit we had on the tour we had some Martin W8L’s and W8LS form Capitol the O2 was considerably bigger than anywhere else the tour had played. It took Toby and my self a few days of prepping bits down at Autograph and a couple of extra days in the arena to get it all ready. The opening night was not great, what with Electrics tripping their incoming power supply during the second number and then us haivng the D5t12 crash during the second half. Not a great moment to be gathered around the Front of House Area. Nor for the poor company manager who had to go on stage and with no control of the PA system try and convey information to the 6000 plus people sat in the arena. It was all tracked down to a corupt desk file, Thankfully it was posible to roll back to the Edinburgh show and rebuild a lot of the changes from memory.

Febuary had me down at the Adeplhi Theatre in the West End with the other usual suspects from Autograph putting in Andrew Lloyd Webbers’ Love Never Dies. Lots of Mayer speakers, an SD7 and a SD7 Extension at front of house and a SD8 sorting all the monitor sends out in the sub stage. Though I was mainly involved with cabeling up the pit as most of the other work had already been done.
During this month I was also back at the What’s on Stage awards with Mr Ben Harison not quite as raucus as last year but still a good event and a lot of famous faces there.

Right now I am out on the Katherine Jenkins Tour, where I am looking after keyboards and playback and the wireless comms.


We Will Rock You Brum to Brizol

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009

So after my nice long summer break I was back to work back in the team moving We Will Rock You from Birmingham to Bristol.  You may remember I had quite a large responsibility in setting this show up from a sound perspective but I have had very little to do with it since it opened in Manchester what must be best part of six months ago so there was an amount of re-frequenting my self with the vast quantity of speakers and cable there is on the gig.  It is a nice big rock show really so nothing on it is overly complex there is just a fair amount of it.  Now I do quite like Birmingham Hippodrome it’s a fairly nice big space and access is pretty good, it all came out fairly well and we had the trucked packed by about half five.  Only to discover that Mr Chester had put his car keys in his bag, which is in the personals flight case just, past halfway down the truck, so it all had to come off again, struck right off the Christmas List for an offence like that.  So it was not long after six that we were walking away from the theatre.

Sunday after a late check out Toby, Ali and my self drove down to Bristol, now last night I’d not made a big fuss over Toby’s keys as he was giving me a lift.  In Bristol Hippodrome we made a good start on the Sunday getting all the racks in and making a good start into the cable pulls.  The rest of the kit went in fairly painlessly and in good time as.  The team assured me it was one of the best fit-ups they have had, I’d like to take all the credit but I think it was mainly down to the riggers been able to get the Front of house motors up in good time so we weren’t waiting around.  One of the problems with Bristol Hippodrome when compared to the other A-List theatre touring venues is it’s lack of storage space, which meant a lot of the cases were off on deads wagons, we did well to keep tabs on our cases however Mr Simon Castle (Show Sound No2) let his case full of Bass Guitars slip which resulted in a Paul Mathiews’ trailer being called back luckily it was only at the local service station but a lot of messing around and a hour or so trip all the same so that’s two off the Christmas Card List now.

So I’ve spent the weekend at home working prep for the Nolans In the Mood Again Tour along with a site visit for Norwich Sparks fireworks display, so the next couple of months are turning out to be nice and busy.