I guess it's okay to share some of the distant past from time to time..... Here's an old thing I chanced upon as I was archiving today - it's a comms recording from an event I had the pleasure of showcalling back in 2006 that I might say was a little under-rehearsed....
Until the comms channels get tweaked, it's a total noise - in fact, you might deserve a prize just for trying to listen to it... but actually, once it calms down in the first 30 secs, especially for those in our "industry", this is a real peach of a comms recording! -
THE STORY
We were 'doing' Michael Jackson et al for a well known televised music awards ceremony and things were not going well at all - mainly because all the celebs were deciding everything last minute, the venue were imposing a curfew ruling for our finish time and there were some other things happening that I can't really write about! - Anyway, there was no event director backstage to sort all this. As a result, the crew (IE us) just made it up as we went along.
The main voices are me - Spike Allibone the showcaller, Iain the First AD for TV (Doing a senior floor manager / SM / Everything job) and Rachel and Sarah who were getting the acts on and off including Lindsay Lohan and other presenters who also had no idea what was going on.
The show only got recorded from about halfway through once a very savvy sound tech realised that someone might enjoy or perhaps even learn from listening to what happened "on cans" that day. What had happened before he hit record is sadly lost - since it was utter chaos!
Iain deliberately left his headset mic on during some of the negotiations happening backstage so that the rest of us could hear the nightmare he was having. Some of the real gems you have to listen hard quite hard for.... the actual time span of the show was much longer so I guess you could call this a "highlights" edit.
The company I was working for disappeared after this.
What did it look like on TV? - well, The Chris Brown moment can be viewed here.
The hysteria that was the We Are The World ‘performance’ can be seen here.