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Anyone know what's up with the Hope?


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I don't wish to spread malicious gossip, or discredit a venue unduly, but a turn of events over the weekend has got me a little perturbed. Just wondering if anybody else here is liaising with, or connected to, the current crew running the music at the Hope and Anchor, in Islington?

The story so far: towards the end of last week, various threads popped up around a few Facebook groups to the effect that a couple of sound engineers had been parachuted in by the venue and subsequently ripped off, and the PA system was in a pretty dire state.

This alarmed me, as my band is playing there very soon (sorry, it's hard to add context without making this all sound like a plug...). On Saturday, I emailed the guy at the venue to ask what was going on, and whether we should bring our own PA to be on the safe side.

I was content to wait for a reply, but this morning I had a gander online and these threads had all disappeared. This makes me think:
i. was it just some people trying to smear the venue's name?
ii. did the venue bully the posters into taking the threads down?
iii. have they kissed and made up, and the original posters deleted their threads out of good will?

Basically just wondering if the dense network of BC has any inside info that might put my mind at rest. (I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it's number iii, and that I'll get a response shortly to say that all the gear is fine/has been fixed.)

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The guy we`ve always dealt with is Rulie, and he`s a really decent bloke. The management there are also nice, I can`t remember the land-ladies name but she`s been there for long time and is very nice to deal with too. This sounds like some sort of campaign to me, especially as everything has miraculously gone now.

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[quote name='Lozz196' timestamp='1490020546' post='3261487']
The guy we`ve always dealt with is Rulie, and he`s a really decent bloke. The management there are also nice, I can`t remember the land-ladies name but she`s been there for long time and is very nice to deal with too. This sounds like some sort of campaign to me, especially as everything has miraculously gone now.
[/quote]

Allow me to thicken the plot some: Rulie has not worked there since the end of last year. It's not clear whether he left or was given the push, but I've been dealing with someone completely different for this one. Thinking about it, this opens up a fourth possibility, that it's just some people over-reacting to what some might call teething problems while the new guys get to grips with the place...

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[quote name='christhammer666' timestamp='1490097122' post='3262100']
be interesting to see how this pans out. Am meant to be playing there in august
[/quote]

As I feel it is my Basschat Civic Duty to report back: approach with caution.

Not long after I started this thread, the guy replied. He said yes, there had been a problem - "engineer blew the desk", apparently - but they'd got it sorted now. Maybe it was the fact he'd only bothered to scribble a one-line email to assuage my concerns, but something about this didn't sit right with me. As such, we went for a contingency plan.

Load-in was 5.30 on Saturday, so I went straight to the venue while the others went to the studio to collect our gear. I basically had them on standby while I sniffed around for the slightest hint of problems with the PA. I got down there to find the guy who runs the venue, and a sound engineer, disconnecting their mixing desk, and suddenly I was helping somebody from a hire company lug another desk down the stairs. While the chap from the hire company tried to patch his desk into their system, I took the venue's guy to one side and quietly reminded him that we had a PA system that we could bring if he thought there might still be a problem.

"Oh yeah, that might be handy actually..."

I'd told him this on Monday. Only now, at two hours' notice, did he decide that us bringing our own PA might be a good idea. When the hired desk inevitably failed to talk to their system, we set up our speakers either side of the stage, and the sound engineer did a sterling job crouching down on the side of the stage by our PA amp, making sure the vocals were audible.

The guy running the venue, on the other hand, went upstairs for a jazz cigarette and spent the rest of the evening baked off his t*ts. Kept telling me, "it's all rock'n'roll, innit mate?" as if this might encourage me to crack a smile.

So: no malice, as far as I can see. Just utterly inept.

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