mike257

God, this is going to take some digging up.... The Funks - aged about 9/10, with some kids from the next street. I was on lead vocals. Lasted two "rehearsals" before we got bored and went back to riding bikes and playing football Blueprint - aged about 16, some semi-competent original material and a load of covers, imploded when the drummers classical musician parents disapproved of us booking a gig at the Cavern. He became a very successful orchestral percussionist, so they were probably right B-BOM - aged about 17 - Played the usual array of underage local band nights, playing a handful of originals mixed in with Rage Against The Machine, Green Day, Nirvana, Foos covers and the like Amidst Speculation - 2002, a one night only, completely improvised metal gig with me, a guitarist, two drummers and two singers. Entirely as chaotic and ill-advised as the description suggests! Call To Order - 2002-2003, hit 18 years of age, was allowed in proper venues legitimately. First "proper" original project. Two members from previous band. Grungy, riffy, rock tunes with a political leaning. Mexican Alibi - 2003 - pre-existing bassless band that I joined on bass as an occasional live and studio member. Weird angular indie-rock with odd time signatures. Lots of fun sweaty local gigs. Seven - 2004, me and the drummer from Call To Order plus a couple of new mates. Moody, dark rock tunes with electronics and samples from films that we thought made us sound clever. Played a few half decent supports in the local Academy/Barfly venues The Idiot Rate - 2005-2007, three of us from Seven with a new singer/guitarist. Best effort at "taking it seriously", apparently one of the first unsigned bands to be booked on an Academy headline tour (in the smallest rooms, and nobody came to most of them). We were aiming for the early 2000s British post-hardcore thing (Hundred Reasons, Hell Is For Heroes, early Biffy Clyro) but everyone just called us emo 😄 did a lot of DIY touring and some decent headline shows and support slots at home (including Enter Shikari, Sikth, and a very early and raw Bring Me The Horizon, who we definitely didn't envisage becoming an arena filling rock behemoth at the time!) Connecting Flight - 2007/9 - mathy, noisy, At The Drive-In-esque stuff with the singer from Seven and a revolving cast of half the guitarists in Liverpool, which became.... In/Casino/Out - 2008/9 which was essentially the same band and revolving cast as above. Hotwire - possibly 2007ish - classic rock influenced with two mega guitarists and a singing drummer, joined temporarily for a few months to fill in The Buffalo Riot - 2008-2010 - a different direction, americana channeling Ryan Adams and CSNY with the singer from The Idiot Rate. A marked change after years of noisy riffs, and they're still going now! The Brave Kid - 2011 - my last solid effort at making original music. Big rock songs with singalong choruses, twisty riffs in strange time signatures and the best drummer I've ever had in a band. Imploded quickly due to rotating singer shenanigans. All my gigging as a muso since then has been in function/corporate world The Recollection 2012-2014 - function band, swapped the fat strings for the skinny ones and bought a Tele. My first dip in wedding world which led to a few years full-timing it Motown Gold 2014-2019 - pretending to be James Jamerson, who wouldn't love it? Hung up my gigging shoes in early 2019 because it was getting in the way of my other career/love as a tour manager and sound engineer, so I just make other people's bands loud now and only play bass at home or mucking about at soundchecks. It's brought up some nice memories racking my brains to think of it all though, and I'm sure I've missed a couple of bands along the way too, not to mention countless ones I've depped for that I didn't list!

I used this chap, who's highly recommended on a lot of the drummers groups on Facebook, for a printed skin ahead of a tour earlier this year. Reasonably priced, good comms, and managed to do a rush job for us and actually hand delivered it to the audio company where our truck was being loaded. https://m.facebook.com/100042380572187/

Ah, up the north end! You won't have a purple wheelie bin up there, which some will say means it's not technically Liverpool 🤣 I lived in Crosby briefly when I was about 13. I'm over in Wavertee in the south end these days. It's a lovely area, and you can add Harmonics Music to your guitar shop list. South Drive has regular live music in a few of the pubs/bars down there, done the odd pub gig and acoustic set over there back when I used to dabble in that. Again, nice places to eat/drink. The Plaza cinema is community owned and a decent place to catch a film. Crosby beach is lovely, and you've got the Anthony Gormley iron men on the beach for a nice bit of public art. We drive up to walk the dogs there every now and again. You've also got easy access further north to Formby - the pine woods are a National Trust site and the sand dunes and beach are great to explore with the kids.

Sounds great! Know which part of the city you're heading to yet?

Can't believe I forgot the Cali. Cracking pub in general, and like you say, a good spot for jazz. Now that I think on it, The Grapes on Roscoe St do jazz bits from time to time too.

Welcome to Liverpool, it's a boss place to be! Live music: for big stuff, we've got the arena, the Olympia (which is architecturally wonderful with a fascinating history, if a little scruffy), the obligatory O2 Academy, and Arts Club (which was a favourite haunt of mine before Academy Group took it over and sucked the soul from it, but still gets decent touring gigs), and the Mountford Hall at the uni. The Philharmonic is gorgeous for classical and for gigs in general. Smaller stuff, there's Frederik's if you're a jazzer, and Phase One, Jacaranda, EBGBs, Jimmy's for 100-200 cap shows with a mix of touring and local artists. The Zanzibar was a legendary small venue but it changed hands in recent years, was largely rebuilt and by many accounts has lost both the character and the excellent sound quality that made it what it was. 24 Kitchen Street has the more interesting/out there stuff and does a lot of hip hop, jazz, electronic stuff - I occasionally mix shows in there when I'm off tour and there's always interesting things going on, a very cool spot. Outpost is smaller again and does a lot of the independent punkier/heavier stuff. There's obviously The Cavern on Mathew St, and a fair few bars down that end that have live music, but it's predominantly covers gigs and a bit of a tourist trap. I'm sure I've missed a couple of others too - I don't get out in the city centre that often these days between touring work and the kids! Music shops: you've got Curly Music in the city centre, Moran Sound (oldest music shop in the city) out in the suburbs in Gateacre, PMT are headquartered in the south of the city and have a collection point at their HQ (but not a shop/showroom) and Frailers is out in Runcorn, a short drive away. For techy/recording stuff, Studiocare are out in Speke and have a small showroom attached to the warehouse. Luthiers: you've got Palfray Guitars working out of Sort Rehearsal Rooms (which is a wonderful, clean, well equipped and modern rehearsal studio run by lovely people), or you've got KGB over the water in Birkenhead, both are great. It's a thriving city with a huge musical community, loads of culture and history to soak up, some cool things happening outside of the city centre on Smithdown Road, Lark Lane and the like, and a great restaurant scene both in the city and the suburbs with a lot of boss independent cafes and restaurants around You'll love it!

There's a hell of a lot of incidences of crucial bits of kit going missing or getting delayed on flights at the moment with the state of the airports at the mo, so wouldn't be at all surprised if that's had something to do with it! One band recently had 14 items of their fly pack go missing at Heathrow, and a tech friend of mine has just flown to America with a touring party and none of the backline made it to the other end, nor did his personal luggage!

Having been there over the weekend working with a few bands, I'd say that the alternative elements are still very much in existence. There's so many stages across such a huge site, and unlike most festivals that are one big centrally managed entity, there's whole corners of Glastonbury operating in their own little independent bubbles. There's still the hippy gatherings, independent traders, weird and wonderful happenings in tiny tents, niche artists, debauched club nights, family friendly areas, and who knows what else. The mainstream TV coverage is focused on the handful of bigger stages with the more recognisable artists because that's what most people will tune in for. What I saw whilst dragging my tech box on the mammoth walks between stages was that there's a huge breadth of things going on there behind the obvious headline grabbing stuff.

It's not often the case that recording engineers are involved in the live production as it's a very different skillset, although the handful I can think of that I work with who split their time fairly evenly between studio and live work are actually some of the best live mix engineers I know.

The desk at the side of the stage is the monitor engineer's console, he's mixing what the band hear and has nothing to do with what's out front. The front of house console is out in the auditorium and can hear exactly what's going on. The tour didn't decline the house rig. The main left and right PA hangs and the flown sub array of the in-house system were used, and augmented with additional ground stacked PA and subs from the touring rig. There was a problem with the in-house system that occured early in EC's set which the touring team identified and worked with the house team to resolve. As for where I'm getting "that gem" from... I'm a touring engineer and production manager myself, I have a number of colleagues and friends on the EC touring crew and also with the support, and I'm well aware of the issues that they had and how much was done to resolve it as soon as it happened. Everyone who works on a show at that level is striving for it to be the best it can be, every day. We put redundancies in place, we plan, we test, we check, but sometimes issues develop that do affect the show and all that you can do is try your best to make it work with the resources available to you. Often, this happens completely unseen and the audience would never even be aware there'd been an issue. Sometimes, unfortunately, that isn't the case.

There was a serious technical issue with the sound system that hadn't presented itself during the soundcheck, and that the touring tech team worked incredibly hard to resolve during the show. Sometimes, despite everyone's best efforts, things can go wrong.

I was their tour manager for the last year. Recently stepped down because of other touring commitments. Lovely bunch and all wonderful players!

I've worked with Lyndon a lot over the last year. Absolutely wonderful guy and insanely talented. Currently playing keys for Go West.

Anyone that wants to see evidence of PAT testing (or anyone with a clue, at least) doesn't want to look at stickers. They'll ask for your PAT certificate. This is less a certificate and more an inspection record on a big spreadsheet, showing the items tested, the results, and the date of testing. That's what venues are asking you to email over in advance, and if you've had your kit tested, the tester will have supplied you with this document. Their insurance will cover them if they're liable for, for example, an accident that causes someone an injury. It won't cover them if they're not liable. Your PLI is to cover your liability for something like that happening. That's not a new development because of someone cutting costs, that's just how liability insurance works and always has done.

The click track will be usually either fed to the mixing desk and returned to the drummer in their in ear monitor mix, along with the rest of the band as needed, or the drummer may have a small mixer as part of their monitoring setup which receives the click directly from the playback system along with their mix from the monitor engineer, allowing them to directly control how much click they want to blast their ears with!

I've used them in large scale touring productions right down to little club shows. It's a massively useful tool. One high end function/corporate showband I've mixed a few times had two different clicks outputting from the playback rig, each with different verbal cues built in - one for the band and one for the vocalists - so even a last minute dep jumping in on a show had cues in their ears for every section change, breakdown, ending etc - great when the band had loads of mashups and unique arrangements. I've seen some very sophisticated setups where a playback rig is sending clicks, automating patch changes on keys and guitar rigs, and feeding timecode to lighting/video to sync the whole show up. There's huge creative and practical potential in these tools that goes far beyond just keeping unruly tempo wandering in check!

Soooooooo good. Remember seeing the Used For Glue video on MTV2 back in the day and being instantly hooked. Such a great record. I met Walter when I was about 17 (20 years ago 😳) and he was an absolute gent too, spent about 45 minutes just hanging out and chatting.

The bigger the venue, the less you need a substantial backline. I'm usually pushing faders these days, but when playing I've tried to go direct and IEM as often as possible for a long time now.

You should! Loads to see. Lots of heritage sites, all the main museums are free to visit, tons of good food places, lovely architecture. Obviously there's all the Beatles stuff if you're that way inclined, but plenty to enjoy even if you're not.

Glad to see the old girl still getting some use! My Yamaha's are long gone, but my SQ5 is doing solid work. Currently piloting an SD12 around the UK and Europe mixing monitors, lots of fun....

The bleed is often down to poor quality sound cards within the laptop, and/or cheap cables. A half decent external interface should sort you out.

My experience of this over the years (having done the original band DIY touring thing in my youth, to occasional covers gigs around a day job, to full time muso/techy work) is that, broadly speaking, the more professional the act, the more accustomed they are to you having multiple projects on the go and to have to use deps from time to time. When I was depping around all over the place, I'd frequently drop in to reasonably high end function gigs with nothing more than the setlist and a handful of notes on the arrangements, and a Motown band I was involved with would sometimes end up doing a gig as a ten piece with seven players who'd never even met before turning up at the gig. Conversely, it was the part time pub bands looking for a dep who'd ask you to come in for rehearsals before playing for £70 at a local boozer. I remember one in particular asking me to come to a rehearsal to "try out" to dep a handful of pub shows for them, and to make sure I could play Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick, because they liked to "test out bass players with it". I think whatever the situation, whether it's a pro working band, a part time pocket money thing, or a fun rehearsal room project that might play the odd show, the important thing is that everyone knows what the expectation is going in to it and is on the same page. If you just want to jam and play the odd gig, and dip in and out of other projects, but the rest of the band want to be playing shows every week (or vice versa) it's doomed. If everyone knows the score, and is comfortable with seeing the occasional dep drop in, then it's definitely workable to be involved with multiple projects.

I've been trying not to do NYE gigs for the last few years, but after the work diary being ravaged by 'rona I'm currently saying yes to everything that comes in! Sadly no four string action - I'll be hauling a load of PA in to a fancy hotel and mixing a band.

Put two products in my basket (Polytune clone and the cheapo 3" monitor speakers), came to £56. Put the 30% discount code in and it knocked it down to £48. I'm no Carol Vorderman, but that's definitely not 30% off! EDIT: On further investigation - anything already showing as having a discounted price isn't affected by the codes. Ah, well!

Ben is great, I was production manager on a tour with him and two American Elvis chaps a few years ago. He's a cracking performer and a properly lovely guy, will be a fun show!