It was the Leicester Music Festival at Leicester Tigers ground last Friday and Saturday, and I was monitoring throughout.
It was quite a small affair. The event had a target of 15000 each day, but less than 5000 people attended on Friday, and 7500 on Saturday. Hardly surprising – the mix of performers was so varied that Labyrinth fans paid £50 to listen to a lot of Katie B and Sam Bailey, and kids who wanted to watch Saturdays, Union J, or Diversity had to be ushered out of the stadium before Tiny Templar or Professor Green started swearing at them. Old folk like me who quite enjoyed Billy Ocean, UB40, and (although not in my case) Kool and the Gang had to listen to an awful lot of rubbish from folk that we hadn’t heard of.
So what was my role? Well, it works like this. Tigers rent the ground to the promoter but Tigers employ consultants to monitor noise and to instruct the sound engineer to reduce the volume to prevent a breach of the licence. The trouble is that there is a second sound engineer in the “sound tent”, who works for the performer, and whose job is to increase the noise level for maximum effect. Although engineer 1 is in in overall control, engineer 2 is generally the most assertive, likely to “persuade” engineer 1 to step away from the controls.
My role, accompanied by a colleague, was to provide guidance for the Thursday night sound check, and take measurements both in the ground and at various residential locations outside of the ground to ensure that the volume specified in Tigers licence is not breached. With an assertive consultant my job is easy, but in this case the consultant and his team were very nice, but not particularly assertive.
The trouble started with Billy Ocean’s engineer. The consultants had provided us with a 2-way radio, and when the noise level breached the limit I knew that instructions were being ignored in the sound tent. I arrived there to find that engineer 2 (for Billy Ocean) had threatened engineer 1, who told us all (as best he could over the music) that this was a micky-mouse event and he was not going to risk his neck just to adhere to a licence.
I decided that some intervention was required, found a quietish spot to phone Tigers Management, advised that the licence was being breached, and suggested that maybe they should “have a word” in the sound tent. The Tigers events manager was suitably assertive, threatened to pull the plug, and the volume was reduced. We had the same scenario with the rapper Professor Green (which we expected), and Kool and the Gang. Surprisingly the engineers for Tiny Templar and Labrinth, both big names in the modern music scene, were very professional and worked with the consultant. Modern performers have grown up (career wise) in a regime of noise restricting licence conditions. I suspect that outdoor events were less common when the older performers started their careers, and in any case sound systems at the time were probably incapable of providing the power and low frequencies of modern systems, and so sound engineers had a free-reign.
On the whole I enjoyed the event. It was two long hot days, monitoring from 11am to 10.30pm. We did a lot of walking, especially since I was also monitoring a smaller festival of local bands on a park half a mile away. On the Saturday we walked another half mile and back to find some sun lotion when my arms started to burn (the nearest pharmacy only offered a £15 tiny bottle of factor 50 baby lotion!), and yet another half mile to the office to change the sound meter battery. And of course the monitoring involves walking in an out of the ground, and around monitoring locations.
It was certainly an educational couple of days. I had only heard of six of the 19 performers/bands in the festival, and of those six although I knew the songs, I would not have been able to attribute them to the artiste. I surprised myself by actually enjoying Tiny Templar, and I was briefly caught bouncing around to the Labrinth finale – in each case the engineers kept the volume down, and so we were able to return to the stadium and watch the show after just a short sound check. Since each was the last act we also had to be near the engineer’s tent in case it over-ran the licence deadline.
And then there was the language. Not that of Professor Green, but the language of youth used by my younger colleague. When he announced that Tiny Templar would be “Banging” I set the sound meter to display lower frequencies. It appears that “Banging” indicates that the singer is particularly talented and appreciated. “Wicked” was around when my kids were younger, and I was aware that this had evolved into “bad”, but describing a band that is exceptionally good as being “sick” was new to me. I did try this new language, stating that I had enjoyed Tiny Templar, who was so banging and bad that I was sick. This didn’t seem to be quite the approved vernacular for the occasion.
Although I quite enjoyed the event, on the whole I would rather have been in my own garden with a cold beer.
Technically we live in Oaktree House, but sadly the tree had to go.
We now have a thriving Oakstump at the front of the house.
