SUMMER PUDDIN' - a rock diary
"You’d better come and have a look at this one…" So starts the day that was to end with riot police.

• Patrick Marks

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Ah! The halcyon days of summer. The outdoor show time of year when LDs and sound engineers, drum techs and drivers gather together in fields foreign, green and sunsoaked, to enjoy the music and hospitality of the Great European Festival’s Mixed Bill. Three months of tents and gazebos, boiled rice and pork, shorts and suntan lotion punctuated by intermittent bursts of airline alcohol.
OK, so you’ve only had a ten minute slot on a desk you’d once heard about, yet prayed you’d never encounter, to program fifty TurboScans, as the sun bleaches out the stage, with a programmer that speaks no English. And it’s a drag that none of the colours in the Parcans are ones that you would be seen dead in; there’s not enough light and the promoter didn’t bother sending your plot to the lighting company anyway.

But, hey! The punters are all happily pissed and the sun’s out, so stick in a few washes, check on your specials and head off to hospitality, where a bunch of buddies you haven’t seen in ages are swapping tales, telephone numbers and ‘T’ shirts. As ‘summer evenings’ and ‘outdoors’ usually equals ‘light’ in Northern Europe, then the job of the LD can be reduced to a literal white wash, and the outdoor experience can be enjoyed the more! Or less, depending on your ‘precious’ handicap.

You may be, for instance, one of that strange breed of LDs that insists on flashing banks of heavily coloured Smarties on and off in broad daylight whilst a twenty five knot wind deposits the entire output of a dozen F100 smoke machines onto Monitor City. The band play in the gloomy half light of shadows as, once again, you realise the impossibility of getting anywhere near your production look whilst His Great Light In The Sky is on.

Thus it is, all over Europe. From Reykjavik to Oporto, Glastonbury to Kiev, everybody has to have an outdoor show. Build a stage and stick on a few bands, preferably in a totally impractical location. A Swiss mountain top in a snow storm, a Norwegian quartz quarry below sea level and a railway station in Brussels spring to mind amongst the most recently bizarre sites I’ve had the misfortune to cope with. Get a brewery or ciggie company to cough up some dosh, a few fireworks to finish…easy, innit?

Well, not quite. It’s those extra variables that creep into the equation that make the outdoor show such a risky platform for live entertainment, as I discovered this summer. We had rain. We had biblical rain where, as Genesis says, (the biblical writer, not the biblical band) "…all the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened." (C.7, V11) ‘Glast’, as we now know, is an Anglo-Saxon word for ‘rain’ and ‘on bury’ it certainly does and did. I hear ‘Party in the Park’ was a bit of a boat ride too. I think that was the night I saw Bryan Adams play to 10,000 cold and rain-soaked Austrians in a Rankwiel swamp after I had done my bit with The Turn supporting. Meanwhile backstage, a Creationist truck driver suffering from trenchfoot marched local farm animals up a ramp, two by two, into his trailer and set off into the night screaming something about Mount Ararat and olive leaves.

But it’s not just the rain, is it? It’s generators blowing up, roof threatening to fall in, plots being ignored, local crews being crap, local rigs being naff, catering being non-existent, desks not working and a general lack of feeling of being in control. The ‘attention to detail’ that we can all concentrate on when we carry our own production and crew often degenerates into a scramble to get even your basics happening when confronted with a local promoter’s idea of what is needed to light your show.
What follows are some extracts from my diary for June. All incidents are true, some trivial, some not.

Germany, Plauen. June 1st. 10.00 a.m.
The curtains of my bunk twitch open. The face of Steve Arch, lighting crew chief, looks worried. Unusual. "You’d better come and have a look at this one…" So starts the day that was to end with riot police.
I am lead to a crumbling ‘al fresco’ concrete platform with a meagre roof that still has ‘Ikea’ stickers on its main supports. Rigger, Johnny Hotpants, is looking woefully at the flimsy piece of downstage ladder beam with two green span sets attached. With incredulity in his eyes and terror in his voice he whispers hoarsely, "The house rigger says that’s for our front truss."
Drawings are produced, architect’s reports and certificates conjured up by local promoters, voices are raised. We are unconvinced by their calculations and arm waving protestations of safety and assurances that we could fly a U-boat from this roof. We prefer to operate on a common sense prediction of what will happen if we try to hang a fully loaded forty-foot truss, with bells and whistles, off an ‘Ikea’ gazebo.
Eventually a practical demonstration is called for…
"Truss moving!" It doesn’t. The Lodestars eagerly devour the chain. The chain goes tight and the roof bends and slowly comes down to meet us. Our point made, we retir to the safety of the Hotel Phoenix whilst the raised voices continue long into the afternoon.
During the afternoon a goodly number of loyal punters have been arriving and drinking the local fighting-and-falling-down liquid at a bar adjacent to the load in/out. At 5.30 the raised voices stop and the inevitable load out begins. By 6.30, police in riot gear carrying big sticks arrive to pull the drunk and ugly crowd off our stage manager as he desperately tries to shovel truck loads of production back onto the trucks, whilst they push it violently and erratically back to the stage. I dunno, I’m just an LD…

Steinbach, East Germany. 10th. June.
Built in the fifties for the amusement of the occupying force, the Russian Army provided today’s stage. Hidden in the dank depths of a forest in former East Germany this amphitheatre can only be accessed by cross loading the contents of our mighty Transam pantechnicons onto two tiny tail-lift trucks. These then judder and jerk their way through the dense spruce canopy down a steep and twisty track, edged by sudden vertical drops, to the small backstage area. Though slow, the load in has gone without incident… in daylight.
Show over, and the reverse of the load in gets under way…in the dark. The small backstage area is well lit, unlike the tortuous track, and full of rock show associated paraphernalia. The first truck arrives, front end first. Quickly realising that lack of space means the truck will have to reverse in to load, it is sent off, in reverse, back up the dark and twisted track to find somewhere to turn around.
A post-show reverie and stroll through the woods, is startlingly interrupted as the back end of a truck appeared suddenly and violently through dense undergrowth fifteen feet above me. Wheels spinning noisily in the fresh air as it rocks gently up and down, deciding whether or not to complete the plummet. I fumble my way up the embankment to the front end of the truck. The German driver is thrashing about in the dark, swearing and kicking his truck, whose front end now completely blocks the load out track. Its back end hangs impotently and precariously in the air.
Much arm waving follows as the load out stopped dead. The truck blocks any way of getting another vehicle into a position to pull it out. Suggestions of pushing it over the edge to get it out of the way don’t go down too well with truck owner, so after an hour of hair brained schemes involving Lodestar motors, trees and pulleys, we call the fire brigade!
A little red terrier of a four-wheel drive fire truck pants excitedly onto the scene, revs its engine for a bit, and then shoots off into the black forest to appear two minutes later in front of the beached truck. Winches are connected, and the little red terrier drags the truck out by the scruff of its neck to cheers and applause.
The truck now sheds hydraulic fluid over the track, coughs and refuses to move. The little red terrier is called once again to drag it into the woods where both driver and truck are shot. It starts to rain. The load out proceeds with a single truck, slowly. Dawn breaks as our Transam transport trundles away.

Abrantes, Portugal. 14th. June.
We say a tearful ‘good-bye’ to our LSD production and are having to battle our way through the rest of summer using whatever the locals think my drawing means.I appear to be lucky today. A rig is hanging at head height that strongly resembles my own festival rig… It is! And all in the right place too! I scamper beaming across the stage towards three very tidy looking Avo 72 way racks, to be greeted with smiles and a copy of my own plot. The sun is hot; the location is cool. There’s an endless view over undulating hills of vines and olive groves to distant mountains. Eager stagehands joyfully push colour into Parcans and sing simple folk songs whilst dusky maidens offer me cold beer and food. The crew chief tells me, "Everything is the way you want it. Would a 3.00 p.m. focus be OK?" I fall at his feet as he shows me the trusted old Celco 90 way desk, in the shade, ready to program blind. Today is good.
3.00 p.m. and we’ve finished flashing through the rig, ready to focus. And it all works!
6.00 p.m. Focus is a distant memory and I’ve long since whacked a show in the desk. I’m now fiddling with the smoke machine, looking for things to do.
"We must test the generator," he says, as a small black cloud moves momentarily across the sun. "We must put all the lights to full for ten minutes," he says as the sound of a distant siren sings in my head.
The generator coughs its usual black smoke for a few seconds as 300 Parcans all scream "Me! Me! Me!" then settle down to apparently purr quietly. Two minutes later the rig goes off. "Nuff of a soak test, then," I think as I turn to see the generator belching thick black smoke.
But not smoke from the exhaust. In fact, smoke from everywhere but the exhaust. Black smoke is quickly followed by a volcano of orange and yellow balls of flame boiling their way up towards the clear blue sky. We all run away. I fall over four policemen in the rush.
The Portuguese fire department arrive to find the generator’s owner on his knees in the road beside his machine, weeping uncontrollably as the last of the flames died to leave a smoking, melted wreck. It’s a bank holiday in Portugal, and it’s 7.00 p.m.
"That’ll be the lighting gennie, then," I mutter and get back onto the Hotel Phoenix.

Aalborg,Denmark. 23rd.June.
Laid back Scandinavian affair spread over three stages and four days. In spite of our late appearance the first half of the show will be in daylight, so I’m looking forward to a nice easy day.
Klaus, my man for the day, introduces me to the ubiquitous Avo Pearl that controls the 10 bars of six hung from anywhere that the low roof allowed. Mainly white light, with three colour tints from the back. Some Source 4 profiles (they’re everywhere this summer!) and four Mac. 600s. Perfect for a near daylight show.
The rain is with us again, and the hay-scattered field is now an alligator infested swamp.
Klaus is Danish, but has an Eton School accent, which may inspire a misplaced confidence in his thoroughness. Looking back, that large bottle of Cognac under his hammock should have told me…
I’m perched on a box next to a follow spot I’m not using, fifteen feet above the sound desk. Klaus has just left. It’s show time. I play with white light for a bit until it gets dark enough for colour to kick in. I push the fader marked ‘RED’. The stage turns blue. I push the fader marked ‘BLUE’ and the stage goes red. I reach for the intercom, but there isn’t one. Then the single Pearl desk light pops its little clogs and I can’t see my hands in front of me.
I can’t see the soddin’ desk! I’m operating by Braille! I frantically grope for the ‘blind mode’ button I’d seen somewhere once, praying that those clever people at Avo had foreseen this very situation. They hadn’t.
As the battery dies on my mini Maglite clasped between my teeth, I see Klaus reeling across the field with his Cognac lifted high and his head tipped back. I push what I think should be the audience blinders in an attempt to get some light on my desk. The Turn go into a slow ballad. A battery of strobe lights machine-gun their way into the punters faces. Klaus falls over…I die.

Dessel, Belgium. 25th. June.
It’s ‘Graspop’, a huge heavy metal festival. Lighting supplied by EML of Brussels. It’s good to see friendly and competent faces and little VLP*‰ stickers on every piece of equipment. I’ve inherited Martin Brennan’s Iron Maiden rig, here the previous night. I’d seen the plot weeks before and was looking forward to playing with it. Until I got here. The promoter had decided that he couldn’t afford the full Monty for two nights, so had removed all the moving heads and colour changers leaving me with five gigantic colour washes. But very nice washes they were to, Martin!
The drummer fell off his riser tonight and trashed some of my strobe and DWE loaded Marshall cabs. The rain continues…
Weiner Neustadt, Austria. 1st. July.
Why is Austria so difficult? Three simple shows and all of them blighted by a dirge of excuses and apologies.
For the first we are taken to a small brewery, next to a castle, with a pretty little beer garden and a tiny wooden ‘oompah band’ platform at one end…with a tree in front of The Star’s mike position. I giggle as ‘the lighting rig’, two six lamp bars with no colour, is trimmed at two metres on top of two wind-up stands. The drum tech queries the practicality of the venue as his riser now occupies the entire stage area. Out front is log-jammed with boxes. The stage manager mutters something about "…shovelling two tonnes of shit into a one tonne pot," as dozens of aged Austrian ramblers invade, march into the cellar bar that is doubling as catering and production office, and demand beer and bratwurst.
"Yes, of course, when Deep Purple played here, we built a proper stage in the car park at the top of the hill, but they said it was unsafe…"
We load out. Piss-ups and breweries?

Number two is outdoors. One of those stages that magically folds out of a truck. The rig arrives two hours late and is dumped in an unmarked heap of metal and cable in front of four bemused and confused lighting techs. They haven’t been given a plot. I draw one. The guy that seems to know what he’s doing leaves, "to do, I must, another show." Eight hours, much cursing and arm waving later the rig is patched, sort of. But the desk isn’t, and the doors are now open and the Fender guitar with the single coil pick-up sounds like a chainsaw every time it goes anywhere near its jack plug. "Have you seen the state of the mains? Two phases for lights and one for sound and backline!" the stage manager wails. Arms are waved and voices raised. The power is turned off just as I start to program the desk…

Show three. Big new arena on an airfield. Same crew, same rig, same comedy of errors. Though hot-patched successfully yesterday, nothing was marked. So today, match the Socapex to the dimmer becomes a six-hour circus entertainment, as a lighting crew argue their way around three floor-supported trusses, randomly cross plugging cable.
Eventually, desk checked and rig focused, I wander outside to the airstrip to hitch a ride in one of the gliders I’d noticed being catapulted to a thousand feet, then set gloriously free. Circling idly, two thousand feet above the arena and chasing therms, I am tranquilly unaware of the old, bearded Austrian, beer in hand, pulling Socapex out of the (still!) unmarked dimmer racks below.
The familiar noise of a chainsaw through a PA system welcomes me back to earth, followed closely by, "Pat, your lights are making the guitars buzz again!" Now, I’m only an LD…
I check the desk. Nothing comes up as marked. Ten minutes to show time and hoards of people are huddled around the dimmers. "Take that one out again. Yeah, that’s better. Now how about this one? Great! Its getting quieter…"

I do the show with half the rig unplugged as the guitars buzz and fart their way through the evening. Over a mournful bottle of after-show wine in the Hotel Phoenix I try to make sense of June and the fax-blurred plot for the big Ukrainian outdoor television show in July.
It rains during the load out, and someone tells me about the nine deaths in the Roskilde mud crush last night. It’s those extra variables that creep into the equation

© Patrick Marks 2001

Email: patrick@marksfamily.com

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See also Confessions of a House Husband