Miscellaneous - TDK Cross Central Festival Part 3

  by Philip Vincent

published: 22 / 11 / 2006

intro

In the third and final part of his account of working at this summer's TDK Cross Festival in his new 'Tales from the Sound Desk' series, Philip Vincent tells of its second day

So it was the end of day one, and we were just going to leave the building when the in house technical guy - we shall call him Gerald - came up and said; “So what are your GAK orders then?” We all looked at him in a puzzled way and he said : “You know GAK, Guitar Amps and Keyboards” We were like : “Nah, mate, we have all that already. Cheers for asking though” And then he was like : “No, GAK orders” He then made a funny little snorting motion and we all suddenly realised his implication. Now I don’t do drugs (I’m not just saying that either. I really don’t) but it seems that a considerable number of the other boys did and quite happily spent their hard earned cash on some of London’s finest Nose Candy. Once this little exchange was complete we headed back through the glory of early morning Kings Cross enjoying the sunshine and starting to feel more than a little bit messed up due to not having actually seen a night time! Day 2: After the joys of day one, I had decided that I was going to limit myself purely to looking after room 3. Don’t get me wrong ! I love sound engineering and all that jazz but after the day before there was only so much I could take !I told the other guys on the crew that I would be in room 3 all night if they needed me, asked the stage manager if he could possibly stay a bit more sober this evening and do his job and headed off into room 3. That was was where I spent the next 10 hours or so on my own, sitting on a stool with only excessively loud dance music for company. To say it was hard work is an understatement. It was like some form or horrific torture, All I wanted to do was sleep but my skull was actually vibrating with the bass so much so that it was causing my teeth to vibrate against each other. Nice. The night went prettly smoothly. In comparison to day one it was like heaven. I saw some cool DJs and also had my first experience of watching DVDJ’s work! You have to see it to believe it! Check out Hexstatic for a taster! Anyway, eventually the night ended and we headed back to the hotel after much coiling of leads and packing away of microphones and all the other glamorous things that us sound engineers do. We got back to the hotel just as the other guests were having their breakfast, and joined them for a quick tea and toast before heading to bed for 3 hours and then back to load all the gear back into the three seven and a half ton trucks it all came out of fifty hours before. We did the drive home and unloaded the trucks with no incident and in comparison to the early days of the show it reminded me why I do the job that I do! All that was left to do now was to go home and sleep for a whole day!

Picture Gallery:-