In 2001 the comittee for the local town festival, which attracts about 5-6000 people, asked me if I could put a band together to play a gig in the park as part of the festival. It was the first time they'd tried any music at all and didn't want anything too heavy, they also wanted to keep it quite middle of the road and folky - so I called up a few people I knew and put together a 9 piece band, with a couple of girls and my daughter sharing lead vocals, keyboards, couple of guitars, me on bass, an accordion player, my son and daughter also played fiddle and we worked out around 2 hours of covers from bands like All About Eve, The Cranberries and The Corrs. We had about 5 or 6 rehearsals and were pretty good for a band thrown together for one gig (and we did manage to fit in an arrangement of 'Won't get fooled again' and a few Pogues tunes so it wasn't all soft MOR stuff).
We had to find our own PA that was big enough to cope with an outdoor gig, but fortunately, between a few of us we came up with enough channels of mixing desk (albeit a couple of 12 channel desks submixed into a 16 channel desk) and I borrowed a 5 kilowatt JBL PA from a company that my brother in law is a partner in.
We played on an open 25ft x 25 ft 'stage' that was built by a local builder from scaffolding and sheets of chipboard and wobbled about on that as we played. A few teething troubles, but we went on OK (we were the only band) and the crowd liked us enough for the organisers to ask us back the following year.
That never happened because the regular band I played in had split up and I couldn't get a scratch band together and rehearsed in time. A shame because having seen the potential, because the organisers got a bit braver and decided to have rock bands on the bill . I did go and see the bands though and they's upgraded the stage to the back of a artic .
For some reason, between now and then, the festival has conincided with dates when I've been working abroad...until this year. I went across to have a look at the bands and they've now got a bloody great dome stage about 50 feet across and 30 feet deep with drum risers, loads of monitor speakers and a 20Kw PA out front operated by a proper PA company (probably came with the stage hire package)...it's not far off the one of the smaller stages at Glastonbury. With loads of bands on the bill!
I've ALWAYS wanted to play a big stage like that....BASTIDS!
All I could do was stand there and think "Oi...you lot....I started all this ya know...you wouldn't be there without me"
It wasn't all good though. The bassists seemed to be plugging into a DI box at the front of the stage which sent a feed to the FOH desk 50 yards back across the field and also to their regular backline amp on stage, but I don't know what the sound guy thought he was doing. I only had time to watch 3 bands but the bassists gear was as diverse as a P-Bass played through a Marshall valve amp, a J-Bass played through another Marshall solid state combo and an MM Stingray played through an Ashdown head and Ashdown 4x10. The style of the bands ranged from indie guitar rock (P-Bass played with a pick), Edgy rap with obligatory DJ in the band (J-Bass played fingerstyle) and Jamiroquai-ish Funk (Stingray played fingerstyle with ocassional slap and pop phrases). The only time you could hear any difference in tone from any of these was during the first 30 seconds of each band's set - during that time the sound guy must've been eq-ing the crap out of the bass to make everyone sound as if they were playing a mudbucker bass with a felt pick! Every bass was tweaked to sound exactly the same through the PA and the bass sound was rubbish, just a woofly mess where the sound is so devoid of mids or highs that the bass player could've played any notes at all because the sound was so bad it was virtually impossible to pick out any distinct notes
