We start this update with the events of this week; after stating that I only wanted to do one night at the sound desk in the Phoenix per week, I ended up doing three nights in four days, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday. The gigs on Wednesday and Saturday were pretty good; I liked all the bands and had relatively easy nights at the desk, things just worked! Thursday wasn’t so good, mainly because of one band, who I won’t name, but it was probably the worst 30 minutes of my sound engineering career, screamo band, and as many people know, it’s not exactly my cup of tea. I normally try to steer clear of these nights, but Phil was stuck as the engineer that normally does the heavy gigs found a full time job, so is no longer able to engineer gigs, and Phil can’t really do them as his hearing is seriously messed up after two years of engineering gigs without ear protection. So it hasn’t been a bad week, met a load of top people in bands, in particularly the guys from Mendex, Get Amped and Imperial Vipers, it really is nice to work with bands like this, makes up for all the asshole bands out there! Yesterday I elected not to go to work, as I woke up with a killer migraine, so decided to spend the day in bed, and sleep a total of 14 hours to try and shake it off, although it was still niggling away when I made my way to the Phoenix to engineer the Imperial Vipers gig. Oddly enough loud music made it feel a lot better, I don’t understand the logic in that myself, maybe I am just weird? actually don’t answer that!
I have finally signed up for an eBay account after resisting it for so long although it wasn’t easy signing up, it wouldn’t allow me to use my G[oogle]Mail account without adding credit card details, which is not possible as I don’t have or want one. It suggested that I use my ISP Email address, which I tried, I used my @btinternet.com address, with the same result although bizarrely it allowed me to use my @myblog-online.co.uk address without inputting credit card details. So it wouldn’t accept an address from one of the worlds biggest ISPs but accepted my own domain name, go figure. Anyway, I have decided to bid on this nifty piece of kit for use in the Phoenix for when I am engineering, we desperately need another compressor, as a single dual channel compressor/gate/limiter isn’t enough for our needs, it would be nice to have a compressor/gate for all 24 channels, but that’s not going to happen unfortunately. A second compressor will allow for compression of three vocal mics, and kick or snare, or both kick and snare if there is only two vocal mics.
In football, Plymouth didn’t manage to win their second successive home game against league leaders Reading. I always knew that it would be hard for the Pilgrims to beat The Royals, as Reading are playing a lot better football than Argyle, or at least more consistently, Plymouth played well against QPR, but that form wasn’t carried into this match. The score line was 2 – 0 in favour of the visitors, Glen Little opened the scoring for Reading after 20 minutes chipping the ball over Romain Larrieu. Nick Chadwick could have scored on several occasions and was denied by the woodwork once. The Royals killed the game off 12 minutes after the interval, when Kevin Doyle was offered up a tap in goal from a Leroy Lita and the Reading player couldn’t have missed if he tried! So not the result I was looking for, but I didn’t expect anything from this game, but at least Argyle weren’t outclassed, if Nick Chadwick’s shot crept inside the woodwork instead of hitting it, it may have been a different result, and Reading manager Steve Coppell admitted that! This hasn’t really affected Argyles position in the league, Plymouth are still within easy reach of making it into mid table obscurity, so it’s not a disaster, but it would have been nice to be come away with some points, but it was not to be, look forward to the next game and hope for a decent points haul, although it won’t be easy as we are away to third placed Watford, but I am ever hopeful of nicking a good result at Vicarage Road! [Story]
In sadder news, two British sports greats died this week, firstly lengendary Northern Ireland and Manchester United player George Best died of multiple organ failure at the age of 59. Best was admitted into London’s Cromwell Hospital 8 weeks ago suffering from flu like symptoms, which later developed into a kidney infection and then further infection of his lungs. Best was well known for heavy drinking, and had a liver transplant in 2002, just shows what alcohol can do to the human body. But when Best was asked what happened to all his money, he replied “I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered.” – which just about sums up the personality of the football legend, live fast, die young! [Story] Secondly, former world rally champion, Richard Burns died from the brain tumour which he had been battling since it was diagnosed in 2003, it looked like the English driving ace was making progress and recovering after undergoing both chemotherapy and radiotherapy. But six months later his health started to decline, he once again underwent surgery, but it was no miracle cure, and eventually slipped into a coma and died yesterday. It’s a sad end to a man that could have been Britain’s greatest ever rally driver, becoming the only Englishman to win the FIA World Rally Championship. World Championship rival and former world champion Colin McRae paid tribute to the Englishman, the Scot said “He was a true character in the world of rallying and will be sadly missed as a competitor and a friend” about Burns, it’s safe to say that its been a sad week for British sport. [Story]