This lockdown is all a bit weird, right? A very odd time. But as you’ve got nothing better to do, sit with me by my fire and I shall spin you a yarn. The story that follows took place in a time of hugs and coughs that caused no arousal of suspicion. A time where there was enough toilet paper, that even the poorest in society could afford to have a clean butt...
A Tune Trucks job is many things. For the audience, we hope it is a time to relax, loosen up a bit and have a good time listening to some tunes. For staff, at times, it can be stressful trying to facilitate that experience. The time-sensitive nature of events, coupled with every event being completely different, sometimes poses a challenge, but it’s a challenge we willingly take on every time.
An example of such a challenge was one of the very first Tune Trucks jobs I carried out alone. It was an outdoor obstacle course race, so we were in the middle of a forest, and it was less than a month until Christmas, so it was freezing, and the pleb I was working with forgot his coat, so we were rotating my coat every 30 minutes to stop freezing to death.
Things were good. We got there super early ready to set up. Set up all went fine, and everything was perfect. We were playing a mixture of hardcore gangster rap (a favourite of the MC we were working with) with a sprinkling of Happy Xmas (War is Over) by John Lennon.
Everything was good until it wasn’t. We were about to ‘step into Christmas’ with Elton, but as soon as the vocals were about to kick in, the front-facing speakers stopped. I checked the cables and all seemed well. I checked the laptop, everything seemed normal. The back speakers were still working for the creepy types of people that like to hang around the back of the truck. I couldn’t figure out the issue, so I performed the highest level sound engineer trick, one passed down through the ages from sound tech to sound tech, from stone tablet to Samsung galaxy tablet. I turned it all off and back on again, and everything worked perfectly. Sir Elton came back in with ‘STEP INTO CHRISTMAS!!’ Everyone stopped what they were doing and hoisted me up onto their shoulders and started singing, ‘For he is a jolly good fellow’. Women were falling at my feet. Men were bringing me drinks. A single ray of sunshine broke through the clouds and fell upon me. I was a GOD.
So everything worked out well in the end. All it took was to turn it off and on again. Which is kinda what we’re doing now. We’re on lockdown. We’ve turned everything off, but rest assured, we will turn it all back on again soon, and things will work as they once did. Things will return to normal.
Stay safe.