LuvEstherCrew - The official crew Blog of the UK tour of the pop musical

Fair Oak - End of An Era

Power Shower Rating - 1 (generally tainted by the whole Travelodge Experience)
Breakfast Rating - 3 (another McDonalds)

Well what do we say about this one. The last gig of the first part of the tour, the end of Ben and Alex on the crew and much missed they will be to. Also (and very very thankfully) the end of staying in Travelodges for a few months.

The most exciting thing to point out about Fair Oak is that the sports hall we did the gig in has had a brand spanking super duper blue floor covering thing, which apparently (and I have to admit with some evidence from our gear) is super sensitive to anything. We had to carry absolutely everything and nothing could be dragged. Even after leaving our motor cases on the floor for a hour or so there were dents from the castors (crumbs!).

The setup and gig were as methodically as a well oiled machine that is working in pretty good condition (as you should expect from a machine that has been doing the same thing for the last two months or so!) and spurred on by getting home to bed as early as possible the gear flew out the venue and onto the truck faster than ever before, we were all out by 12:20 on Monday morning.

It was a good end to the tour. And the crew are now fondly thinking back of the tour days while rocking slightly in the corner of their rooms.

Brighton

Imagin you have a rectangle venue, to make it simple we will say it is 8 x 4. Now we will say that the set is 1 x 1. So inorder to fit the set in with the maximum amount of vewing seats i imagin'd it would look like this.....

but no.....the venue made us do the show corner on?!

Well we did as we were told and between Anna, a very helpfull (freelance) venue manager and the Crew we pulled it off with out too many hickups (despite haveing to carry 5m sectoins up two flights of stairs).

The show went well and all were happy. Thanks to all that helped pack down and special thanks to the dedication of the few chaps who stayed untill 1am packing the truck, 'good job!'

Also a MASSIVE BIG UP to Adam from Littlehampton, Thank you for all your help here in Brighton and an advanced thank you for tomorrow in Fair Oak.

Stirling

Power shower & breakfast ratings: 9/10 (Various host families)

Stirling was the first gig on the Scottish tour. The Albert hall was our venue for the day, and a slightly awkward one too!

The load-in was very slow due to a 1.5m high stage. Super Nick our lorry driver brought in his truck ramps so we could wheel the flight cases up to the stage.

The next dilemma we had was the fixed curtain rain, Sven & Crusty climbed up the truss and managed to attach the curtain rail to our truss to stop it bending, so our truss went up with some extra weight (and the rail).

Lunch was kindly provided at the Baptist church - it was a good 5 minute walk away in the freezing Scotland air.

The show itself ran very smoothly, but sadly on the get-out our pro-crew did a Sam (didn't show up), so this took longer than anticipated (3 am).

Oxford

Power Shower Rating - 4 (Travelodge)
Breakfast Rating - 5 (MacDonalds (AGAIN!!))

Well it was another interesting gig. We always knew it was going to be a squeeze to get luv esther into this venue and it was. Faced with the task of getting our ground support into a venue with a ceiling height of under 5m when our normal truss height is 6m was always going to be a slightly different adventure for us.

After some debate we decided the best plan was to put on our bodging hats and raid the hardware case for as many ratchet straps as possible. With several ratchets in hand the process of securing our home made "truss booster seats" into place began and it was a thing of beauty.

The rest of the setup was fairly tight the top the set touching the ceiling in places...After much grunting and sweating the process was finished. There was even time for 40mins relaxation before the show began. All in all a good day was had by all.