“Are you going to be loud,” asks George. We’re in Belfast, at the venue, setting up for tonight’s performance of the Ballad Of Johnny Longstaff. The venue is called the Strand; an apt choice of name as the whole place is hanging on by a thread. George works at the Strand and is providing threadbare assistance. Casing point: his response to our enquiry about whether we could have some power to facilitate the speakers working is to look at us concerned, as if surprised by the notion that a band playing to 150 people would require amplification, and then to ask, “are you going to be loud?”
We shake our heads at him in incredulity. He takes this incredulous head-shaking to mean no, we’re not going to be loud, and flicks a switch that engages the speakers. Our sound engineer promptly plays music through the speakers to test the acoustic response of the room. George blanches, clearly aggrieved.
“oh no,” he intones, “I’m sorry but if you’re going to be that loud then Mary Poppins is going to have to come up.”
Was this some kind of weird euphemism? Is he threatening us in Belfast slang? What does Mary Poppins coming up entail? Is Mary Poppins the nickname of a particularly domineering member of staff who doesn’t hold with loud English bands coming in to her venue?
Our sound engineer – let’s call him Andy because it’s shorter than writing “our Sound engineer” all the time, plus that’s his name – silenced the music so as to make sure that he hadn’t just heard what he thought he’d heard: some incongruous statement about Mary Poppins.
“What did you say?” asked Andy. We all waited to hear what none Mary Poppins related thing George had actually said.
“If you’re going to be that loud then Mary Poppins is going to have to come up.”
No, he had actually said that Mary Poppins was going to have to come up, and then stopped speaking, as if he’d just delivered a perfectly legitimate, comprehensible sentence.
“Mary Poppins?” Andy repeated, irritation and confusion both etched into his voice. Due to some earlier ineptitude on George’s part, we were running behind schedule, and we hadn’t counted on further time being taken up with a surreal Mary Poppins based stand-off.
“Yes, Mary Poppins,” George hostilely snapped back.
“What’s Mary Poppins got to do with it?” Andy exasperatedly responded, his question sounding all the more angry by the fact that he’d slammed his hand down on the mixing desk in frustration, knocking the unmute button on the mixing desk, causing the microphone he was holding to amplify his words.
“Mary Poppins is next door,” said George, for some reason leaning into the microphone, perhaps thinking that Andy was trying to use the microphone to give him the upper hand.
“Mary Poppins is next door?” Andy responded, his voice bordering on rage, which was heightened by the fact that he had just located the mixer’s reverb function. A minute ago, I hadn’t expected to hear the words “mary Poppins” once, but in the last minute I’d heard it over ten times, said with increasing levels of angry intensity and now reverb.
Michael, concerned that the two of them were about to come to blows whilst shouting increasingly baffling phrases about Mary Poppins in each other’s faces over a variety of reverbs and delay effects, decided to step in. Finally, a voice of reason to help deriddle this confusion; and if Michael Hughes is the voice of reason in a situation, then you know things have gotten bad.
The Strand is part theatre part cinema, and it transpired that the cinema, which is next door, would be screening Mary Poppins at the same time as we were on stage doing our show, and George was concerned that our show would drown out Mary Poppins. He seemingly wasn’t concerned that Mary Poppins would in anyway effect our show. He clearly valued Mary Poppins much more highly than anything that we might be doing in the room next door.
The majority of our show isn’t particularly loud, but there are a few brief louder parts. We were now worried that one of these louder moments would cause George to ramp up Mary Poppins and then keep her up even during the quieter moments of our show. The last thing we wanted was Johnny’s heart wrenching poignant recount of men he knew who had died fighting fascism to suddenly be accompanied by a jolly blast of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, as our audience wiped away the tears from their Um diddle diddle, diddle um, diddle eyes.
Kally, our man behind the show’s visuals, had finally, after an hour of exasperated attempts, got the projector working, once he’d realised the secret formula was to essentially do the exact opposite to what George said to do to get it to work. It’s incredible that out of all the places on this tour, the most challenging projector to get working belonged to a cinema. Finally, after an irksome hour of George shouting baffling instructions about what needs to be stuck where to get the projector to function, whilst Kally, with admirable resolve, resisted the growing urge to tell George where he could stick it, the projector was working.
Not wanting to risk any more projector problems, Kally said he would just leave the projector on so it was ready for the show. But George grumbled about this, saying that we should turn the projector off until it was needed. George was indifferent to Kally’s reasoning that it had taken over an hour to get the projector set up, and that the whole thing was clearly temperamental , and so it was surely best to leave it on. George just kept countering that he was going to turn it off until the start of the show. At this point Kally told George that the projector was staying on, and that was that. George reluctantly demurred, but then fifteen minutes later, when Kally returned from getting a sandwich, he caught George standing in front of the projector, his finger poised over the off button. Fortunately Kally intervened and reiterated that the projector was staying on. George slunk off.
Half an hour before the show’s start, Kally went to investigate the situation with the projector and was pleased to see that it was still on. Phew, he had seemingly got the message. But when the show began, Kally pressed the button to launch the first image and the screen was blank. The audio was playing, but there was no image. The show was now under way, but the images weren’t showing. Kally needed to be back within a minute to cue the next audio/visual slide, but he needed to see what was happening with the projector, although, he had a hunch what had happened.
He tore out of the back doors and ran to the room opposite which housed the controls for the projector, where he had caught George skulking just half an hour earlier. Behind him he heard running footsteps and wheezing. As he pushed the door to the projector room open, Kally caught sight of a clearly panicked George.
“I’ll turn it back on,” George spluttered. But Kallly didn’t have any seconds to spare. He ran into the room, the door slamming behind him in George’s face. George chastised Kally for shutting the door with such intensity, reminding him that Mary Poppins was playing next door. kally made some rather explicit remark about mary Poppins that would, if carried out, certainly warrant a much more stringent film certificate rating.
“I’ll do it,” squeaked George, “you don’t know how to turn it on.”
Kally suggested that maybe the way to turn it on was to press the big on button, and indeed, upon Kally pressing the button, the projector came on, and the images were showing on the theatre’s screen. Then Kally saw at the other end of the room, a second projector, presumably responsible for powering Mary Poppins. As strong as the temptation was to disable George’s precious Poppins, Kally had just ten seconds to race back into the room in time to cue the next slide, so he had to forgo the urge.
It is probably a bit unprofessional of me to slag off a venue and their member of staff in a blog, but it’s not like we ever want to go back and play there again, so hay ho. Besides, it’s very unlikely that George will find out about this blog post, as that would require him being able to read.
This Wednesday, the BBC television programme Inside Out featured a ten minute piece on The Ballad Of Johnny Longstaff, which you can watch here. It’s nineteen minutes in. Sadly, George from Belfast didn’t make the cut.
Follow me on social media:
