Cheltenham Stage Services - Your Production, Our Experience.

Cheltenham Folk Festival 2007

11th year brings in record audiences       

The Festival season kicked off this year with the highly successful 11th Cheltenham Folk Festival. Focussing predominently on the Town Hall, where the Main hall and Drawing Room played host to the majority of acts across the 3 days, CSS provided sound and lighting services in both venues, run by Rob Elmore, Neville Mitchell, Dave Hughes and Matt Nelson.

The rear drapes were rigged off 12" Tomcat truss, on Doughty Zenith stands. The truss also supported some Martin Mac 500 moving heads, Source 4 Pars and Pixelline units above the white drapes. The inevitable Folk Festival gobos highlighted on the same drapes and Source 4 Profiles hit the stage front along with 36kw front truss of parcans flown from the 2 hall fly points on Lodestar chain hoists.

The MeyerSound system, under the baton of veteran Folk guru Rob Elmore, and his trusty associates, provided an extremely well balanced coverage throughout the hall, with some house PA used to in-fill the First floor balconies.

In the Drawing Room, Matt Nelson took the artists through their paces on a MeyerSound UPA rig. Four units were used. Two on stage-front tripods and another pair flown on a 12" goalpost truss structure further back in the room. Also on the truss was a pair of 4-can bars and the gobo profile.

This is always a good natured and happy event to start the season with, and 2007 was no different. Our thanks to John Shorter and Jo Heatley again for asking CSS to come to the party.

On the Saturday evening, CSS took another MeyerSound rig down to the Cheltenham Ladies College's wonderful 1897-built theatre where the Folk Festival Ceilidh took place.

The evening, which saw around 250 people on the dance floor was a colourful event as always, and brought a huge amount of fun, energy and heat to the Festival. The superb "Bedlam" held the stage all night, and kept everyone busy from dance to dance., whilst CSS' own head of pro-audio, Lee Dreezer pushed the faders.