Cheltenham Stage Services - Your Production, Our Experience.

Wychwood Music Festival 2006

Cheltenham Racecourse

Having taken a bath last year, the festival weather this year was superb sunshine, barring a half hour or so of light drizzle. As everyone arrived, the site was still drying out from a couple of weeks of rain, but the lakes with attendant ducks had given way to the usual high standard of festival village, and the crowds in this second year suddenly appeared in much greater numbers. The anticipated mud bath was avoided.

CSS, this year, was responsible for all sound, lighting and rigging services at the festival. Our good friends at Canegreen brought all the additional sound gear to our own, needed for main stage, and Lee Dreezer with the excellent Canegreen crew – Kevin, George and Damien had the MeyerSound MSL4s turning out a stonking level across the field. We put a line of subs across the front of stage again to both level out the sub dispersion in the field, and also to limit the side spill into other venues. Some impressive turnaround times again this year, with bands pre-rigged backstage on rolling risers.

Greg Szabo and the rigging team – Tony Wood, John Lahiffe and Totch put an impressive “W” truss into the domed roof and produced some spectacular lightshows over the bands.

(How many lampies does it take to rig one flood?)

In the Big Top venue the Shermann CA4 rig thumped away constantly to the engineering of Seb Knowles, with Pete (Flip) McCrea on stage looking after the remarkably short turnarounds. Andy Bartlett looked after the lighting in this venue which was required all day from 09:00 right through to 03:00 in the morning, when the hugely popular “Silent Disco” wound down for the night.

In the Bar tent, the two Zimbabweans – Keith Farquharson and Daniel Meakin did their magic with the MeyerSound UPA-1P / Sherman CB 215 rig, turning over a vast number of bands well into the night. A popular haunt and one that saw some great artists getting to woo their audience much closer and more intimate than the other venues could manage. 

Out in the centre of the village then was a group of 5 x seminar/ workshop/ activity tents, running a variety of Electro-Voice and MeyerSound equipment with Sennheiser radio mics. Overseeing this was Dave Hughes and Dan Keating, as requested back after last year’s great successes.

We had small 3 kW lighting rigs dotted around the smaller venues too, so always plenty to do throughout these long, long days. Thankfully the crews were either able to sleep at home, being Cheltenham-based, or were found rooms at the very adequate Hunters’ Lodge on the racecourse. Great breakfasts too!

Sound levels at the boundary proved to be quite a problem this year, mostly aggravated by the fact that half of Cheltenham were treating themselves to sunny evening barbecues and parties in their backgardens and therefore exposing themselves to our sound more than they might have done had it been raining. Our intrepid sound monitoring team Adrian McCordick and Les Momsen were on the ball most of the day therefore, reporting back to the stage sound engineers with advice on errant frequencies. We had to be highly reactive as the wind directions changed and even ended up rescheduling the programme to cope with the music genres likely to cause offence late at night.

At the end, we concluded that we had all had a great time, and given that it had been hard work all round, we reckoned that the thing went off remarkably smoothly and certainly to plan. You can’t always say this about festivals. There are always the inevitable personality clashes, awkward band/ engineer moments and often complete surprises to be had. This year, we had none of it and it was immensely pleasurable.

We send to the Wychwood board therefore, our sincerest congratulations on a super second year, and look forward to assisting again in 2007.