Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Ireland, Scotland, & England

Being an Internet addict has its downside, but then again, when you roll into Cork, Ireland, check into a hotel at midnight, and the desk clerk tells you, yes, there is an Internet café nearby, and it’s open 24 hours, it’s fun to walk down streets that probably looked essentially the same before I was born, find the cheerful neon, go in and get a cup of tea, and settle in to enjoy some e-mail and surfing on a high-speed connection. That jolly feeling got knocked down a notch when I saw the mix position at the Savoy Theatre the next day.

Not only was it elevated a good twelve feet off the dance floor, it was literally tucked all the way back in the house-left corner. I’ve dealt with worse, like the third balcony in a theatre in New Haven, so I proceeded to listen to some CD’s, while the band set up and discovered that the situation was worse than I had thought.

EAW ASV series mains

The Savoy has some unusual EAW mains, the ASV series; the current version of them is the MQ Series. I certainly would not have preferred that they be pointed toward the corners of the room. But, since they were properly aimed onto the dance floor, all I could hear in my corner turret was roaring ambient mush. Hey, no big deal, I can still walk unassisted, so what if it meant a few trips down to the floor during the set to reference what is going on.

But, to me, it has always seemed that the caveman brain only begrudgingly admits how that is true – a part of me is always convinced in a situation like that that what I am hearing is what I am bombarding the crowd with. When I descended, I discovered that the guitars were running far more hot and piercingly than it seemed to me up in the air, so I brought them down to where they were merely strong and raging.

Ian Richards

Martin Bohane

Ian Richards was there at FOH to help me out, John O’Donoghue ran the monitors, and Martin Bohane is the production manager at the Savoy. Overall, we had a really decent day with them. Even in outlying areas like this, away from the larger markets, Suicidal has devoted fans, that really look forward to the band coming through. On a selfish note, when I went for a walk after the soundcheck, I found an incredible all-mystery bookstore called Mainly Murder, and I would like to thank the proprietress for recommending the Irish writer Reginald Hill, who I had not known of. The guys in Suicidal can tell you, same as every other band I have toured with, that if we are not working, my nose is in a mystery novel!

We had a good ride to Dublin, checking out the green countryside, which had actually been surprisingly visible up to about 10 PM the night we rode from the ferry stop in Wales, to Cork. Parking in Dublin is a challenge, we were on a busy street at the top of an alley that led to the venue, the Temple Bar Music Centre, so that the local crew pushing amps and drums had to wind their way through crowds of pedestrians.

The system there is a modern one, complete with delays, including low end cabinets, for the balcony crowd, and yes, you guessed it, the FOH engineer, who is all the way at the back of them, a mile high in the sky. That night, the sold-out crowd was so impossibly thick on the floor that I literally could not even pass the doorways, when I ventured down to see what the mix sounded like.

Production manager Carlie Harrington braved a drizzle to come out to the bus and introduce herself, and totally took care of us the rest of the day. As we were leaving, the club turned into a disco, for several more hours of wall-pounding hell for her. Like many other people on the LAB, I sure know what those double shifts are like.

When one is in Dublin, one is going to hear about U2. We could not afford to stay at their hotel, the Clarence, but we did order out for some food from a take-out restaurant that we were told sternly admonishes Bono that he has to wait in line just like everybody else.

Brian O’Reilly

The 40 channel Soundcraft Vienna that Brian O’Reilly set me up on behaved acceptably, and a guy simply named Smokey took care of the monitors. Many venues we visited used freelance people, as these guys were. On this particular day, I felt like I was hearing the most full range signal from the bass I had yet heard on the tour. That’s when Brian pointed out the Demeter tube compressors that he had sent it to. The Music Centre also sports a nice patch bay, which simplifies moving dynamics around, and configuring EFX the way you would like. I continued on my band-requested program of no effects.

At one point, I took a lap up to the hotel to change, and pick up Mike Muir, the lead singer, who usually does not go to soundchecks. In Europe, it is common to find taxicabs that are Mercedes and BMW, and when I entered one, ducking out of the rain, I was surprised to hear a JJ Cale CD playing. When I mentioned that to the driver, he nodded, and stated, “He’s a good man.” Small world.

I had not thought to send an e-mail ahead to tell Sven Anderson that I would be coming to the town where he and his wife have ended up. We had never met face to face, although I had written for an audio website that he used to edit, and I in turn had invited him to write some articles for PSW. I asked Carlie to see if she could find a local number for Sven, and darned if she didn’t, we invited them, down they came, and I must say, waited very patiently as I finished up. Then I joined them at a classic old downstairs pub nearby, and sank some Guinness and single malt. It was grand!

There had been a comedy of errors at the end of the night – one of the support acts had dashed off with one of their amps in the case for one of our rented Marshall heads, and it took some concerted cell phone action to locate them, explain the mistake, and demand in a nice way that they get it back down to the club, before we were finished loading out. They offered to let us take their case, but we explained that the nice people in Germany who we rented the gear from would probably prefer that it came back in the same case as it left in.