Dedication to Duty

There were many occasions when it was necessary to work through the night. For example when one act came to the end of their week on a Sunday night, and we needed to completely re-rig and/or re-gel the lighting, or make alterations to the sound equipment ready for the next top-of-the-bill. Nobody ever complained - we just took it as part of the job and got on with it. In fact, many of us revelled in the responsibility.

It was due to the requirements of The Three Degrees (most likely at the insistence of their manager, Richard Barrett), that the club’s PA system was substantially upgraded by the addition of a pair of JBL stacks and some powerful Crown Amcron amplifiers. Prior to this, the PA system consisted of 8 or so Dynacord 4 x 12 columns distributed throughout the club - mounted in the tubular-steel ‘scaffolding’ that formed most of the ceiling. I believe it was a local company, “Johnson’s Soundaround” (based on London Road) that did the upgrade. The people involved were Roy Millington and Andrew Colley, latterly of “Cloud Electronics”.

Although the sound mixing desk (a lovely Allen and Heath studio model) had stereo capabilities (not very common for its time), this wasn’t used as such. Instead, the sound could be routed to the front ‘main’ PA (i.e. the JBL stacks) or the rear Dynacord columns (or any blend of the two). The idea behind this was that the rear speakers would be better for reinforcing quieter sounds, such as the speech of comedians etc.

It wasn’t long before the rest of the crew and I decided we preferred stereo. So, one night, we worked through, and completely rewired the system! I’m not sure whether the audience appreciated all our efforts, but it was an interesting exercise!

One occasion that is firmly etched on my memory, is after we had just had the sound mixing desk completely overhauled. All the connectors and contacts had been professionally cleaned, and the sliders had years-worth of dust and cigarette-smoke removed. All was lovely. No more crackles, fizzes or pops! Kenny was on sound duty that night, when a person in the audience recognised Kenny as an old school-mate and rushed over to say hello. He had a pint of beer in his hand, and placed it on the ‘shelf’ in front of the sound desk while he leaned over to speak to Kenny. Unfortunately, the ‘shelf’ was actually only an inch wide and the beer-glass tumbled, emptying its contents into the sound desk! The whole of the rest of the night (3am until breakfast time) was spent dismantling the desk, mopping-out the beer, cleaning the circuit-boards and stacking them in front of a fan-heater. It’s a testament to our dedication that the following evening’s show went ahead without any problems from the sound system!

I was 17. Many of my colleagues were around the same age, and it was my first job from school. Our rate of pay was 40p per hour. We did at least get cheap food while we were working! However our take-home pay, as you can imagine, wasn’t anything exciting. For working a 5-or-6-day week, I would have been getting around £12-15. So, when we were offered the opportunity to take-on the job of “night watch”, meaning an extra 4 hours pay for each night worked, A couple of colleagues and I jumped at the chance!

The job entailed checking all the doors after the public had left, and making frequent patrols around the building looking out for any problems - fire, flood, break-ins etc. (exactly what I would have done in the event of a burglary is not worth thinking about!). It wasn’t long before we all found this extremely boring, so a few of us concocted the idea of staying behind “after-hours” to keep the person on watch-duty company! Whoever was on duty was to lock-up as usual after all the staff had left, then wait for us to re-appear at the door and let us in. I must point-out that there was nothing nefarious going on! It was simply that we had little reason or desire to go to our respective homes, and spending the night chatting with our mates was far more appealing to the 17/18-year-old mind! We would often make use of the “Star” dressing room, to watch telly (not that there was much on at 4am in 1975!) or simply to get our heads down for a while.