Nice To See...

[paulears]

Indeed, and as ray now works permanently at Wolverhampton a little er, not quite right either! Nice topic though. Let's add some modern day reports.

 

I picked up one of the osmond brothers suitcases and took it up the stairs to the dressing rooms. Jimmy osmond took it off me and said "you don't have to do that, let me".

 

What a lovely bunch of people.

[nickb12345]

Having done 2 tours with the Osmond's recently I second the above - very nice people and not afraid to help out

[gareth]

Wow! Someone's first post to the BR and it's replying to one from nearly 12 years ago! Way to go http://www.blue-room.org.uk/public/style_emoticons/default/laugh.gif

[paulears]

It's because new members don't spot the view new content button, and search manually. My own settings revert to two weeks in the views every now and then, no idea why, so I never see the ancient topics at all, but others seem to list the stuff the search function doesn't dig up. Weird isn't it?

[dsharp7th]

It wasn't long before the original post that Georgie Fame and his son helped manoeuvre his hammond organ through backstage and with that killer lift with those awful metal handles onto the stage. I say backstage, it was a busy hotel, and he got shouted at by a chef for smoking. To which he said "Yeah yeah".

[OllieDuff]

A bit old hat now, but Brendan Brown from Wheatus. I rocked up shortly before sound check (I was going to be running logistics for that stage later in the night), and went up to introduce myself to the guy in cargo shorts and a tool vest who was plugging everything up onstage. Me: "Hi, I'm Ollie, I'll be looking after you guys later". Him: "Hi, I'm Brendan, I'm the lead singer." We exchange a few words and then he gets right back to sorting out the instruments and monitors. Keep in mind that the PA company had supplied both a monitor engineer and an onstage system tech, so he really didn't have to do it himself.

Later that night, they played a 25 minute rendition of a certain hit of theirs, because the crowd got mad if they played anything else...

[vinntec]

Even older hat but I started backstage in 1968 like a lot of people while at school. I was lucky that my school had a proper stage and facilities to play with and it was pre-elf and safety, so the children (including sixth form) supervised themselves to a large extent.

 

However one of my biggest surprises, and something that was a guarded secret, was that several fierce masters (teachers) were also part of this band and were willing to work under the direction of much younger people. Not only were they willing to roll up their sleeves and get on with seriously helping, but you could call them by their first name. At a grammar school this was pretty revolutionary stuff. A bunch of us came in during the holidays for the annual scrubbing of flats and once again some of the masters were also there to get soaked like everyone else. They carried flats, scrubbed flats the lot.

 

It is worth pointing out that in those days there was no drama department so the masters concerned were doing this in their own time, for nothing and absolutely no perks. We were always skint of course so they also had to cough up for a round of chips etc. I have to stress that the whole thing was absolutely above board. But you had to understand the rules...backstage it was "Jim" but in the classroom it was "Sir" - and you got no allowance for the other secret life backstage!

 

When I organised a backstage reunion in 2001 as part of schools 90th birthday, I was pleased to be able to track down many of these masters (from all times in the school's history, not just mine) and invite them along to a reunion of about 400 stagehands, even though they were now in their very advanced years.

 

Here I am all these years later still at it!