Behind The Scenes At The BIG GIG 2011

The Big Gig for 2011 went off without a hitch this year… that is, until the rain came – fail. With heaps of local acts and children collide, who didn’t get the glory of playing this year, which sucks, but other then that it was awesome! I myself was working as a roadie on the stage like always.

I started at 8am on the Friday morning, to bring you our amazing event. A few of our other GRINDers and YAGers were there before I was, and so we started the day by getting everything off the truck and on the stage, stacking our three part PA systems and starting to organise how we were going to set everything up on the stage itself and how the power leads were going to travel along to our power outlet.

Come 10am more volunteering workers were getting to the venue, and started setting up the other areas like the chill-out tent and the stalls, and by now we had the stage generally set up and the mixing and EQ racks set up in the tech space, set up for our sound manager, Simmo.

At 11am I was on break for an hour, YAY BREAK!!!!

When I come back its 12pm and I’m off again working on the stage, making sure everything is alright, then I went off to check the area.

Come one o’clock I was freaked to find out that we were still perfectly on time, and if anything maybe even ahead a little!

As bands stated arriving we showed them where they could leave their bags and instruments and again I was going around making sure everything was nice and set up for the next hour, unless I was given a task.
The first act of the day was Abbey Rose, a wonderful young solo artist, she played an amazing set, the crowd loved her and she did great for one of her first public performances.

After Abbey finished there was changeover time, and the high school battle of the bands started, with six contestant bands. They played for an hour an a half, most of the bands did amazingly well, and the winners were “Ned and Friends.”

The day progressed into evening and Calabria’s Fall got the crowd moshing and even got a “wall of death” going… sadly there was only about 20 people and they didn’t really have enough room to get enough speed to really do any damage to each other, which was less metal, but it was still awesome.

We started to see some signs of rain on the way, and the night progressed warily, until FLASH, 1…2…3… BANG!!!!!! Thunder and lightning came and the pool had to be evacuated, that’s when the rain came, so now it was time for a safety check, get all the power leads off the ground and make sure no one gets electrocuted. We stood around for about an hour waiting to see if the rain was going to pass anytime soon… it didn’t. Sadly, we had to call off the gig and start packing everything up.

We finished pack up at about 9:30 -10ish and that was that, the gig was done and it was time to leave. Overall, it was an awesome day, with a sadly disappointing ending. We all had so much fun, and I personally can’t wait for next year!