Chapter 3 What You Actually Sound Like
Doors had gone at half six, and by twenty to seven the Rannoch had started breathing.
That was the only word for it. From the corridor you could not see the bowl at all, but you could feel the air change in the building the way you feel a train coming through a tunnel before you hear it — eleven thousand people arriving in a shed with a high steel roof and nothing on the walls, and the room that had given her nothing back at one o’clock now full of the low churn of a crowd that had been drinking since five because Glasgow comes early and means it.
Shona stood in the production office with the door hooked open and repainted her mouth in the paperback-sized mirror.
Between soundcheck and doors: she had done it in four hundred buildings and she did it here, one careful pass, lips pressed together once, and then she looked at herself for a second longer than the job required.
A show file was open on her tablet on the desk behind her, and she had spent most of the last hour not looking at it.
“Tell me it’s boring,” Mags said, coming in with a radio in her hand and a plate of catering she was not going to eat.
“The support are running eight minutes long and their engineer’s a child.”
“He’s twenty-three.”
“That’s what I said.” Shona capped the lipstick. “He’s fine. He’s going to be good. He’s just never had a room this dead and he’s chasing it.”
Mags put the plate down on the printer and did not look at it again. She had a laminate round her neck that said SLATE and under it, in smaller print, the word that mattered: TOUR MANAGER, no qualifier, no assistant, no deputy. Twenty years of somebody else’s runs and then this one.
“And mine?” she said. “Are mine boring?”
Shona had, by that point, been turning the sentence over for an hour and twenty minutes, and there was a version of the evening in which she did not say it.
She was extremely clear about that afterwards.
She could have said yeah, grand, all boring, walked out to the desk and given three men the four easiest shows of her career, and nobody would ever have known, least of all the three men.
“No,” she said.
Mags’s chin came up about a centimetre.
“Their mix is a lie,” Shona said. “I don’t mean it’s wrong.
Wrong I’d have fixed at four and gone for a coffee.
I mean every number in that file is the exact truth about what three men asked for and none of it is the truth about what they sound like.
Yusuf’s voice is four down everywhere on that stage including in front of his own feet.
Emre’s bass is ducked under a kick that’s ducked under his bass, which is not a thing that can physically be true and they’ve been standing in it since 2019.
There’s eight hundred hertz missing off the master and it’s dated.
They can’t hear each other in the middle.
So they play around the middle. They’ve got very good at it, Mags, that’s the bit — you would not hear it in a van and you would not hear it on a record and you are going to hear it tonight in an eleven-thousand-seat room with nothing on the walls. ”
“I have heard them,” Mags said. “Nineteen shows.”
“In the same lie nineteen times. It’s a stable lie in a small room.
” Shona pulled the tablet round and turned it so Mags could see the master bus, which Mags could not read and did not pretend to.
“It isn’t stable under this many people.
A room this size takes away the bottom and the top and hands the band back the middle, and there’s nothing in their middle to hand back.
Third song in, that band are going to reach for each other and find a hole, and then they’ll do the only thing you can do about a hole, which is play harder at the edges of it.
That’s what a bad night is. Not a mistake.
Three people going louder in the wrong places for an hour and fifty minutes. ”
The radio on Mags’s hip said something about a barrier and Mags said copy into it without taking her eyes off Shona’s face.
“Four shows,” she said. “No adventures. I said it kindly and I’ll say it once more the same way.”
“I heard you.”
“Shona.”
“I heard you the first time, in the corridor, and I have not forgotten a word of it.”
They looked at each other for the length of about four seconds, which in a production office at twenty to seven is a long time, and what passed between them was not agreement.
Mags Lenane had been carrying other people’s runs since she was twenty-four and knew precisely what a sentence that does not contain the word yes is worth.
“If it goes wrong it comes to me,” she said.
“I know where it goes.”
“Do you,” Mags said, and picked her plate back up, and took it away with her still uneaten, and that was the end of it, because she had a support act eight minutes long and a barrier and a hundred and ten other things, and because she had been told no by a freelancer in a way that would be extremely difficult to write down afterwards.
Shona went out to the desk.
Monitor world was four steps from the drape and the drape was breathing too now, sucked in and pushed out a half-inch at a time by eleven thousand people shifting about on the other side of it.
She sat down. She put her water to the left of the strip of tape that said DEAKIN, which she still had not taken off, and she pulled a clean page towards her and looked at her own shorthand from four o’clock, nineteen scenes and two spares, song by song, in order.
Then she saved his file, untouched, as scene one, and named it his name.
That was the first thing and it was not sentiment.
If this went badly she wanted to be able to put three men back inside the room they knew, from a standing start, in under a second and a half, mid-song, with a thumb.
You do not take away somebody’s floor without building the old one back in as a trapdoor.
Then she started.
She did not put the voice back. That was the thing she had worked out somewhere in the last hour, sitting with a coffee she had not asked for going cold at her elbow: four decibels handed to a man all at once, at eight fifteen, in front of eleven thousand people, was not a gift, it was an ambush.
So she built it up the set. Half a decibel in the first, nothing in the second, three quarters in Colours Down, and by song nine Yusuf Warsame would be hearing himself at the size he actually was and would have arrived there over fifty-five minutes without a single step big enough to notice.
She wrote the numbers down the page and then wrote them again on her own sheet in pencil, because the desk was a computer and she had watched two computers die in her career and had not missed a cue either time.
The notch came out in stages too. Eight hundred hertz of missing room, 2023 — Y asked, and she brought it back a third at a time from the third song on, and left the last third in until Wintering, which was eleventh and slow and the only place in the set where a band that had forgotten how to sit in a room together would be forced to.
She had been through the live audio Deakin had archived from Newcastle at teatime, on headphones, with her eyes shut, in a plastic chair in a corridor, and she could tell you where every seam in that set was.
Emre’s bass she brought up into the two hundreds and out from underneath the kick, and unducked the kick from under the bass, and put the two of them side by side where two grown men could look at each other.
Then, because Yusuf had told her to and Yusuf had been right, she put Emre’s own cab down into Emre’s wedge — more of it, not less, so that a man who had been reading the room off a speaker cabinet four feet behind him for four years would have it in front of him instead, and would not have to turn round.
Solomon got his hat. In the left wedge, not the new one she had put in on the right, exactly as she had been told, and she left the new one flat and patched and silent, because a spare you have not used is the cheapest insurance in live sound.
And in the middle of all of it, at four minutes past seven, with the support act audible through the wall like weather in another country, she stopped with her hands on the armrest and looked at what she had built.
It was the same set. Same songs, same order, same three men. What she had done was take out every apology in it.
Here was the honest part, and she let herself have it for exactly as long as it took the support act to finish a song: nobody had asked her for this.
Not one of the three. Yusuf had asked for Solomon’s hat and Emre’s cab.
Solomon had asked for his own wedge unstacked.
Emre had said it’s fine twice. She had been given three men’s wants and she had taken all three and then gone and added a fourth that belonged to nobody in the building but her, and there was no polite word for that. There was one accurate one.
She looked at it, in the way you look at a thing you have decided not to think about, and put her hand back on the desk.
“Alright?”
She did not jump. She had heard him two steps before he spoke — trainers, not boots, and the particular hesitation of a man coming through a drape he does not want to be in the way of.
Fifteen minutes to stage. Yusuf Warsame stood at the edge of her light with his hands at his sides and the fine black mesh shirt buttoned all the way up to the throat, done up to the last one, which was not shyness and was not costume either: it was the first half of a decision, and she could not yet see what the second half of it was going to be.
The lights in the wings caught him through the mesh.
He was standing very deliberately still, which she did not think he had ever noticed about himself: a man who moved constantly in every room he was in, holding position two feet from the drape like a man waiting to be let into a room.
“There’s twelve minutes and there’s fifteen,” she said. “Depends whether the lad on the support desk finds his nerve.”
“Fifteen,” Yusuf said. “He won’t.” He glanced at the desk, at the surface with four thousand pounds of light glowing on it, and looked away from it again in a manner she recognised as manners. Then, straight at her: “Are they alright?”
There it was. Not an option. Not there’s the early car or the late one. A question, put to her face, and she watched him not notice he had made it.
“Solomon’s got his hat in the left one,” Shona said. “Emre’s got his cab in front of him instead of behind him. Both of them are going to hear something different tonight and both of them are going to be fine about it inside a song and a half, because they’re professionals and it’s better.”
It was true. It was also not an answer to what he had asked her, and both of them let that sit there on the floor between them, unmentioned.
“Right,” Yusuf said. “Good. That’s good.”
“Is there anything you want in yours?”
“Mine’s grand,” he said, warm as anything, already half turned, already moving — and then he stopped, with one hand up on the drape, and hung there for two full seconds.
She waited. She was extremely good at waiting; it was most of the job.
“They’ll be alright, then,” he said, to the drape, and went through it.
Shona sat with her fingertips resting on a fader she had not yet moved, and worked out, without any pleasure at all, what she had just watched.
He had asked a question about himself and had dressed it up as a question about two other men, and she had answered him with a technical specification, and he had taken it, gratefully, and gone.
She had done that. She did that. She had been doing it in every room she had stood in since she was eighteen — how are you, Shona, and back came the state of the splitter — and she had never once in twenty years been on the receiving end of it and had absolutely no idea, until fifteen minutes to stage on a Wednesday in Finnieston, what it looked like from the other side.
Out in the bowl the house music came up loud, and the crowd noise went up underneath it like water under a boat.
She pulled her scene list towards her, and armed the first one.