SSE Hire
Summer Festival Season 2006
Supplying the UK’s major live festivals keeps SSE Hire busy every summer, but even without Glastonbury, Summer 2006 was the busiest ever with the new Hi Fi and Latititude festivals joining the usual round.
A quick tally of the job sheets shows over 150 truck movements coming through SSE’s Redditch Headquarters during the season; not forgetting 2000 bottles of water to refresh crews and 680 rolls of gaffer tape!
The trend for multi-site festivals continues – with Hi Fi joining the Carling Weekend and the V festivals for simultaneous north and south sites. No other UK sound rental company can match SSE Hire’s expertise and resources to supply such complex events, often supplying two or more stages at each site, with equipment provided being exactly the same at each site so that the engineers can expect the same result. SSE Hire has spent many years developing systems that deliver maximum power where it is required and minimum noise where it is not – particularly important with stringent site licenses.
With tight schedules and curfews, promoters and audiences alike want to see the rapid change over of acts. SSE Hire adopts is well-know flip-flop system, with two front of house consoles and two monitor consoles working in tandem. While one band performs, the next band’s engineer line checks the second desk, while much of the stage rig can be pre-set in readiness for a fast changeover. SSE Hire typically manages 15-20 minute changeovers early on in the day with even headliners being put on stage within 30 minutes of the previous act.
The basic flip-flop system uses analogue consoles, which can be easily operated by artists’ engineers. To meet the growing demand for digital set-ups brought in by headliners, SSE provides the major festivals with digital multicores in addition to the conventional technology. Acts can either sub-hire a digital desk from SSE or use their own.
One of the busiest weekend this summer was probably July 8-9th, with major festivals simultaneously in Scotland and Ireland, with T in the Park and Oxegen.
A few statistics from the V Festival weekend give a fair idea of the resources deployed by SSE Hire throughout the summer. SSE Hire supplied systems and crew for the main stage and the Channel 4 stage at both the Chelmsford and Stafford sites. Each of the four stages used two front of house consoles and two monitor consoles – totalling 16 large scale consoles.
The main stage at each site used a Geo T system, while the Channel 4 stages used L’Acoustic’s VDosc in Chelmsford and JBL Vertec systems in Stafford.
The equipment inventory for the weekend:This lot was looked after by a crew of 50, plus 12 SSE personnel (project managers, assistants and directors).
Here's SSE Hire's 2006 Festival Line Up:
Hi Fi Festival North
Hi Fi Festival South
Monsters of Rock
Download Festival
Escape into the Park
T4 on the Beach
T in the Park
Oxegen
National Rock & Pop festival
Volvic Kerrang Fest
Latitude Festival
Global Gathering
Fairports Cropedy Festival
Summer Sundae
V Festival Chelmesford
V
Carling Reading Weekend
Carling
