The Wildhearts

Is it me or do The Wildhearts seem to have these more regularly than most bands? Sonisphere '09, Reading '04, a load of the recent London gigs and (to an extent) Download '08 all had issues with guitars, mike's or the sound in general. It seems to happen more often at the bigger shows too. I wouldn't have thought their set up of 2 guitars, bass, drums and mike's would be that challenging to get right but then again I'm no techie.

So is it bad luck? The fact I notice more cos I follow the band closely? Poor oranization?

It must be really annoying for them.

Your thoughts?

I've been at all the london shows for solo and band for the last year and I've not noticed any sound problems at all and last time it was brought up neither had anyone else as far as I know.

Wildhearts gigs do tend to blur into one big haze of fun, however:

The Forum show in '08 when Ginger left the stage cos of the sound problems
Koko '07 - guitar probs - I think Ginger and CJ had to swap at some point so a solo could be played. I also seem to recall one of the mike's packing up. Wasn't that noticeable though...

Add those to the Reading and Sonisphere gigs and that's some big shows where the sounds gone funky. I might be wrong though, I've been wrong before!

I was at the forum show and when we spoke about this last time it was brought up none of us found there to be any sound problems, okay on stage the monitors might have been acting up a tad but to the audience there was nothiong wrong.

Fair enough, I couldn't make it to that show unfortunately so I'm probably not best placed to comment. I would count monitor problems as sound problems though, especially if they cause disruption to a gig.

Having worked in a theatre for 12 years i can say you'd be lucky to get through a show without any sound problems.

The vast majority of them will go unnoticed to an audience.However on occasion it does go badly wrong.Equipment is a pain in the arse.

The simplest thing like a lead/plug/Lx cable going wrong inevitably leads to a trawl through hundreds of cables to find the course of the bloody thing to unplug it.
You know where it goes at the start of the gig but by the time you've stuck drum risers etc all over the place it's like looking for a needle in a pile of needles that have wrapped round each other.

Oh and thats before you even get to monitors,bass bins,amps and multi cores.

For what it's worth the only problems i've noticed at any Wildhearts shows in Glasgow was guitar tuning ones.

To be fair, the main problem was that the guys were trying out new amps at Sonisphere. CJs was fine but Gingers, well, it just wasn't.

The sound at the Earth Vs show was pretty shocking. Didn't matter, but it sounded pretty bad, and Ginger spent a huge proportion of the gig signalling to get it sorted out. Apparently it was good up in the balcony though, so...

richjones wrote:To be fair, the main problem was that the guys were trying out new amps at Sonisphere. CJs was fine but Gingers, well, it just wasn't.

They should have just stuck to good simple reliable old Marshalls. In my view, the more knobs a guitar amp has on the front, the more shit it sounds - and that even applies to Marshalls!