News

5 Dec 2011

Bad Sound Review: rebuttal

Angus Davidson is the FOH  Engineer for Kimbra and one of the ‘sloppy technicians’ described by Rachel Olding in a Sydney Morning Herald review of Homebake 2011.

Quote: …’ARIA single-of-the-year co-star Kimbra, whose big-band, soul-driven set was watered down by sloppy technicians but still delivered the hits just the way we like them.’ Now Tim Freedman’s show this week at Metro has also been reviewed, with focus on Greg Weaver’s mix. Read here.
This after Bernard Zuel moved in on Chris Madden’s excellent mix of Sade, here.
Angus Davidison has fired straight back at the newspaper, and asked for a retraction…..
Rod Matheson on Monitors (Kylie, Massive Attack, Il Divo) and I (Crowded House, Supertramp, Joni Mitchell) have over 70 years of experience between us and are anything but sloppy. We are both professional engineers who are highly regarded by our peers and the acts we work with.
We were in fact at the Homebake site at 12pm the day before the show on a day off setting up equipment and making life as easy as we could for ourselves considering we were so far down the bill and DON’T get the same consideration as headline acts. Hardly a sloppy attitude.
I’m not sure if Rachel is such a genius that she conducts her own computer maintenance, but somehow I doubt it. The fault that caused us the problem at Homebake was a Mac Book Pro that suddenly stopped passing audio a minute before the show was scheduled to start. It had been checked and was working, but when I went to the FOH mix position and requested some sound to check levels, it failed.
Now if she had bothered to ask she would have found out this simple truth and perhaps written something like this; ‘due to an unfortunate technical glitch, Kimbra was on stage late, but the situation was saved by the crew, who worked frantically to remedy the problem.’
Instead lazy, irresponsible journalism won the day and we are made to look like fools. Bravo!
It may interest you to know that this was brought to my attention by Julius Grafton, editor of CX magazine who does know both Rod and my reputations and I suspect was as surprised as me to to see this rubbish in print.
I would like a retraction or correction of this poorly researched article please.
Sincerely,
Angus Davidson
KIMBRA Production Manager/FOH

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