Last month I thought I'd gone deaf. After decades of standing too close to the loudspeakers I'd finally got my comeuppance and my ears had given up the ghost. I was at Joan As Police Woman's gig at the Barbican and the music sounded like a muffled whisper, as if someone was talking to me from the other side of the room through a ball of cotton wool.Luckily it turned out that it wasn't me, it was them. Joan apologised for the sludgy mix and explained that it had been perfectly fine during the soundcheck but some gremlins had decided to rain on her sonic parade. The sound improved a little during the show, but the incident highlighted the fact that after all these years, at a time when the live scene is thriving while the recorded music industry is going through its death rattle, venues still cannot get the sound right.
I also go to a lot of comedy shows in big venues and the funny thing is that the sound for them is often better than it is for the bands who have played enormodomes for years. Suede at the O2 Arena lost all the finesse that make their records sparkle, whereas seeing Peter Kay there last autumn was – for better or worse, depending on how you feel about the Bolton banter merchant – the same as watching him on DVD.
Yet when comedy is more than one-man-and-his-mike it is prone to the same pitfalls as bands. At Tim Minchin's show at the O2 before Christmas, complete with 55-piece orchestra, I thought the sound was pretty good from the side of the stage. It was only the next day when a friend who was sitting elsewhere told me that he could barely understand half the lyrics that I realised that the trouble with mixing the sound in a venue this size is that, no matter how many flashing lights, dials and gizmos you have on your mixing desk, it is virtually impossible to get the acoustics right for all the people all the time. It's perhaps not insurmountable in an unseated venue where the sonically disgruntled can wander, but a royal pain when you are stuck in the same seat all night.
I don't expect a live gig to be as nuanced as the recorded version, but it would be nice to be able to decipher the vocals
I'm not alone in getting frustrated by this. In the last week two music reviews on theartsdesk – Janelle Monáe and Robyn, both at The Roundhouse where I had issues with Gorillaz last year – have drawn attention to questionable mixing. I'm lucky, I often get complimentary tickets. I'd feel like strangling someone if I'd paid £50 for a gig and couldn't distinguish between a guitar solo and the sound of a cat's neck being systematically throttled. And this is a problem way beyond rock and pop concerts. My colleague Ismene Brown has complained regularly that the Sadler's Wells sound system is killing live dance performance.
There must be a solution, but even in this digital age the live circuit has yet to come up with a consistent answer. Is it the rooms or the people twiddling those knobs in them? Obviously some venues were not purpose-built for bands, but how hard can it be to balance the output from the stage so that the vocals are not drowned out by the overamplified pneumatic drill of the guitars?
I consider myself to be a moderately fussy but reasonable gig-goer. I don't understand how people can keep wandering to the bar during a show they've paid good money to see. I don't like people talking in front of me. I can tolerate the odd bored whisper, but at a novelty one-hour comedy gig a few weeks ago which featured 60 acts doing only one minute each, the couple in front of me talked almost constantly. Don't even get me started on texting at gigs. How short are people's attention spans?
Yet it is when mixing-desk engineers opt for volume over subtlety that I really boil over. To me there are very few occasions when lyrics do not matter. A live Clash gig in the late Seventies was a visceral experience, one so loud I could never make out what Joe Strummer was blathering on about at the time (it seems positively sedate on the video below) yet nobody cared. But that was an exception. I suspect at the premiere of Tosca at the Teatro Costanzi in 1900 there was some curmudgeon in the stalls complaining about the vocals. But I doubt that they had to put up with the quality of the sound at various major UK rock venues over a century and countless technological advances later.
I don't expect a live rendition of an album to be as nuanced as the recorded version, but it would be nice to be able to decipher the vocals now and again. Having seen the comments on other reviews on theartsdesk and spoken to colleagues, however, I realise I'm not alone in being irritated by this. Perhaps that is the one bright side. At least I now know that my hearing is not the problem.
The Clash perform "Janie Jones"
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