The Shamwagon Rolls Into Pleasance

Last night, when normal people were asleep in their beds and the rest of Edinburgh was drilling holes in their wallets in the Speigeltent, the mighty forces of Shamwagon decended on Pleasance Below.

It's a great little space - the perfect venue for inyourface Shamwagoneering but with a larger stage than at the Stand. The chaps all seemed very happy with it, particularly since the venue staff seem to have a pirate theme going on.

As the Technical Director this was largely an opportunity for me to get to grips with Below's facilities, an unknown quantity until this point: would the lighting be controlled by a series of men in lab coats operating banks of resistance dimmers or a furiously complex moving-head rig running from a bunch of Pearls? In a word, neither - the desk is a Zero 88 Alcora, the ideal little manual console for busking on the go. This makes me happy.

After checking that I could get power to my PowerBook, plugging in the all-important Voice Of God microphone and making sure that Humphrey's broken iPod could still play AC/DC that was pretty much the "technical" part of the technical rehearsal done and dusted. Next time will be playtime!