Way out West (incorporating Way up North)

honestly, why do we bother.

I sometimes despair; for a number of years I was in loco parentis/chief electrician at a large, crumbling theatre in the East-End of London. This venue closed for a major refurbishment about five years ago, and in the process of clearing the decks I acquired a few bits and pieces.

As a very occasional guitarist, I wasn't about to let a couple of classic 1970's amplifiers go into the skip, and spent nearly £200.00 having one of them serviced and made lovely. The other one I shoved under a bookcase and forgot about as it had 'f*cked' artistically marked on it in six inch high letters made from PVC electricians tape. It also had a matching speaker cabinet which I shoved into a cupboard at the lighting company I'm associated with, and also forgot about.

As we are moving the lighting company out into the country next month, a gradual process of consolidation has been going on, and we finally moved the last few bits and pieces out of the last couple of rooms at the former chemical factory in Bethnal Green, amongst which stuff was the aforementioned speaker; I was prevailed upon to take it home (it was less subtle than that, but let's not go there). Faced with the storage problem of a large speaker, I decided to have a bit of an eBay clearout,and get rid of those odd, but strangely desirable bits and pieces that I keep tripping over. So I dug the dead amp out from under the bookcase, assuming that it would be useful at least for spares, spent half an hour cleaning tape goo off it, took its picture, and wandered off to do the eBay listing.

In the course of writing the listing, littered with many caveats, it occurred to me that I ought to at least plug the bugger in and see. So I replaced the broken 13A plug, and expecting nothing, plugged it in. It worked perfectly, the pots were a bit crackly, otherwise there was enough oomph for Eric Clapton (he used to use/endorse this particular flavour of amp). I am forced to the conclusion that my predecessors (and successors, because most of them are still there), would be happier to spend 45 minutes creating a PVC notice, than replacing a plug, which would take 2 minutes.

There is nothing in my seven year association with the venue to cause me to change my view, recent events led me to the opinion that nothing has changed: Last week, during the Panto, their new sound desk (estimated cost £20K),went off with a huge bang, stopping the show for twenty minutes, investigations revealed that in the two years since the venue reopened it had never occurred to anybody to clean the airfilters on the sound desk power supply (newly opened venues tend to be dusty). Although they had a second back up power supply with an auto-changeover for just such an eventuality, the previous time the power supply had failed (unreported to any vaguely sober/senior management), they had simply removed the fuses from the back up and presumably hoped that the fuse fairy would replace them. M'lud I rest my case.

The amp has been relaying random snippets from my ipod for the last six hours without showing any signs of distress, here's to eBay.

posted by Lampy @ 1/06/2006 10:11:00 pm