Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

Letters and Colours at Leeds Festival

Every waking hour right now is focused on our outside broadcast from the Carling Weekend Leeds Festival on August Bank Holiday weekend. The Unsigned Stage just gets better and better and once again this year, the Raw Talent crew will be recording all the bands on the stage over the three days and then broadcasting live from backstage on the Sunday night, playing out all the highlights. So if you can't there, you won't miss a thing.

Broadcasting live from Leeds 2005

Setting up a big outside broadcast of this kind takes months of planning. We have to book a line which will be installed a week or so before hand. This will enable us to broadcast from the Festival site. This year we'll be using a portacabinΜύ as the base for our operation. From there we'll run out a cable to the back of the Unsigned Stage, enabling us to record everything. The turnround time on the stage is twenty minutes between bands so the activity behind the scenes is frantic as John, our engineer, gets info on the re-settting of the stage and then works on getting a new balance for the next band. We then edit long into the night so that all the material is ready for when we go live on air on the Sunday night.

Raw Talent team enjoy breakfast on the campsite

Wandering past our broadcast vehicle last year, one Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ chap working for telly asked us if we were staying in a hotel nearby for the duration of the Festival. How we laughed. One of my first jobs on arriving at the site is putting up the crew's tents. All eight of them.Μύ So what else is in our Festival luggage? Well I'm the most organised. Wellies, camping mallet, plasters, insect repellent, bottle of whiskey, cereal bars, waterproofs.Μύ Alan? Well he comes in his camper van so it's like he's moved house for the weekend. He even has duvet and proper pillows. John? Red Wine and multi tool. That's it. Pete Dixon is new to the team this year so we're all waiting to see how well he travels. If we get to Monday morning and we're all still talking it's a good sign.

We also welcome back our amazing rigger and engineer Kristan Webb this year to the Raw Talent team. When we first broadcast live from Leeds two years ago, Kris turned to me half an hour after arriving and told me he'd established full internet connection. I looked around at an empty field, a cow peering over the fence at us and didn't even bother to ask "How did you do that?" Kris finds solutions to all those niggling problems that crop up on an outside broadcast so we're looking forward to his inventive approach once again this year.