Gleneagles - with Weston Foster
Here we are in the refined atmosphere of Gleneagles Hotel, providing the audio equipment for Weston Foster (who I must add is a lovely guy). Weston was heavily involved in the London Brit-Funk scene back in ‘the day’ and worked with many visiting artists such as Randy Crawford, Womack & Womack, Sister Sledge and Jimmy Ruffin to name just a few. In the mid 1990s he gave up playing the drums to become a session singer. You will hear Weston’s voice on TV & radio commercials as well as on tracks from pop artists such as the Pet Shop Boys, Matt Bianco, Supergrass, Joey Negro and Heather Small. Tonight he's singing for a select group of diners and leaving me to write a blog as he's also a record producer and wants full control of the mixing desk as well! Andrea - who is in charge of the evening's smooth progress, managed to find Scotaudio via Google as a very competitive alternative to the hotel's usual pro AV company. She has also managed to find me a 3 course meal of wonderful food, so all is well even if this does finish at 1:00am!
The life of an AV person is nothing but varied - earlier this afternoon, using much of the same gear, we provided the sound system for a heavy road repairing/road marking company demonstrating their noisy products at Stirling University. Earlier still, we battled with the intricacies of the internet and finally managed to get our emails back. Say what you will about Google, but less than 30 seconds after raising a ticket with their online help desk I had a call back from a really helpful guy who got us up and running in no time.
So today I have two things to thank Google for; an impressively fast customer service which puts every other company I've dealt with into the shade; and levelling the playing field to let the smaller guys have a shot at the work and show they can do it just as well - but for a lot less.
Today Google did no evil, but they certainly did us (and our clients) a lot of good.
