The Week in Lighting & Sound
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Price Wars - Ed Sheeran has urged fans not to buy from online touts after tickets for his forthcoming tour appeared at vastly inflated prices just minutes after going on sale. The singer-songwriter says he is "deeply concerned" after tickets for his 14-date UK and Ireland tour were offered for sale at almost 13 times the original price. Four tickets for his gig at The O2 Arena on 1 May, with an original face value of £77 each, appeared on secondary ticketing site StubHub for £999 each plus booking fees.
StubHub, which is owned by eBay, insists that prices - which are set by sellers - are dependent on demand, and often reduced as the event approaches. Tickets for gigs are not allowed on eBay itself, and any ticket listings are removed from the site. Sheeran has now teamed up with Twickets - a site aimed at the ethical resale of tickets - for his April and May concerts.
Brits Live - Little Mix, Emeli Sandé, The 1975, Bruno Mars, Skepta and Ed Sheeran will perform live perform at the Brit Awards on 22 February.
High Jump - Lady Gaga jumped off the roof of Houston's NRG stadium and bathed in the light of hundreds of drones - but her Super Bowl show was fairly restrained by her standards. The star only changed costume twice, letting her music do the talking in a 12-minute, hit-laden set.
She opened with Woody Guthrie's civil rights anthem This Land Is Your Land, a gentle but pointed rebuke to the Trump administration; which she reinforced by performing Born This Way - her hymn to acceptance and inclusion.
Metal Fatigue - Black Sabbath, the band credited with inventing heavy metal music, have played their last concert. The two-hour gig at the NEC Arena in their home city of Birmingham saw the rock veterans play 15 songs ending with their first hit, Paranoid. Ticker tape and balloons fell as singer Ozzy Osbourne, 68, thanked fans for nearly five decades of support.
Sabbath's The End Tour began in the US in January last year and took in 81 dates across the world. The tour schedule saw the band visit Australasia, Europe, North America and South America, finishing with two shows in Birmingham.
Dramatic Cutbacks - One in 10 teachers responding to a Guardian survey claim art, music or drama has been dropped from their schools due to funding cuts. The Guardian Teacher Network polled more than 1,000 teachers, with 80% claiming their schools had been making general cutbacks or were planning to. Nine percent of respondents reported that their schools had already scrapped art, music or drama, with a fifth claiming that one or more of these subjects had been given reduced timetable space.
Circle Seats - A new theatre featuring a revolving auditorium is to be built in Liverpool as part of plans for a creative district in the city. The performance venue is based on a similar space in Amsterdam, and the revolving auditorium – where the seats move around the stage – aims to give audiences "a genuinely immersive experience". It is being created by Dutch company Stage Around, which has also taken the concept to Tokyo.
The theatre, which will also host music events, is part of wider plans for a major new creative district in Liverpool, called Ten Streets, which aims to attract creative businesses to the area. The vision for the development was unveiled by the city's mayor, Joe Anderson, as a consultation on the plans was launched. The area that will become Ten Streets covers 125 acres of former dockland to the north of the city centre and is estimated to create 2,500 new jobs in the area over the next decade.
Lost & Found - Lost recordings by Bob Marley found in a damp hotel basement in London after more than 40 years have been restored. The tapes are the original live recordings of the reggae legend's concerts in London and Paris between 1974 and 1978. Tracks include No Woman No Cry, Jamming and Exodus.
The tapes, recorded by the Rolling Stones’ mobile, were found in a run-down hotel in Kensal Rise, north-west London, where Bob Marley and the Wailers stayed during their European tours in the mid-1970s.
They were discovered when Joe Gatt, a Marley fan and London businessman, took a phone call from a friend, who had found them while doing a building refuse clearance. From the 13 reel-to-reel analogue master tapes, 10 were fully restored, two were blank and one was beyond repair.
Union Moves - John Smith is to step down as general secretary of the Musicians’ Union after 15 years. Announcing his retirement, Smith said he found it “gratifying to look back and see how the MU has consolidated its position within both the music industry and the trade union movement” during his tenure.
(Jim Evans)
7 February 2017
