Touring a continent the size of Europe with a well-known musical act is a complex undertaking. Check out this time-lapse video that I created when I was on tour with Lady Gaga a few years back. I’ve compressed 20 hours into two minutes 38s. It captures the whole process from what we call ‘load-in’ to the ‘load-out’ after the show is over. Lady Gaga’s performance is in there too, but if you blink, you’ll miss it.
Take a look. It’ll give you an idea of what the touring crew gets up to. We did this 84 times, in 84 venues, in countries all over the world in 8 months, with 70 touring crew + band + dancers and LG’s entourage, in the EU we had 25 trucks and 11 tour buses and for the last show in Paris we did a live stream to over 2 million people worldwide.
Imagine having to obtain Visas for every crew member, band member, dancer, bus and truck driver for each of the EU27. It’s just not going to happen!!!
Sometimes it’s a pain in the a**e, especially when things go wrong, like in Japan when the local generator guy turned up the voltage supplying my racks and my UPS caught fire, Just as LG was standing next to me waiting to go on stage, the production manager standing next to her said, do you need a minute as the flames licked around my ankles! I needed 3, and she went on stage!!!
But mostly we love what we do and wouldn’t swap it for the world!
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