Whitecliff’s storm sound system feeding back

Rik and I had been sifting around the Christchurch cafes, meeting the locals and trying our best to blag a venue for the next Entrain party. The locals were staring. We were an odd-looking pair. I’m diminutive, Rik’s gigantic. We used to carry matching handbags.

Rik’s wearing Pakistani trousers, baggy on the thigh and gathered around the calf. On his top half he’s got a threadbare long sleeve grandpa shirt and an English gentleman’s tweed jacket - a proper one that smells of piss when it rains. He thinks it makes him look respectable. It really just makes him look more like an over-dimension eccentric Englishman.

“Rik man, my stomach thinks my throat's cut”.

I’d been spending loads of time with Rik and had adopted his native Mancunian as my preferred slang.

Whitecliffs is the home and farm of the Grenell family where they breed Appaloosa horses and throw the occasional festival. John Grenell of” Welcome to our World" fame is a character of New Zealand’s country music and folk scene. The farm is on the Canterbury foothills, and comes with a purpose-built barn-stage, dance floor and control tower.

It turned out that one of the Grenell kids was turning 21 soon and had been looking for something extraordinary to mark the event. We totally fit that bill.

We spent a couple of days on-site setting up, building scaffold, installing cafes, hanging artwork.

People came in from all over the country.

Zoltan aged 15 hitchhiked from Auckland to the party.

Opening ceremony, parade of freaks, all night dance frenzy.

A breeze started as it got lighter, around 4.45 in the morning. The sun rose and hit the mountains at the top of the valley, warming them up, moving the air and creating a convection scenario throughout the valley. The wind got stronger as the day got lighter, until there was a gale blowing across the site.

The video screen in front of me started getting buffeted.

“We gotta get that down” shouted Sam, “That things hired and its really expensive. I jumped off the tower and ran to help him untie the rope. While I was running I saw that the 12 metres long painting that we’d hung around the eastern side of the dance floor was billowing and creating a massive sail that was threatening to tip several tonnes of scaffold onto the crowd.

Someone yelled that one of the tipi’s had just been blown over with people inside.

The wind was lifting the needle off the record and Stefan was bring to build a windbreak from record boxes.

After helping Sam lower the screen I ran to the painting. It had to come down quickly before someone was hurt. I yelled for help.

“Leon grab a knife! Stef give us a hand man! We’ve gotta cut the painting off”

Stef ran across the stage back to the DJ booth, accidentally kicking the microphone in the process, switching it on. The microphone started a feedback loop. Steffan couldn't tell where the sound was coming from. He turned off all his lines and it kept going, getting louder and louder. It was channeling through the sound desk, which had been left unattended for the night since the live show the previous evening. The discorded tone of the mic feedback was channelling through a 20,000 watt sound system going at full volume.

It got louder and louder. It was horrifying. People started running away from the dance floor - as fast as they could. Stefan staggered away from the DJ booth, holding his nose as blood poured over his top lip.

The painting ripped in the middle. The scaffold settled. The soundman emerged from his van and switched off the microphone line. The wind stopped and it was quiet.

“Id gabe me a blood dose” Stef looked haunted.

I looked around the crew. Everyone was visibly shaken. We’d never experienced anything like this before.