The Great Escape is becoming a hugely popular and important annual festival and showcase for the UK music industry. And Jon Crawley is responsible for the audio for 400 bands, 35 venues and three solid days of music. Dave Robinson meets a busy man
Escape Victory to
“I LOVE the Airstreams at the Hub, it’s very vibey there.” We’re in a coffee bar across the
road from the Brighton Dome, the nerve centre of The Great Escape, and Jon Crawley – technical manager for the complex three- day conference/ music festival – is talking about his part of the set- up. He elucidates: “Something we introduced last year was the Hub stage (in Jubilee Square), which becomes a central focus for free live music. This year the Hub has an Airstream [trailer] stage which looks very cool, plus we have Arts
Council funding to build a TV installation, where people can text in video footage from the festival and it appears on the screens in a random sequence.” Crawley was recommended for the big TGE post two years ago. He and his C3 Productions partners (John Castrillon and Chris Fillery) now play a major part in managing the sound across the city for the bands, reps, A&R, labels and speakers that attend the event, held over three days in mid-May. “C3 has always done quirky festival and performance art-
based stuff – we’ve worked for Shangri-La, Lost Vagueness, done stages at the Secret Garden Party; we’ve been involved with [promoter] Serious up in London, and we’re doing some stuff for the Cultural Olympiad. So our passion is performance art and live music – we try to limit how much corporate work we’ve got to do but we’ve got to pay the bills too, so we try to choose corporates with a similar creative outlook. We never want to be labeled ‘an AV company’.” Does that come from being
in ‘bohemian’ Brighton? “I think so,” agrees Crawley.
“There’s a whole network of audiovisual artists here, great music and great bands. “We’ve been involved with The
Great Escape since it started,” he continues. “It’s a great scene, it’s small and we know everyone. We do work in London but only as much as we want to, rather than have to. Having said that, we’ve just invested a lot of money in a new system which is going to elevate us to the next level.” C3’s much-loved, much-used
Turbosound Aspect system has been joined by a shiny new L-Acoustics KARA rig. “It’s in the Corn Exchange right now – we only bought it last week!” laughs Crawley.
(During a soundcheck in the
Exchange later, John Castrillon will tell PSNEurope: “KARA is a fantastic piece of kit and we’re really happy with it. It’s a cleaner sound [than Turbosound] so we’re just getting used to it.”) “We’ve got a deal with Midas,”
says Crawley, “so they’ve lent us a PRO2 for the festival, and on Saturday Rob [Hughes] is coming down to do a demo for all the engineers in town.” While there are 35 venues
across Brighton taking part in The Great Escape, most of them have capable in-house systems already. Crawley and crew have been responsible for 12 PA installations for TGE. That ranges from the
New Jersey’s Nicole Atkins radiates at Komedia Studio on Friday night at TGE