Eleven of us set up in half a conference hall and then waited out of sight for a partition to move.
The client was running a staff conference for 1,000-plus in the ICC Wales main hall and had booked the band without telling the staff. We played two hours of back-to-back hits, under a lighting rig the client had paid properly for, with more glitter balls than the room strictly needed. DJ Sam Tweaks ran it to 2am.
Four hours of sitting still
The reveal itself is the venue’s trick rather than ours - the ICC Wales main hall divides, so a band can be built and line-checked in one half while the business runs in the other.
What that means for the band is a long, quiet day. We load in and soundcheck while the sessions are running in the other section, then go to the green room and stay there. Nothing that carries through a partition, which rules out most of what a band would otherwise do with a spare afternoon.
What the client spent it on
The production was the client’s, and it showed. Full lighting rig, proper PA, an actual show wash over the stage rather than the house strip lighting. A band under a rig like that is a different event to the same band under whatever the room came with, and at this scale the difference is visible from the back.
The other thing the budget bought was the band size. A 4,000-square-metre flat floor swallows a small band, and the 11-piece - brass, full rhythm section, multiple vocalists - reaches the back of it without the PA being pushed anywhere near distortion.
Why it ran to 2am
Nobody left early for a train and nobody was queuing for a taxi at half midnight, because the resort next door has over 1,000 bedrooms and most of the room was sleeping in them. A conference crowd that can walk to bed behaves differently at one in the morning to one that is watching the clock.
If you are planning one
Tell the band the tone of the day in advance. A management conference that has been in sessions since nine opens on a different song to a Christmas party, and we can only pick it if we know which one we are walking out to. The ICC Wales venue page covers the room, the band size it takes and how the load-in works.
We’re a corporate band in Newport - ICC Wales, Celtic Manor and venues across South Wales and nationwide. If you’re planning something and want to talk about what works, get in touch.
