The Ned Wood Archive

Sam

Sam’s sat with his brother and the others on one of the benches at the top of the Pyramid Field.  There’s an area roped off halfway up the field, halfway between them and the stage. Just about where they had the CND symbol the year before.  They’ve got a trapeze like they usually have in the Circus Field.  Around that are four trailers, ordinary farm trailers, like the one Sam was on last year.

He’d been part of the 2025 opening ceremony.  They’d asked the Recycling Crew to join in the singing.  Sam can’t sing, but he’d gone along.  At first, he was just curious, like how serious was it?  Then, when he sussed it might be entertaining, he wanted to be part of it.  Like he said at the time, he’d stand next to someone who could sing and just open and close his own mouth like a goldfish.  Nobody would know.

The idea was that if they got enough of the recycling crew to sing during the ceremony there’d be enough volume.  Trouble was that not enough of the crew turned up and some of those that did, like Sam, couldn’t really sing.  I mean, Sam could hit roughly the right note some of the time, but he couldn’t sing that note at sufficient volume.  It opened his eyes during the rehearsals when he heard how loud some of the real singers they’d got leading them could really sing.  They’d had, what?, three or four rehearsals on the Tuesday and the Wednesday.  For the last one on the Tuesday, before the crowds came in when they had a proper dress rehearsal, they’d been able to watch the performance up close, so it was worth it just for that.  Fire dancers, of course, but also some fairly incredible acrobats up poles and hanging from cranes.  Ade and Linda had seen some of the actual opening ceremony on TV when it went out and said it was pretty good.  They’d even seen the recycling crew on the TV, but not Sam.  He’d been able to avoid the cameras.

They managed to get about a hundred and fifty, two hundred of the recycling crew plus about, what, forty or fifty bin painters, and they put them on three or four trailers lined up towards the Pyramid stage – maybe a third of the way back.  They had a conductor on each trailer and they’d sort of learnt the notes they had to sing and they also knew that there’d be some sort of guide on the screens next to the stage.  Gareth, who’d written the piece, told them at rehearsal that it didn’t even matter whether they sang the right notes as long as they sang any note in the right key.  Of course that didn’t help Sam any.  He doesn’t know what key it was so he doesn’t know whether he managed even that.  

Anyway, Sam had fun.  He was on one of the trailers with forty or fifty other recyclers.  Many of them were wearing their recycling crew T-shirts, the sensible ones (which didn’t include Sam) wearing the shirt over about three layers of sweater to keep out the cold, cos no matter how warm it is during the day, it always gets cold when the sun goes down around here.  Sam could hear the rest of the choir on his trailer and it sounded pretty good, although he could also tell that it wasn’t nearly loud enough to reach beyond the first couple of people stood next to the trailer.  He mostly remembered what to sing and, even though he could barely see the conductor, he mostly kept in time. He thinks.  

Now, If you’ve ever seen anyone perform on the Pyramid Stage, if you’ve ever stood back away from the stage, you’ll know that the sound lags behind the visuals.  Simple physics.  Light travels faster than sound.  At the back of the field, the sound you hear doesn’t always match what’s on the screen.  Having loads of amps all the way back up the field, all the way back to the tree, makes a difference, because that lets you get sound and vision more closely sync’ed.  With the opening ceremony, Sam started to realise that the conductor was a fraction behind the screen visuals.  She’d got an earpiece and was using it to follow a synchronised guide. That guide was a fraction delayed compared to the screen, so half the singers were out of sync.  He looked at a few punters around the trailer and, from those that returned his gaze, got looks of pity, bemusement, and derision.  What the hell.  Maybe it isn’t working.  Sam’s still having fun.  They got to the end.  They did Hey Jude.  They started the countdown to the fireworks.  Sam’s following the screen, calling out the numbers: 10, 9, 8, 7…  He looks at the conductor who is signalling the countdown with her fingers and he realises she is one full count behind.  That’s when it truly hits him that his one and only appearance on the Pyramid isn’t going to go down among the all time great performances.