TALK TIME:Eoin Butler talks to PADDY SOPER, Technical manager of the O2 Arena, Dublin.
How long have you been working here? I'vebeen here since the venue opened in 1989 as the Point Depot. It really was just an old train depot. I'd been working in theatre in Plymouth, building sets. One day I was asked if I fancied having a look at a venue in Ireland and I thought, "Why not?" In the taxi on the way, one of the tech guys said, "You're going to have to use your imagination now". He wasn't joking. It literally was four walls and a roof.
It was originally envisaged that The Point would host West End productions. Why the switch to live music?We did get a lot of West End productions over here in the first couple of years. We had Les Miserables, I remember. It wasn't a conscious decision to switch over to rock bands. It just panned out that way. Once we started putting bands in alongside the musicals they just took over, because there are a lot more touring bands than there are touring shows on that scale.
Describe your duties hereMy job is getting the stage ready in advance of a performance. This involves talking to the artist's production team over the phone in advance, getting drawings together, finding out where they want the stage to go and so on.
Are there any artists you've been particularly excited about meeting?Generally, the artists come in at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, soundcheck for half-an-hour and then vanish back to their hotel or the dressing room, so we don't have much to do with them. The only artist I did try to orchestrate a meeting with was Bob Dylan. But he stayed on his tour bus all day. In the end, all I managed to say was, "After you", while we were walking through a doorway. He said, "Thanks".
Have you ever had any unusual requests?Well, no one has ever stipulated no brown MMs [as rockers Van Halen famously did in the 1980s], if that's what you mean. Diana Ross played in the round. When the Stones were here we had to provide them with a full-size snooker table and backstage bar for Keith and Ronnie to warm up in each night.
The old venue hosted everything from wrestling to opera, 'Riverdance' and even the 'MTV Europe Music Awards'. Which was the toughest challenge you faced? Disney On Icewas always an awkward, messy gig to do. Setting it up was easy. Getting rid of the ice afterwards, though, was a nightmare. You'd think it should just be a matter of melting it and pumping it out. But it wasn't that simple. We actually had to deep freeze the ice to make it even harder, and then smash it up with sledgehammers.
How did you dispose of it, did you throw it in the river?No, we considered doing that. But there was a special dye in the ice to make it white. So we couldn't dump it. We had to throw it into skips and leave it in the car park for a week, thinking it would just melt away. But it didn't melt for weeks.
What's been your favourite performance here down the years?Bowie's first shows here in the early 1990s spring to mind. He made a concert video here. So did Springsteen. When these guys are filming they tend to do it over three nights and then edit it all together to make it look like one concert.
Do they have to wear the same clothes for three days?Yeah, I suppose so. I asked one of Bowie's lighting designers why, of all the venues in the world, they chose to shoot their video here? He said it was the Irish audiences. You always get the best reaction from an Irish audience.