Streetlife 08

Modified and Ice type car shows at the NEC have been huge in the past as well as fiercely expensive to attend for either visitors or exhibitors. I know for a fact that one year a big Japanese company spent £30,000 on their efforts at a Max Power show! The organisers back then were a part of a huge publishing house and it was generally agreed, were only into it to skin as much wonga out of the market, even if it strangled it to death, by charging both punters and professionals like wounded bulls. I recall being appalled at the ticketing structure that deemed an outdoor arena was extra money over the entrance price and the silliness of EVERYONE being a VIP, as long as they had paid up an extra slice of cash to get another laminate pass to say so and thus allow them to see what at every other show is simply part of your normal ticket price. I was reporting on one of them and was not permitted to go outside and see the live action arena as I hadn’t got the right pass! I have a low opinion of that outfit.
This show, with Pioneer Events as the organiser was a very different and far more righteous proposition to that and while it was not easy to attract a lot of exhibitors who are having a tougher time in this era of spiralling petrol and everything else costs, what they did pull off was great fun and impressive for an unknown-quantity first oeuvre.
All in one long run of halls with an outdoor action area and an apron out the front used for the EMMA sound off, the event was well arranged and had a slew of the best cars around. One big feature was the ‘˜Street’ laid out complete with white lines down the middle, that had show cars parked along it. There were club areas and stands from the likes of the Fast Girls and other lifestyle sites, like Basedrift.

Audio exhibitors included some retailers selling stuff and distributors included Bass Junkies, Four, BBG, Vibe and in particular a serious effort from Armour, who had a rocking array of cars-and-girls, as well as a room just at the entrance to the show for a dealer promotional effort that I checked out. They had quantities of Monster energy drink from their sponsorship deal with them, other libations, nibbles and a Scalextric set for those inspired to race by the running of the British Grand Prix on the big screen telly they had set up in a lounge area.
I had to laugh. Someone had problems finding their new wedge of fresh printed business cards. They had been used in pure blokey fashion by someone else as an essential track support for the slot racing set! Anyone who has played with Scalextric knows about this. Armour were launching new dealer ideas and a hugely important new product called iO Play. You can read about it in their news story here.
Vibe’s bass tunnel is running like a brute these days and is at least twice as powerful as when I first met it. In fact, it’s so fierce now that the public are not actually allowed to stand deep inside it when it’s running. However, being a bit of a git (never!) I kind of leaped up onto the stagey bit and dived into the tunnel as they were doing a beefy demo and not realising that the rules are perforce different now, beckoned folks up into it. I can guess to within 2dB SPL up to about 157 and I thought it was of the order of 155dB! After it stopped and my intestines were just settling back into their cavity, I worked out that poor Fraser, the poacher-turned-gamekeeper (Ex journalist moved into PR like so many of the more intelligent ones do he’s part of a known trend) was having kittens and telling off his colleagues for allowing the punters inside the tunnel. Shamefacedly, I had to admit it was my fault.
Oops!
It was bloody awesome though and we would have had the EMMA SPL equipped AudioControl SA-3055 RTA/SPL meter (like ours but with red not blue LEDs) placed in there to try it out but for the fact that it had been driven so hard that something, somewhere had broken and let the smoke kept inside come out. (It’s a well known fact that all high end audio kit runs on smoke. You break a thing and it leaks out. Heavier smoke comes from posher equipment.) So we’ll take it out and measure it next time. (Stop Press: It was actually a melting C-Form socket from the mains as all the Vibe kit was sucking so hard. The Vibe stuff was utterly unfazed.)
The Sun bus was present, with a bevy of Page Three Girls. When I was a kid, my mum was the Sun’s agony aunt. It was the era of Linda Lusardi and Samantha Fox and Mum’d bring me home huge photographs of the girls that I would Blu-tack to my ceiling. I was 13 and I guess it meant mama was ensuring I didn’t go seek out feet-behind-the-ears material! Just nice cuties with pretty boobies.

I pulled a lovely stroke for the Iceman and his protégé Pixie, with them being placed right inside the main entranceway. This meant they had to wait until after midday to rock, as otherwise those coming in and the staff working there would have been vibration-fatigued! However, once it turned time, the Odyssey batteries, Panasonic front end and all that lovely Orion ordnance was able to let rip. The suspended ceiling nearly changed status to become a rattling, debris-dropping mess and I inveigled first a couple of Max Power girls into the thing to have their parts wibbled at 33Hz while their eyes lit up and their hair flowed around like a mermaid’s, and then someone a bit more famous.
My mate Big Mick Hughes, known also as The Metal Overlord is well chuffed with now being the newly-touring-again Led Zeppelin’s front of house sound engineer. His main job is Metallica though and despite being transatlantic for so long, has no trace whatsoever of any change to his Walsall-lad’s accent.
His regular stadium-rig wattage is 500,000w.
At the Monsters of Rock Gig in Russia, there were a million people, delay towers so big and so distant they had to be checked for having all their LEDs lit up by helicopter and the rig (with every single ElectroVoice MT4 P.A. enclosure in the entire northern hemisphere shipped in) piled up until there were 1,500,000 watts-worth.
That’s one point five megawatts.
But he’d never experienced this sort of thing. He kindly got up and very close to non-rock-and-roll times, drove to the NEC and in the absence of a stretch simply legged it the mile or so to the halls to come and see this car. He said, ‘It was like a massage. I thought bits had fallen off. My bits.’ Mick is well up to speed on mobile electronics, having had a large install in a Lexus he owned and having done features with me in both Fast Car and Home Cinema Choice. The bass in his living room is truly crushing and when we were demming a bit of Master & Commander for the second HCC mag feature recently, the vertical blinds were jumping in his window frames with each blast of the cannon.
Below are the video clips of two Maxy P lasses getting basserated and of course the hairy rocker that is Big Mick Hughes getting both beard and locks flung awry as he too was massaged by bass from Ian ‘˜Iceman’ Pinder’s mad Orion Astra.




Outside the rain came and went a bit, which was a pity as in previous years the warm weather made for balmy evenings by Pendigo lake. I recall going to a raucous do held by Armour again in the Hilton. They were doing a dealer launch. I attended, wandered out to the balcony and witnessed a chef fling several loaves into the lake, which then boiled with great big carp. As an angler, it made my thumbs itch.
What was also sweet was that the population of rabbits on the NEC lawns has rocketed so baby bunnies were running about all over the place. Aaah!
The cars that impressed me were of course Ben Murray’s motorised Genesis install, Motorguard’s reworking of the old Rockford Chevy Suburban with Directed’s Orion and Cobalt stuff and the amazing budget-price-epic-result mad Uno belonging Adam Rutland. The Murray mobile is below.


Adam’s Uno has sixteen Oz Vector tens and eight pairs of Oz Vector coaxes. Blue LEDs proliferate and there are even highlights using the brake light clusters from an Alfa 156! The 25mm thick Perspex wall is flame polished and acts as a port for the huge bass install. Four big Starsound 1.5 kilowatters are made to look like one big amp in the back by use of a metal plate and moving just one logo badge to the centre. The head unit is a flip screen but not motorised and cost £20 on Hong Kong E-Bay. The equipment was around £2,000 but should have been £8,000 odd if he had been buying premium kit at retail. It scored 143.6dB with the door closed and 148.7 with them open, on music from the EMMA ESPL disc. He uses a 160A Ohio generator alternator he paid £50 for and five 105Ah batteries. He referred to one of his opponents thus, ‘He is insanely jealous of my cheapness.’
Incidentally Ian Iceman Pinder Also entered and won 1st with 146.7dB with the doors shut and 151.5dB with them open. That means that on bass tones, Adam’s throbbing 152’s and Ian’s has to be hitting 156dB+. Wicked!
The only car inside that really resonated for us lot is of course Mark Shaw’s Civic Coupé. It is awesome and is on a promise for a cover with Max Power. As well as all the Audiobahn kit, he has a 160GB HDD Shuttle PC, with mobile internet access via O2, so he can download music while he is driving.
It was a cool event and with a bit of luck will hit full potential in visitor numbers next time.
And here’s where to click to see a funky cool slideshow in the newly imported gallery system. We LOVE this, it’s full of sexy chickas!
link