That Friday Feeling - LIVE!

Due to technical / time constraints, tonight, for the first time in about 6 months, I had to present my show on Hope City Radio… live.

Of course, this should have been no big deal – most of my first year on the station had been live, (not to mention nearly every show I'd done back in the UK) but after 6 months of getting to re-record all my imperfect takes to death, tonight I found that – horrors - my standards had gone up.

In the old days I’d archived the show on a cheap SKC normal position cassette – now I was taking in leads to master it digitally onto DAT.

Previously I’d just played a random selection of tracks from the station library, in a fairly rough order. Now I was keen to include some Hillsong for live worship, some Elvis for gospel, an unreleased track, a modern track, a duet, a comedy track and an instrumental track, and all sourced from CDs that I would still have access to at home, so that I could digitally restore the show afterwards.

And of course I wouldn’t accept any pauses or fluffs at all from that idiot who would be presenting and engineering the whole thing.

Then, just as I was about to go on air, something unheard of happened. Someone I knew texted me and told me they were about to listen to the show. No pressure or anything…

JINGLE: (Wal Read) “Hope City Radio – spreading the word that Jesus is alive.”

ME: (Steve Goble, live, trying to sound smooth and fluent) “It is indeed Hope City Radio, it’s myself Steve Goble with That Friday Feeling - 45 minutes of the very very BEST in contemporary and classic Christian music. On the show this week we got Hills Christian Life Centre, Sydney, Australia, and Elvis Aaron Presley, as well as a bit of Matt Redman we’re gonna fit in before the end of the programme as well, but first of all – I think it’s time for Dave Dowlen to go on…”

At this point I hit the play button on the CD player, where I had a sketch lined-up featuring Dave Dowlen getting stage-fright before going on stage to perform the whole of I Need You.

What actually came out was distorted nonsense.

It took me the entire forty-second sketch to deduce that, at some point over the last 6 months, the levels on the CD player had been reset higher, resulting in the distortion, and the balance had been, for want of a more technical term, over-balanced onto one speaker. These I duly adjusted by about the 50-second mark.

(Good job I was planning to restore the show afterwards for the repeat version.)

Later I saw my friend and inevitably found out what he’d thought of the show. He said that he’d managed to tune-into the start of the programme, but couldn’t get a good signal, so he’d turned off again.