Fleetwood Mac Video Scam
Posted by Meggs | Uncategorised | Posted on December 11th, 2009
Illegal video recording at Fleetwood Mac. Note the vacant seat to the front left.
Greetings all,
After my post on the Danny Green and Roy Jones Junior fight I’ve been asked to provide commentary on other things that interest fellow fisher persons. One thing that has always accompanied my Fishing & Reef Tour Specialist crew on our holidays (apart from great times and big fish) is music.
In fact last Saturday night we all went down to the local club to help The Radiators celebrate their 30th anniversary along with Spy v Spy, Jenny Morris and The Screaming Jets. Mi Sex were also suppose to play but apparently a couple of them are sick and one reportedly is not long for this world. Those of you in the know would already be aware that their lead singer died in the 90’s in a car accident up on the NSW north coast. Anyway it was a sensational night and I managed to win an amp in a raffle. But I digress…
During the week I had the honour to take my darling wife along to see Fleetwood Mac. Now I’d be the first to say that they were not my style of band and I wasn’t looking forward to it but I must say it was one of the best concerts I’ve been to. I spent seven years in the music business so I have seen a heap of acts in my time but the Mac put up a terrific show for over two and half hours and two encores.
But that’s not the story.
We had pretty good seats. For those of you who have been to Acer Arena we were seated just off the floor in one of the two seater rows next to the tunnel entrance to the flat. By the way unlike the Danny Green fight we were able to buy 4 beers at a time at the Fleetwood Mac concert. Typical I was driving! Anyway Ella Hooper from Killing Heidi now in band called The Verses was the warm up act and a couple of old guys in front of us were seated with a brief case on their laps. Hmmm straight from work I thought.
Well as soon as Ella started singing up popped the brief case and one of the guys took out his telescopic lense and started taking pictures. I thought that was a bit rude because obviously he wasn’t sanctioned by the band or Acer Arena to do so but freelancers will do what freelancers do. What happened when Fleetwood Mac started was another story altogether though….
His mate pulled out what looked like an oversize camera but with the display on the back I could tell it was a video camera and he proceeded to tape the entire show. What’s more I cottoned onto the fact that the seats in front of them were occupied by only one person which meant that both photographers had an uninterrupted view of the performance for their cameras. For a total cost of just under $800 they had secured four seats and used three and were able to pull off a scam that would put the old Asian trick of videotaping live film productions at the movies to shame. One wonders how much of a paycheck these guys would pull for making it happen.
I was pretty p&*ssed of at these guys and motioned the security guy to come and check. He confiscated the camera with the telescopic lense (you are allowed to have a camera) but when he questioned the other guy he gave him the story that it was just a camera not a video camera (all he had to do was switch modes!). These guys were good at their craft.
I would not be surprised that the footage as we speak will be available out of China right now.
It got to me so much that I leaned forward and told the guy with the video that he was burning a hole in my retina with his video camera (well I wasn’t that polite!) and all he did was bring it closer to him so I couldn’t see it. He didn’t want to cause a fuss, draw more attention and miss out on the footage. I could’ve called him anything under the sun and made rude remarks about his mum but it wouldn’t have mattered. All he was there for was to get the video. His equipment was obviously worth a fair bit of money. Even from where we were sitting he could get great close-ups and pan from side to side across the stage. It’s probably got great sound as well.
Anyway, that’s my story for this week – it’d be great to hear if anyone else has had a similar experience.
Sea you later,
Skipper Meggs