Behind the Scenes: Coordinating One Extra Live at Birmingham NOAA (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: It's 11 o'clock on the Friday before show day, One Extra Live, at Birmingham NOAA. It's still very much an empty shell, so we're making it one extra at the moment. So things are about to get busy. I think this is the calm before the storm. My name's Rachel Coomba and I work in the live events team in Radio Popular Music, which is Radio 1, Radio 2, One Extra and Six Music, and I'm a live events coordinator. There are six live event coordinators within our team and I am one of them. When we do our large scale events such as Radio 1's Big Weekend, the Radio 1's Teen Awards and One Extra Live, which we just did in Birmingham, we each get given a role to fulfill, which could include the on-stage coordinator, which was my role, ticketing, backstage production, artist grid, working closely with the artist liaison team. It could be the lead coordinator, which works really closely with the event manager, also oversees health and safety and security. The most important skill you need to have is communication. From right at the start of an event to on the show day, you need to make sure that you are communicating every element to every department, that you are coordinating all of those different departments to pull off an event or an outside broadcast. So today is our loading day, essentially. We're putting in the lights, we're putting in screens, the PA, we're setting up the event. This is our crew catering, which is probably, I think, most of the team would say one of the most important things that we need to have on site. This is where the big show is going to be tomorrow. So my role for One Extra Live was the on-stage coordinator. I needed to liaise very closely with all the various departments throughout radio, which included the visualisation team, who were actually filming it, the marketing team, the online team, to radio production to make sure everyone was getting what they

Speaker 2: wanted out of the show. Rachel would be my eyes and ears on stage. She tells us what's going on with the band, whether the band's ready, whether the stage is ready technically, if the presenters are in place, and effectively, we're all ready to go.

Speaker 1: This is our running order, which I've been putting together, and it says it's basically, it's the entire show. Everything on the screens, everything that's happening on the stage.

Speaker 2: We're going to rehearse. Are we rehearsing any of our bits in between there?

Speaker 1: Yeah, we're actually doing that today at 7. Thanks, Neil. I started my career when I was, I'd just turned 19, and I was managing bands in my local area, and from doing that, I was offered an internship at Jamie Cullum's management. I became his assistant manager. I worked there for over three years. I definitely think this role, it's more important to have a lot of, say, life experience or knowledge of the music and event industry, rather than qualifications itself. It's also extremely important to make good relationships with people that could be outside in the music industry. I think it's really important that you have those strong contacts and are constantly working to build those relationships. I can honestly say that my favourite part of my job is actually the team I work with. We work extremely hard together, but then also when the event's all done, we play hard together too.