Post
by FTM » Thu Nov 26, 2009 8:10 pm
OK, Having been reading these Forums for years, tonight I registered in order to post a comment. My name is Toby Mamis, and I have worked with Alice for 23+ years, as a manager at Alive, and more recently also as a tour manager, and a lot of you probaby know who I am.
We were distressed to read the postings about Manchester, and also disappointed with the way venue security handled the front-of-stage area at Glasgow last night.
We in Alice's backstage production office -- and if you didn't know, let me tell you that there is an office for us every night backstage -- did not hear anything about any problems in Manchester.
Alice's production manager and the promoter's rep always do a security briefing with the security managers (obviously not the entire security staff) before the doors open each night, and we give them a "pass sheet" -- as noted by one post here -- that includes ALL passes, including the VIP meet n greet laminate. The security managers are then supposed to distribute sufficient copies of the pass sheet to their personnel and brief them accordingly.
It's no secret that it doesn't take a rock scientist to work security at a rock show, and maybe they were poorly informed and/or poorly trained, but that is still no excuse for rudeness on their part.
As another post pointed out, why there was a disconnect between venue staff who KNEW about the VIP meet n greet (the box office who had the envelopes with the passes) and some (not all, hopefully) security staff who didn't seem to know, well, that's an internal problem at the Apollo, and we will let them know we were very unhappy to hear about it after the fact.
They very well could have contacted someone to find out what was going on. In future, though hopefully this won't happen anywhere else, one might ask the security person to get a supervisor to help, or specifically ask a non-security venue employee to call the backstage production office for help, in such a case.
We hate reading something like this.
One thing I am pretty sure of is that everyone enjoyed the concert itself, and that the VIP meet n greet participants all had a blast meeting Alice after the show.
I did also read the comments about the previous Fanfire meet n greets, most or all of which I also attended. One year, there was a dedicated rep just for that, but the past few years, we have done it ourselves on their behalf.
We have always tried to meet everyone right after the show, bring them to the meet n greet room, make sure everyone gets their shirts & photos, and have a chat until Alice gets there.
We think it's gone pretty smoothly and has been a good experience for both the fans and for Alice. And we hope you agree.
I'm not going to be a regular posting person here, but I did want to address the posts that I saw today.
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