22/06/2023
AN ISLAND FOR TRAINEE PIRATES…AND NOW, PIRATES OF PENZANCE
When I was in my very early teens, me and my mates used to ride our bikes along the towpath of the River Thames from Walton towards Weybridge. Just before you got to a place where the river darted off in all different directions near Shepperton Lock, there was an island with a big old boarded up and fairly derelict house standing on it. The island, called D’Oyly Carte Island, was accessed by an arched metal bridge from the towpath which was, like the house, all boarded up and the gate to the bridge covered in barbed wire…to keep people, people like me, out!
But what is a bit of boarding and barbed wire to a bunch of Trainee Pirates? The island looked so exciting and such a grand place for an adventure and bit of skulduggery. So, on many occasions, me and my mates would slide our way round the boarding, being careful not to cut ourselves on the barbed wire (didn’t always manage that and I still have battle scars to prove it) and sidestep our way across the bridge. We would, frequently, loose our footing and fall in the river - but hey, pirates!
Me and my crew had lots and lots of amazing adventures on that island and made many memories – lighting campfires, cooking sausages and generally being pirates. I still consider myself to be a pirate – I earned my pirate stripes on that island.
Fast forward 50 years and Sarah and I are lying in bed, both with Covid. Sarah goes downstairs to make a cup of tea while I stay in bed. While she was making tea, a magazine came through the door. It was one of those free local magazines that only get used for lighting fires and putting under cat litter trays but, on this occasion, Sarah decided to bring it back to bed and read it while I lay there being ill.
After a while, Sarah chucked the magazine over to me and said, ‘you should read this.’ The mag was opened at an article telling the story of a man called Andy Hill, who was, apparently, the first person to do online music streaming and who had just bought D’Oyly Carte Island. The article (here) talked about how Andy came across the island, how he was restoring the house and what he was intending to do with it. One of Andy’s plans was to use the ball room, that holds around 100 people, to put on up close and personal gigs with A-list artists and then, to make the financials make sense, live stream those exclusive gigs to a global audience.
I instantly understood why Sarah had made me read it – that’s exactly what we, Sonosphere, were in the process of doing. Putting on gigs and live streaming them. But we had ambitions to not just live stream, but to do it in immersive audio.
So then it was my mission to contact Andy. That proved not to be quite so straight forward, and I ended up filling in an online form on his I Like Music website explaining who I was and how I thought we would be a perfect match for his ambitions for the island. I was amazed when only a few minutes later I got an email from him asking me to call him.
Long story short, we invited Andy to our Dolby Atmos studio and he instantly understood that we could help him do something really different. That was a year ago, almost to the day. Since then, we’ve conducted trials and tests to prove the concept of streaming in immersive audio and worked with Andy to put all the various bits of tech we need in place.
So here we are, making history in the same way that Richard D’Oyly Carte did as we work on the first Gilbert & Sullivan performance on the island for over 120 years and making Andy’s motto of ‘what would D’Oyly Carte do?’ a reality.
And just in case you know nothing about D’Oyly Carte or why Andy would refer to him in that way, Richard D’Oyly Carte was an English talent agent, theatrical impresario, composer, and hotelier in the late Victorian era and was probably the first person to tour a theatre company. He managed the first productions of operas by Sir W. S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan, and is famous for elevating his era’s musical taste, and for contributing to the development of theatre technology.
Andy’s motto is rather fitting, don’t you think?
If you want to experience this bit of history in the making, it’s taking place this Saturday, 24th June, and you can buy tickets for just £10 here.
Time:
4.30pm (UK)
11.30am EST (USA)
8.30am PST (USA)
1.30am AEST (Australia) 25th June
For more information about D’Oyly Carte Island, visit https://www.doylycarteisland.com
