World in Motion

Ah, Glastonbury. One of the grand titans of the British music festival scene, where the population of a decent-sized town descends on Worthy Farm in Somerset to enjoy a long weekend of music, theatre, art and comedy. In amongst the madness, there are TV cameras capturing the action for the benefit of armchair festival-goers, who’d much rather enjoy the music from their comfy and hopefully  less muddy living room. That’s where we at Ericsson step in to provide the subtitles (also known as captions in some countries).

The question is, with practically every kind of music represented at Glastonbury – from Adele to Billy Bragg, Coldplay to DJ Yoda, Ellie Goulding to the Fisherman’s Friends – how do you even prepare to subtitle for something on this scale?

Time Is Running Out

As with any live-subtitled programme, preparing in advance for Glastonbury is vital, and requires a pretty big team effort. Using the set lists we’re sent, a group of a dozen or so subtitlers fan out across the internet, hunting down lyrics for songs, copying them into our subtitling software and then checking them off in a spreadsheet in order to make sure we don’t cover the same song twice.

For established bands – New Order, say – all of that can be a fairly simple task; as a subtitling company, in one form or another, we’re been around for long enough to have developed an archive of music files stretching back into the mists of time. For newer bands, or if someone’s just released a new album – like Gregory Porter – it requires more detective work, pulling lyrics from fan websites where we can, transcribing them from YouTube where we can’t, then reformatting and correcting them (because the online interpretations of song lyrics can be, ahem, interesting).

Once we’ve sorted out the planned set lists, we look at the bigger bands’ recent gig sets to see if there are any of their well-known songs or covers that they tend to do as an encore, and then make sure those are done as well, just in case. With as many lyrics prepped as possible, it’s time to go live.

Speed of Sound

When you’ve got a Glastonbury live allocation, you’re in a two-person team – one is there to cue out all of the lovingly-prepared lyrics now sitting securely in our subtitling software. The other subtitler, armed with all of the band members’ names and other related vocab, is there to cover the links, or any lengthier speeches by the bands. Should the worst come to the worst, they also attempt to make sense of any songs that have somehow not been prepared, or altered on the fly so drastically that it would just be confusing for the audience.

Handing between the two subtitlers is as simple as the click of a button. When a song starts, the one on cueing duty searches the list of songs they have to see if they have a match. If they do, then they assume control and start cueing it out in time with the music. If not, they pass control to the other, who has to do the best they can to make sense of the song. Once the song’s over, it’s a judgement call on whether you need to hand over or not – if they just yell, “Cheers, Glastonbury,” before getting on with the next song, it’s probably not worth handing over. If, however, they introduce every member of the band, plus their families and roadies, or go on a 20-minute rant about the world being run by the king of the potato people, you definitely need to.

Someone like You

Subtitling Glastonbury live takes a lot of work, concentration and collaboration, and it can be stressful when the band decides to change the lyrics of one of their famous songs to be “current”, or the controversial rapper du jour spits unscripted rhymes at 50,000 words per minute. But, at the end of the day, you have to roll with it, lean back and just enjoy the melodies. You can have a bit of a boogie, a bit of a sing-along (as long as your microphone is switched firmly off), and maybe even find a new favourite band, all from the comfort of your subtitling booth.

 

Andy Robeson, Subtitler